[conlang_learners] Vabungula: first impressions

[Jim Henry]

Vabungula is an a priori artlang with a relatively simple but not
perhaps unnaturally regular phonology and grammar.  It's definitely
learnable, since the creator, Bill Price, is fluent in Vabungula.
Possibly it would make a good compromise between the criteria of our
artlang and auxlang contingents.  It's SVO, prepositional, with
adjectives preceding nouns and genitive phrases following them.


Phonology and orthography

The native orthography is pleasing.  The romanization requires a
handful of non-ASCII characters, e and u with circumflex and s
and z with hacek.   (Acute accents are used to show stress on
the phonology page but not apparently elsewhere.)
The explanation of the phonology is reasonably clear in spite
of not using IPA; several of the phonemes have examples
from more than one natlang, and only a few of the vowels'
pronunciation is unclear because of the reference to American English
without specifying what dialect thereof is intended.  The phoneme
inventory looks to be a subset of that of English, except for having
distinct /e/ and /E/, pure vowels, and a tap rhotic /r/.  The
phonology/alphabet page doesn't say much if anything about
phonotactics, but I haven't noticed so far any difficult clusters.

Stress is irregular and often lexically significant.  Many
nominalizations of verbs have the same segmental phonemes as the verb
but stress a different syllable; the phonology page doesn't make it
clear whether moving the stress is a productive derivational pattern.


Morphology

Nouns are apparently inflected only for number, not for case,
definiteness, etc.  Noun stems ending in a consonant pluralize with
-e, stems ending in a vowel with -n, and there's one irregular plural.

The pronoun system is even more simple and regular than that of
Esperanto; three basic singular pronouns, marked as plural with
-l.  There's also an animate/inanimate distinction in the third
person, which may be optional to some degree.

There is one class of modifiers, no distinction being made between
adjectives and adverbs.  Some adjectives are root words, others
derived from nouns or verbs with the suffix -ke.

Comparison works much as in Esperanto, although the comparative
particle "ne" is used prepositionally for some spatial relations
as well.

Verbs are inflected only for voice (-ke marking passive, o-
impersonal).  Preposed adverbial particles and auxiliary verbs mark
tense, aspect and mood.  There are productive derivational processes
forming gerunds and participles as well.

There is an extensive derivational morphology, but many of the
derivational patterns are irregular and it's not clear how productive
they are.  The derivational patterns appear to at least have a strong
mnemonic value for learning derived words, and for deducing the
meaning of some unfamiliar words, even if the derivational morphology
is irregular enough that one can't coin many new words on the fly as
one does in an agglutinative auxlang such as Esperanto.


Presentation

The example sentences and phrases are generally helpful, but would be
improved by adding interlinear glosses, especially early on.  Some
things said in later documents should be mentioned earlier, e.g. the
fact that adjectives precede nouns should be mentioned in the
adjectives section as well as in the word order section.  Given the
unpredictable lexical stress, it seems that it would be helpful to
show stress in all the example words, phrases and sentences, not just
in those on the phonology page.

At least one link (the "Roots" section, 4a) is broken.


As Brett mentioned earlier, Vabungula has a wonderfully impressive
corpus online -- sixteen texts, some of them fairly long (including
full translations of two of the Gospels and the Apocalypse).  If we
decide to learn Vabungula we'll have no shortage of reading matter
to practice on.  And Bill Price said in an email to Brett that he'd be
willing to help us out.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/