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My conlang (warning: work in progress)!

Posted: 12 Nov 2020 18:20
by Pan
This is my first post in this forum. I will explain both my conlang and my constructed world. But first I'll start with explaining my constructed world.

My constructed world is divided in two parts: Gaia and Pangaea. Gaia is the world we know and live in, i.e. planet Earth, exactly as it is in reality. Pangaea is, literally, "the land of everything", so it's basically an infinite Multiverse where absolutely everything happens, no matter if it's fantasy or realistic, no matter if it's good or horrible, at one condition. Everything happens as long as a Pangaean language is spoken. There are infinite Pangaean languages, but I'm creating just one of them as an example. All Pangaean languages are based on the same philosophical concept, the concepts of "ambiguation" and "disambiguation". I'll explain what they are.

"Ambiguation" uses the formula: Sentence 1 OR Sentence 2 = New Sentence
"Disambiguation" uses the formula: Sentence 1 AND Sentence 2 = New Sentence

Example of an ambiguation:

Sentence 1 = My sister is hugging me
Sentence 2 = My brother is hugging me
New Sentence = My sibling is hugging me

Formula: "My sister is hugging me" OR "My brother is hugging me" = "My sibling is hugging me"

Example of a disambiguation:

Sentence 1 = My sibling is hugging me
Sentence 2 (granted, it's more like a concept added on the first sentence than a stand-alone sentence, but it's still valid) = This hug is long
New Sentence = My sibling is giving me a long hug

Formula: "My sibling is hugging me" AND "This hug is long" = "My sibling is giving me a long hug"

I'm planning to take this simple concept to an extreme level, therefore creating a philosophical conlang.

First thing you need to know about my conlang (I didn't give it a name yet!) is that the lexicon is work in progress and the words will be changed very often, but the grammar is complete. The really weird thing about the grammar of my conlang (and probably Pangaean languages in general? I think only the lexicon changes from language to language and the grammar stays the same in every Pangaean language) is that it's extremely simple yet powerful! I think I have found the golden grammar. I'll start explaining it.

The first thing that you need to know about my conlang's grammar is that it's mostly based on the relationship between "A" and "B". What are "A" and "B", then? I'll make a simple example in English. Consider the sentence "I love hugs". If you translate it to my conlang, "A" would be "I" (the first person singular pronoun) and "B" would be "hugs". But it's not all. "A" and "B" have a certain relationship with each other. What is this relationship? Of course it's "love". "A" and "B" are both called "operands", and they are connected with each other through something called "operator", which in this case means "love" but obviously in different sentences it will mean something else. Operands and operators are the only parts of speech in my conlang. There is no grammatical distinction between nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, particles, etc. There are only operands and operators. The interesting consequence is that in my conlang, the number of "words" in every speech should be odd (so... 1, or 3, o 5, or 7, or 9, etc.), if it's even, it means the sentence is grammatically wrong and invalid. Every word is separated by "separators", which are not words, they are just letters that separate every word. The separators are the following:

Default separators: l/i
Open parentheses: r/a
Close parentheses: n/u

Therefore, the letters "l", "i", "r", "a", "n" and "u" cannot appear within the lexicon. As a consequence, there is no standard way to use spaces in my conlang. Consider the English sentence "your conlang is so weird". Imagine it could be freely written as "yourcon langisso we ird", "yo urcon langi sso weird", or ANY other combination of spaces and it will mean exactly the same thing with no chance of it meaning something else. My conlang is exactly like that!

Now I can give the first example (WARNING: the lexicon can and probably will be changed very often in the future, however the grammar is always stable and has been for a long time):

I love hugs
cle begël bozö

c: I (operand "A")
(e)begë: to love (operator that connects "A" and "B")
bozö: hug(s) (operand "B")

As you can see, the words are separated by the default separators. Now you might be wondering why the operator has a prefix. Here are the prefixes that must go before every operator. They are mandatory. Also if you are wondering how everything is pronounced, don't worry, I'll tell you the phonology later.

e-: default order, no focus
o-: default order, focuses on A
ü-: default order, focuses on B
ë-: reverse order, no focus
ö-: reverse order, focuses on A
ä-: reverse order, focuses on B

Examples with the example given before, only changing the prefix.

e- prefix: default order, no focus

cle begël bozö
I love hugs

o- prefix: default order, focuses on A

clo begël bozö
I (who love hugs)

It's impossible to translate this in English, but basically it's just "I" (the first person singular pronoun) with more information, i.e. that the speaker loves hugs. It cannot be used as a stand-alone sentence, however.

