Weird coincidences in your conlanging journey

[Khemehekis]

Have you experienced any really creepy coincidences during your months/year/years/decades of experience with conlanging?

While I was adding whatever OR- words I could think of, such as "oriel window" and "orpiment" to Kankonian, I came up with puor, meaning orf (as in, the veterinary disease). That became word #39,671.

A few words later, I realized I needed a word for "idem sonans". This soon had me fishing about (no pun intended) for other IDE- words, and I realized I was missing a word for "ide".

I did some research on ides (the plural of the fish, that is, not what Julius Caesar was supposed to beware of) and discovered that an ide was also called an orfe! Thus within one day of each other my Kankonian dictionary acquired both "orf" (puor, word #39,671), and "orfe" (obrozas, word #39,682). And entirely by coincidence . . . not because I thought, "I have a word for 'orf', now I need a word for 'orfe'".

Creepy, huh?

You have any stories about such synchronicity?

[AndrewTheConlanger]

Oh my god.

Thirty-nine thousand words.

How.

[qwed117]

Oh my god.

Thirty-nine thousand words.

How.

You mean 51k

[Khemehekis]

Oh my god.

Thirty-nine thousand words.

How.

See this:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3077&p=220346#p220346

[Khemehekis]

I just ran into another really bizarre coincidence.

I was working on Hapoish today, creating words to borrow into Kankonian, such as nejita, a verb meaning "to be like a nejita (a patty of vexu qasa)". Qasa is a type of in vitro meat popular in the Lehola Galaxy, and a vexu is a Hapoish animal raised for its meat.

So anyway, after doing a search for the string "cric" in my Hapoish document to make sure I didn't mistype any circumflex entities as &acric; instead of â and therefore break them, I discovered Hapoish didn't have a verb for "to be like a cricket"!

I searched my soul for a word, and I thought that qîqâ would be a good imitation of a cricket's sound. The circumflexes, in case you're wondering, mark stridulant vowels, a kind of phonation in Hapoish caused by the Reds (the sapient species that speaks Hapoish) stridulating their apos. An apo is a three-leaf-clover-shaped projection at the back of a Red's throat, the way we have a uvula. All five vowels in Hapoish -- a, e, i, o, and u -- have a clear form and a stridulant form. The letter Q represents /x/.

So when I got to the place in my dictionary where I would fit qîqâ in alphabetical order, I discovered I already had a word in Hapoish called qiqa -- like qîqâ except both the vowels were clear instead of both being stridulant. And qiqa meant "to be loud".

If someone wanted to indicate, in Hapoish, that a forum had gone quiet, I suppose s/he would be unlikely to post a sentence with qîqâ the way we would post "Crickets", because it sounds so much like qiqa, to be loud -- which would be exactly the opposite of what s/he wanted to express!

It's crazy!

[Reyzadren]

The ᛝ Futhark symbol looks exactly the same as a symbol in my conlang, and it also has the same /ŋ/ phoneme value.

Eventhough I was aware that runes existed back then, I had never seen the entire set because the Internet wasn't widely available yet, let alone know its corresponding sound. Moreover, my conlang's script is not inspired by runes, so this is a very cute coincidence.

[DV82LECM]

Well, the root for "sickness." It's wuhan- [vuhan].

(It actually was intentional.)

[Khemehekis]

The ᛝ Futhark symbol looks exactly the same as a symbol in my conlang, and it also has the same /ŋ/ phoneme value.

Eventhough I was aware that runes existed back then, I had never seen the entire set because the Internet wasn't widely available yet, let alone know its corresponding sound. Moreover, my conlang's script is not inspired by runes, so this is a very cute coincidence.

Oh, that is so cool!

(And creepy, too ::woo-woo music sounds off::)

[Khemehekis]

Well, the root for "sickness." It's wuhan- [vuhan].

(It actually was intentional.)

If it was intentional, it's not a weird coincidence, it's an Easter egg.

[LinguoFranco]

A very minor one:

In one of my scrapped conlangs, the suffix -ki was used for negation. Rukai uses the /ki/ for negation as well, except as a prefix, IIRC.

Oh, and another conlang of mine had /ⁿde/ as the first person pronoun, but it's the second person pronoun in Guarani.

The biggest coincidences are my conlangs ending up bearing a strong resemblance to some natlang I didn't even consider as an influence, in terms of inventory and prosody, and even grammar.

[Creyeditor]

A lot of my conlang end up with more or less subtle similarities, e.g. both Kobardon and Omlueuet independently have some kind of interrogative verbs.

[Khemehekis]

A lot of my conlang end up with more or less subtle similarities, e.g. both Kobardon and Omlueuet independently have some kind of interrogative verbs.

Interrogative verbs? Are those like "Do . . . ?" in English?

[Khemehekis]

A very minor one:

In one of my scrapped conlangs, the suffix -ki was used for negation. Rukai uses the /ki/ for negation as well, except as a prefix, IIRC.

Oh, and another conlang of mine had /ⁿde/ as the first person pronoun, but it's the second person pronoun in Guarani.

The biggest coincidences are my conlangs ending up bearing a strong resemblance to some natlang I didn't even consider as an influence, in terms of inventory and prosody, and even grammar.

I occasionally find things like that.