ü- prefix: default order, focuses on B

clü begël bozö
The hugs that I love

It cannot be used as a stand-alone sentence, but I think it would be okay to use it as, for example, the title of a book or the title of a song.

ë- prefix: reverse order, no focus

clë begël bozö
Hugs love me

It sounds a bit creepy, I know. It doesn't make sense, but I showed it as an example.

ö- prefix: reverse order, focuses on A

clö begël bozö
I (who am loved by hugs)

ä- prefix: reverse order, focuses on B

clä begël bozö
The hugs that love me

---

Phonology:

Vowels (9):

a: /a
ä: /ø
e: /ɛ
ë: /e
i: /i
o: /ɔ
ö: /o
u: /u
ü: /y

Consonants (17):

b: /b
c: /ʃ
d: /d
f: /f
g: /g
j: /ʒ
k: /k
l: /l
n: /n
p: /p
r: /r
s: /s
t: /t
v: /v
x: /x
y: /ɣ
z: /z

The sound "m" is only found as an allophone of "n" before "b" and "p".

---

How to make longer sentences than just three words, then? It is fairly simple, actually. The default formula (i.e. if you don't use any parenthesis) is that everything before the last operator is considered as "A", the operator is... well, the operator, and the very last word is considered as "B". But this order can be changed using the parentheses. Example: "I want a long hug"

c: I
(e)geob: to want
bozö: hug
(o)g: (copula)
bemü: long (duration)

Now, if we don't use any parenthesis, and therefore we say: "cle geobi bozö logi bemü", it probably won't mean what you say. Since "A" is everything before the last operator and "B" is the very last word, "A" will be "I want a hug" and "B" will be "long". Connected through an operator that is basically a copula, the sentence without parentheses will roughly mean something similar to "The fact that I want a hug is long". So we need to open a parenthesis.

The correct sentence is: "cle geoba bozö logi bemü". If you forgot, "r/a" are the separators that open a parenthesis. So, now "A" is just "I" (the first person singular pronoun) and "B" is "a long hug". The two are connected with an operator that means "to want". So the sentence is correct.

I already tried many sentences and other stuff my conlang, and trust me, this language can be extremely expressive and nuanced if you want it to be. The examples I made in this thread are extremely basic and simple, so that's why perhaps it doesn't sound very expressive. But trust me, there is a lot of stuff that needs to be said about this language. These were just the very basics of my conlang. I explained all the grammar of my conlang, which (the grammar) is very simple yet powerful, but it's the lexicon that makes this language very expressive and nuanced. If you any questions, criticism, etc. please feel free to ask. I will check the other parts of this forum now.

Re: My conlang (warning: work in progress)!

Posted: 12 Nov 2020 23:59
by elemtilas
Pan wrote: 12 Nov 2020 18:20 This is my first post in this forum. I will explain both my conlang and my constructed world. But first I'll start with explaining my constructed world.

My constructed world is divided in two parts: Gaia and Pangaea. Gaia is the world we know and live in, i.e. planet Earth, exactly as it is in reality. Pangaea is, literally, "the land of everything", so it's basically an infinite Multiverse where absolutely everything happens, no matter if it's fantasy or realistic, no matter if it's good or horrible, at one condition. Everything happens as long as a Pangaean language is spoken. There are infinite Pangaean languages, but I'm creating just one of them as an example.
Cool. I hope to see more about the World of Pangaea in our Conworlds & Concultures forum!
All Pangaean languages are based on the same philosophical concept, the concepts of "ambiguation" and "disambiguation". I'll explain what they are.

"Ambiguation" uses the formula: Sentence 1 OR Sentence 2 = New Sentence
"Disambiguation" uses the formula: Sentence 1 AND Sentence 2 = New Sentence

Example of an ambiguation:

Sentence 1 = My sister is hugging me
Sentence 2 = My brother is hugging me
New Sentence = My sibling is hugging me

Formula: "My sister is hugging me" OR "My brother is hugging me" = "My sibling is hugging me"

Example of a disambiguation:

Sentence 1 = My sibling is hugging me
Sentence 2 (granted, it's more like a concept added on the first sentence than a stand-alone sentence, but it's still valid) = This hug is long
New Sentence = My sibling is giving me a long hug

Formula: "My sibling is hugging me" AND "This hug is long" = "My sibling is giving me a long hug"

I'm planning to take this simple concept to an extreme level, therefore creating a philosophical conlang.
Is Ambiguation like moving from the specific to the general and then Disambiguation like moving from separation to combination?

Would these be valid?:

Ambiguation: A cat is napping : a dog is snoozing = an animal is sleeping

Disambiguation: The cat is tall : the cat is long = the cat is big

We don't see many philosophical invented languages being made. I'm sure folks here will be interested to learn how yours works!
First thing you need to know about my conlang (I didn't give it a name yet!) is that the lexicon is work in progress and the words will be changed very often, but the grammar is complete. The really weird thing about the grammar of my conlang (and probably Pangaean languages in general? I think only the lexicon changes from language to language and the grammar stays the same in every Pangaean language) is that it's extremely simple yet powerful! I think I have found the golden grammar. I'll start explaining it.
Coo. The The Golden Grammar itself!
The first thing that you need to know about my conlang's grammar is that it's mostly based on the relationship between "A" and "B". What are "A" and "B", then? I'll make a simple example in English. Consider the sentence "I love hugs". If you translate it to my conlang, "A" would be "I" (the first person singular pronoun) and "B" would be "hugs". But it's not all. "A" and "B" have a certain relationship with each other. What is this relationship? Of course it's "love". "A" and "B" are both called "operands", and they are connected with each other through something called "operator", which in this case means "love" but obviously in different sentences it will mean something else. Operands and operators are the only parts of speech in my conlang. There is no grammatical distinction between nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, particles, etc. There are only operands and operators.
Interesting.

How are operators and operands functionally different from the, well, function words of say English?, where "I" and "hugs" are similarly operands upon which the operator "love" works its relational magic within the context of syntax.
The interesting consequence is that in my conlang, the number of "words" in every speech should be odd (so... 1, or 3, o 5, or 7, or 9, etc.), if it's even, it means the sentence is grammatically wrong and invalid.
Makes sense, though do you actually mean "words" or do you mean "notions" / "idea": in other words, "hugs" is a valid operand, but is "fierce hugs" a valid operand?, or does that itself need to broken down into its own (operand+operator+operand) sub-cluster: (I + love + (hugs + are + fierce))?
Every word is separated by "separators", which are not words, they are just letters that separate every word. The separators are the following:

Default separators: l/i
Open parentheses: r/a
Close parentheses: n/u

Therefore, the letters "l", "i", "r", "a", "n" and "u" cannot appear within the lexicon. As a consequence, there is no standard way to use spaces in my conlang. Consider the English sentence "your conlang is so weird". Imagine it could be freely written as "yourcon langisso we ird", "yo urcon langi sso weird", or ANY other combination of spaces and it will mean exactly the same thing with no chance of it meaning something else. My conlang is exactly like that!
Explain. The spaces, in English, perform a specific function in orthography, which means your examples are "wrong and invalid" in English. So I'm not sure what it is you mean by "ANY other combination of spaces and it will mean exactly the same thing with no chance of it meaning something else".

In English, the space is simply a word separator, much like the letters you've chosen above.
Now I can give the first example (WARNING: the lexicon can and probably will be changed very often in the future, however the grammar is always stable and has been for a long time):

I love hugs
cle begël bozö

c: I (operand "A")
(e)begë: to love (operator that connects "A" and "B")
bozö: hug(s) (operand "B")

As you can see, the words are separated by the default separators. Now you might be wondering why the operator has a prefix. Here are the prefixes that must go before every operator. They are mandatory.
The only separator I see from your list is "l" and it's not clear quite how it's functioning. Can you explain what "default" and "open / close parentheses" separators are & do? Also, what is meant by the slash in your separator examples? I don't see an "i" in your sample sentence to go with the "l".


Also if you are wondering how everything is pronounced, don't worry, I'll tell you the phonology later.

e-: default order, no focus
o-: default order, focuses on A
ü-: default order, focuses on B
ë-: reverse order, no focus
ö-: reverse order, focuses on A
ä-: reverse order, focuses on B
Okay, so what are "default" and "reverse" order?
Examples with the example given before, only changing the prefix.

e- prefix: default order, no focus

cle begël bozö
I love hugs

o- prefix: default order, focuses on A

clo begël bozö
I (who love hugs)
It's a little odd to speak of prefixes when they're placed at what appears to be the end of a word. In other words, your orthography is confusing. If the o is a prefix and the l is a word separator, why not write it "clobegëlbozö" or, better for talking about your language here, "c-l-obegë-l-bozö"?

How does "default order, focuses on A" become a relative clause? This could use some clarification!
It's impossible to translate this in English,
I seriously doubt this. If the Pangaeans are humans, then there's a way to translate into English, once you clarify what the invented language's terminology means!

One thing I would strongly recommend at this point in your undoubtedly illustrious future CBB career, and more so because you've described your invented language as "philosophial": avail yourself of some good basic linguistics resources.

If you don't already, learn how the International Phonetic Alphabet works and how to use it. Familiarise yourself with basic linguistics terminology (e.g. Pei's Dictionary of Linguistics).
but basically it's just "I" (the first person singular pronoun) with more information, i.e. that the speaker loves hugs. It cannot be used as a stand-alone sentence, however.
Yeah. It's the "with more information" that seems to be getting you to think it's not translatable. As it stands, "I who love hugs" is perfectly sensible in English.
ü- prefix: default order, focuses on B

clü begël bozö
The hugs that I love

It cannot be used as a stand-alone sentence, but I think it would be okay to use it as, for example, the title of a book or the title of a song.

ë- prefix: reverse order, no focus

clë begël bozö
Hugs love me

It sounds a bit creepy, I know. It doesn't make sense, but I showed it as an example.

ö- prefix: reverse order, focuses on A

clö begël bozö
I (who am loved by hugs)

ä- prefix: reverse order, focuses on B

clä begël bozö
The hugs that love me
Cool Nice topic/focus stuff going on here.


ow to make longer sentences than just three words, then? It is fairly simple, actually. The default formula (i.e. if you don't use any parenthesis) is that everything before the last operator is considered as "A", the operator is... well, the operator, and the very last word is considered as "B". But this order can be changed using the parentheses. Example: "I want a long hug"

c: I
(e)geob: to want
bozö: hug
(o)g: (copula)
bemü: long (duration)
Generally, "copula" refers to an equivalence between two predicates: the hugs are long. "Hugs" and "long" are predicates; "are" is the copula that equates the two.

So, how is "want" a copula?
Now, if we don't use any parenthesis, and therefore we say: "cle geobi bozö logi bemü", it probably won't mean what you say. Since "A" is everything before the last operator and "B" is the very last word, "A" will be "I want a hug" and "B" will be "long". Connected through an operator that is basically a copula, the sentence without parentheses will roughly mean something similar to "The fact that I want a hug is long". So we need to open a parenthesis.

The correct sentence is: "cle geoba bozö logi bemü". If you forgot, "r/a" are the separators that open a parenthesis. So, now "A" is just "I" (the first person singular pronoun) and "B" is "a long hug". The two are connected with an operator that means "to want". So the sentence is correct.

I already tried many sentences and other stuff my conlang, and trust me, this language can be extremely expressive and nuanced if you want it to be. The examples I made in this thread are extremely basic and simple, so that's why perhaps it doesn't sound very expressive. But trust me, there is a lot of stuff that needs to be said about this language. These were just the very basics of my conlang. I explained all the grammar of my conlang, which (the grammar) is very simple yet powerful, but it's the lexicon that makes this language very expressive and nuanced. If you any questions, criticism, etc. please feel free to ask. I will check the other parts of this forum now.
Well, expressivity & nuancitation are good things in language. Kind of unusual for a philosophical language, modern ones often focus on specificity rather than expression.

Have you put this Golden Grammar to any kind of test? E.g., for example.

Re: My conlang (warning: work in progress)!

Posted: 13 Nov 2020 16:37
by Salmoneus
Pan wrote: 12 Nov 2020 18:20 This is my first post in this forum.
Hi.

My constructed world is divided in two parts: Gaia and Pangaea. Gaia is the world we know and live in, i.e. planet Earth, exactly as it is in reality. Pangaea is, literally, "the land of everything", so it's basically an infinite Multiverse where absolutely everything happens, no matter if it's fantasy or realistic, no matter if it's good or horrible, at one condition. Everything happens as long as a Pangaean language is spoken.
That's... a strangely specific single limitation. Any reasons for that?
There are infinite Pangaean languages, but I'm creating just one of them as an example. All Pangaean languages are based on the same philosophical concept, the concepts of "ambiguation" and "disambiguation". I'll explain what they are.

"Ambiguation" uses the formula: Sentence 1 OR Sentence 2 = New Sentence
"Disambiguation" uses the formula: Sentence 1 AND Sentence 2 = New Sentence
It might be more useful to leave "ambiguation" and "disambiguation" in their usual meanings, and use the ordinary words for these things instead: disjunction and conjunction. [unfortunately, 'conjunction' also means something else in natural language grammar, but I'm assuming this won't be an issue in a language built on the propositional calculus]

However, I'm a little surprised: presumably you are aware that conjunction and disjunction are not sufficient to form all propositions by themselves: you also need negation.
Example of an ambiguation:

Sentence 1 = My sister is hugging me
Sentence 2 = My brother is hugging me
New Sentence = My sibling is hugging me

Formula: "My sister is hugging me" OR "My brother is hugging me" = "My sibling is hugging me"
Just to point out: this isn't actually true disjunction, for two reasons. First, the new sentence can be true even if neither sentence 1 nor sentence 2 is true (you might have a sibling who had no gender, or a third gender). More fundamentally: you would not say "my sibling is hugging me" if both your sister AND your brother were hugging you (unless you were trying to offend one of them). That is, what you have here is an example of exclusive disjunction - whereas what you need (for a conventional and/or/not system) is inclusive disjunction (i.e. "and/or").
I'm planning to take this simple concept to an extreme level, therefore creating a philosophical conlang.
OK. Bear in mind, though, that the grammar of a conlang built on conjunction, disjunction and negation has existed for a long time now, in the form of the propositional calculus of classical logic, so you may be reinventing the wheel a bit.

Also note: the propositional calculus is insufficient for expressing the propositions of natural languages. Instead logicians use something called the predicate calculus, which incorporates the propositional calculus (the manipulation of propositions modified by 'and', 'or' and 'not'), but also adds the concept of a relation and/or function (which maybe is what you're trying to do with your 'operators'?), and also of qualification (you need at least two, translatable as "there exists some X such that..." and "for all X it is the case that"). Qualification cannot be reduced to predication. And then this ordinary predicate calculus is in turn unable to deal with modalities, so you need a dedicated 'modal logic' with at least the concepts of necessity and possibility (these cannot be faithfully reduced to qualification or to predication).

[in logic, little is necessary - so, for example, Hilbert did not use qualification in the usual sense, but instead developed an 'epsilon calculus' with a single operator, epsilon: qualification can be translated into epsilon propositions, but not all propositions in epsilon calculus can be translated back into predicate calculus. However, this is probably too advanced for your needs here!]
First thing you need to know about my conlang (I didn't give it a name yet!) is that the lexicon is work in progress and the words will be changed very often, but the grammar is complete. The really weird thing about the grammar of my conlang (and probably Pangaean languages in general? I think only the lexicon changes from language to language and the grammar stays the same in every Pangaean language) is that it's extremely simple yet powerful! I think I have found the golden grammar.
Congratulations. Although it should also be noted that every other new conlanger who attempts a philosophical language ALSO believes they have found the golden grammar. Philosophers also went through this phase, in the early 20th century. [they eventually encountered two problems: first, that many rival 'grammars' (logical systems) sprang up - some logically equivalent to one another, others not; and second, that it was increasingly recognised how insufficient Ideal Language really was in expressing everything that Ordinary Language can express; it was also realised that one of the 'easiest' tasks for which these languages were developed - systematic mathematical proof from first principles - is impossible (any language powerful enough to be adequate for this task is inevitably incomplete - that is, there are true or false propositions of mathematics that cannot be shown to be either true or false using that language). Logical notation has certainly not gone away - it's only become more sophisticated and diverse - but its limitations are much more realised now].
I'll start explaining it.

The first thing that you need to know about my conlang's grammar is that it's mostly based on the relationship between "A" and "B". What are "A" and "B", then? I'll make a simple example in English. Consider the sentence "I love hugs". If you translate it to my conlang, "A" would be "I" (the first person singular pronoun) and "B" would be "hugs". But it's not all. "A" and "B" have a certain relationship with each other. What is this relationship? Of course it's "love". "A" and "B" are both called "operands", and they are connected with each other through something called "operator", which in this case means "love" but obviously in different sentences it will mean something else. Operands and operators are the only parts of speech in my conlang. There is no grammatical distinction between nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, particles, etc.
I'm afraid you're falling into a common trap here: denying you have something, then having it, but just inventing your own terminology to pretend not to have it.

The usual word for your "operator" is "verb". The usual word for your "operand" is "argument". Most (arguably all) arguments are nouns). In a sentence like "I love hugs", "I" and "hugs" are arguments of the verb, "love". "Hugs" is a noun; "I" is considered 'nominal', but it's a special form of nominal known as a 'pronoun' (a noun with deictic reference).

Conversely, note that what you call an "operator" is not what logicians or mathematicians call an 'operator' (logical operators are the things that combine propositions (and, or, not), not the contents of the propositions - the logical term here is 'relation'. [We may say that 'verb' applies to the class of words in a specific language that is the primary class used in signifying relations - although individual languages may also convey certain relations in other ways, and may use verbs for other puposes].
There are only operands and operators. The interesting consequence is that in my conlang, the number of "words" in every speech should be odd (so... 1, or 3, o 5, or 7, or 9, etc.), if it's even, it means the sentence is grammatically wrong and invalid.
So all your relations are dyadic? You have no intransitive verbs? [or ditransitive verbs?] Why? That seems a strange limitation.

[how would you translate:
"he fell"; "she dreamt"; "it doesn't exist"; "Bob and Jane have the same surname"; "nobody gave me directions here so I just guessed", "heavens give me a sign!"; "I think, therefore I am"; or "I'm given to understand that perhaps if you had not been sleeping when your cousins arrived, they might not have had this offensive sign painted"]
Every word is separated by "separators", which are not words, they are just letters that separate every word. The separators are the following:

Default separators: l/i
Open parentheses: r/a
Close parentheses: n/u

Therefore, the letters "l", "i", "r", "a", "n" and "u" cannot appear within the lexicon. As a consequence, there is no standard way to use spaces in my conlang. Consider the English sentence "your conlang is so weird". Imagine it could be freely written as "yourcon langisso we ird", "yo urcon langi sso weird", or ANY other combination of spaces and it will mean exactly the same thing with no chance of it meaning something else. My conlang is exactly like that!
I think you may be getting confused between language and spelling. 'Spaces' aren't something that exist in language - they're a punctuation convention of modern spelling. Latin, for example, is typically written with spaces today, even though Romans did not (generally) use them when writing Latin themselves.
Are 'l' and 'i' actually spoken? In which case, they're words. [Or, at least, morphemes] If not, then they're just punctuation.
Why don't any human languages regularly use word-dividing morphemes? Because they're not very useful, and it makes more sense to use phonemes ('phonemes' occur in speech; 'letters' are again just spelling convention) for actual words. I'm certainly not sure why it would be worth having two different phonemes just for this purpose!
However, it's not impossible that some alien language could do this. Ironically, it'll probably be most likely in a language with few phonemes. The more phonemes you have, the more possible sequences of phonemes there are, and the lower the chances that any given sequence will happen to be a valid word, making word-finding easy. So I'd expect explicit dividers to be more common in a language with very few phonemes.

However, there would never be any need to distinguish a space from a bracket, since word-division IS just bracketing, logically speaking.

[why do we use spaces in modern writing, but not in speech? partly because reading is inherently harder than listening, so we need more help. But mostly because our spelling is inadequate. Word divisions are generally made clear in speech by allophonic and suprasegmental elements that our spelling simply doesn't notate (and that would be hard to notate, as they vary with dialect and speech style). So we can distinguish "gave a caterwaul" from "gave a cat a wall" primarily by the greater stress placed on the final syllable in the latter case, and in some dialects by glottal reinforcement or even replacement of the /t/ in the latter sentence but not the former, or by flapping of the /t/ in the former sentence but not the latter. These cues are lost in writing, so we make them clear with spaces]
Now I can give the first example (WARNING: the lexicon can and probably will be changed very often in the future, however the grammar is always stable and has been for a long time):

I love hugs
cle begël bozö

c: I (operand "A")
(e)begë: to love (operator that connects "A" and "B")
bozö: hug(s) (operand "B")

As you can see, the words are separated by the default separators. Now you might be wondering why the operator has a prefix. Here are the prefixes that must go before every operator. They are mandatory. Also if you are wondering how everything is pronounced, don't worry, I'll tell you the phonology later.
As these are here suffixed to the previous word, they're called 'suffixes', not 'prefixes'. Or 'clitics' if they can move about between words.

[and you haven't explained why it's 'cle', and not 'cia'...]

e-: default order, no focus
o-: default order, focuses on A
ü-: default order, focuses on B
ë-: reverse order, no focus
ö-: reverse order, focuses on A
ä-: reverse order, focuses on B

Examples with the example given before, only changing the prefix.

e- prefix: default order, no focus

cle begël bozö
I love hugs

o- prefix: default order, focuses on A

clo begël bozö
I (who love hugs)

It's impossible to translate this in English, but basically it's just "I" (the first person singular pronoun) with more information, i.e. that the speaker loves hugs. It cannot be used as a stand-alone sentence, however.
Why can't it be used as a stand-alone sentence? It's true that the English can't, but the equivalent in other languages can be - why follow English? And note that this disrupts the 'simplicity' of the grammar 'based' on logical connectives: why can't you connect any valid sentences, as in the calculus? Why do you need special clause-forms that only appear when connected? English does it, sure, but...
ü- prefix: default order, focuses on B

clü begël bozö
The hugs that I love

It cannot be used as a stand-alone sentence, but I think it would be okay to use it as, for example, the title of a book or the title of a song.

ë- prefix: reverse order, no focus

clë begël bozö
Hugs love me

It sounds a bit creepy, I know. It doesn't make sense, but I showed it as an example.
Of course it makes sense. But what you haven't shown is why you would say this instead of "bozöle begël c"...
ö- prefix: reverse order, focuses on A

clö begël bozö
I (who am loved by hugs)

ä- prefix: reverse order, focuses on B

clä begël bozö
The hugs that love me
You may want to read up on 'focus' and 'topic', to see which one you mean here. English often blurs them, but...
z: /z
Just to note: phonemes have slashes on BOTH sides: /z/ [and technically letters have <> on either side of them: <z>: /z/]


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If you want a maximally 'logical' language, why use 'and' and 'or' at all? Classical logic uses 'and', 'or' and 'not', for convenience, but all three can be replaced by one of two alternatives: either the pierce arrow or (more often) the sheffer stroke. In fact, you can replace your 'and', 'or', your unmentioned 'not', your two word dividers AND your four brackets AND your copula, all with a single phoneme - let's say, /a/.

For instance, if 'sister' is /b/, 'brother' is /k/, 'relative to' is /d/, 'love' is /f/, 'hug' is /g/, plurality is /i/, and 'long' is /l/, and the operator is /a/, then "my sisters and my brothers love long hugs" could be translated simply as:

aaaabiabidaabiabidaaakiakidaakiakidaaabiabidaabiabidaaakiakidaakiakidaafaaagiagilaagiagilafaaagiagilaagiagil


But if we then allow two different brackets (/a/ for relational, /o/ for connective), and introduce the allophonic rules that /aa/ > /u/ and /oo/ > e/, then we can reduce this considerably and unambiguously, to:

eubidukidubidukidaugilf



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ANYWAY!

If you haven't already, you may be interested in reading up on symbolic logic!

Re: My conlang (warning: work in progress)!

Posted: 15 Nov 2020 13:57
by Pan
Thank you both for the feedback!