Things like zan (the Kankonian word for "ten") looking loke German zehn aren't really interesting, since I knew the German word and therefore may have been subconsciously influenced by it. But I also find words I didn't even know! I thought kiphi was the perfect Kankonian word for millet . . . and then I learn that millet is kibi in Japanese. The Kankonian words for "student" and "weather" are telemis and mesemiwa respectively (I only later learned about Arabic talib and mesam).

But the craziest lexical coincidence of all?

The Kankonian word for "psychic": randi.

I was 16 and had never heard of The Amazing Randi.

[Creyeditor]

A lot of my conlang end up with more or less subtle similarities, e.g. both Kobardon and Omlueuet independently have some kind of interrogative verbs.

Interrogative verbs? Are those like "Do . . . ?" in English?

No, not really, I think. They are both weird. In Kobardon, 'why' is expressed by an adverbial clause with an intransitive verb, roughly translate as 'in order to do what?'. This is inspired by Indonesian, which uses a verbalized version of 'what' to express 'why', i.e. apa 'what' becomes meng-apa/ken-apa/ng-apa-in 'why (lit. do what).

Example.
Abarvum ut auú.
a-barv-um ut a-uú
1SG-love-2.O to 1.SG-do.what
'Why do I love you?'

I also just recently rediscovered the interrogative verb in Omlűt. This is used for polar questions. It is modeled after the Finnish negative verb and embeds the rest of the sentence. I cannot come up with an example on the spot.

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

Nothing as interesting as some of these, but the name "Lihmelinyan" sounds oddly like the Finnish word ihmeellinen meaning "wonderful", which I had no knowledge of when creating the name of my conlang.

[Pabappa]

I will undo any coincidences I find if they arise from word-gen output and not from preexisting roots. And sometimes I'll even undo them if they arise from preexisting roots. I like it better this way .... e.g. from random word generation I ended up with two political parties that both had the morpheme /ndàka/ in their name. Even though the languages are widely spaced apart and could easily have come up with two unrelated words that both trace back to the same /ndàka/ (consider that even short morphemes like this are often originally dimorphemic), I decided that the two political parties in fact contained the same word, which means I will only use one root, and that root means "tip of the tongue".

I have hundreds of other examples of this, which isnt as surprising as it might sound, since I have a long list of word-gen output and a protolanguage that is entirely CV. But what I find more interesting, and usually easier to remember, is when coincidences happen even with roots I've manually created instead of using word-gen. For the most part, I dont see these coming because I get new words from a proto-language that was spoken about 4200 years before the classical stage of Poswa and Pabappa.

For example, the word for "baby" and "friend" collided in Poswa, so I figured ... why not? people call each other "babe" and "baby" in English too, so I just deleted the word for friend from the language and said that it was just one root all along. (This meant deleting the root even from languages where they did not collide, so e.g. Pabappa lost its word for friend, but I consider it worthwhile.)

Even of this type of coincidence I probably have a few dozen examples ..... the words for breast and laugh collided, so I retained the word for breast and said that the word for laugh was derived from it. "clumsiness" was close enough to looking like it meant "thigh armor" that i merged those as well. The word for "nail" was close enough to a verb meaning "to use once" that i collided those too. "baby" and "to have difficulty" also collided (yes, its a different word for baby). "arrowhead" and "to fight back" .... and i have many more, though a lot of the ones I didnt type up here are so semantically divergent that one could say they're not really coincidences anymore. e.g. /bap/ is the merged reflex of words that originally meant "to push, shove" and "animal" ...... not really that close in meaning, since only a few animals are even capable of that means of attack. but i did the same thing .... said that they were the same root all along, and therefore they trace back to just a single root instead of two now.

[Khemehekis]

Nothing as interesting as some of these, but the name "Lihmelinyan" sounds oddly like the Finnish word ihmeellinen meaning "wonderful", which I had no knowledge of when creating the name of my conlang.

Oh, that's amazing how close they are! Have Xonen and the other Finns on the board told you that Lihmelinyan is ihmeellinen?

[Khemehekis]

A lot of my conlang end up with more or less subtle similarities, e.g. both Kobardon and Omlueuet independently have some kind of interrogative verbs.

Interrogative verbs? Are those like "Do . . . ?" in English?

No, not really, I think. They are both weird. In Kobardon, 'why' is expressed by an adverbial clause with an intransitive verb, roughly translate as 'in order to do what?'. This is inspired by Indonesian, which uses a verbalized version of 'what' to express 'why', i.e. apa 'what' becomes meng-apa/ken-apa/ng-apa-in 'why (lit. do what).

Example.
Abarvum ut auú.
a-barv-um ut a-uú
1SG-love-2.O to 1.SG-do.what
'Why do I love you?'

I also just recently rediscovered the interrogative verb in Omlűt. This is used for polar questions. It is modeled after the Finnish negative verb and embeds the rest of the sentence. I cannot come up with an example on the spot.

Thanks for explaining! I make hing, the word for "or" in alternative questions, considered a WH-word in Kankonian, which is a WH-in-situ language.

[Dormouse559]

So, I picked *pintei as the etymon of Ilóhra's word for "milk". This resulted in modern hinti [ˈhinti], which was all well and good, but then I altered my sound changes, and it became hindi [ˈhindi]. The sound changes recently got another overhaul, though, so the modern form is now inži [ˈind͡ʒi]. I guess that new form might still be a weird coincidence if you speak Portuguese.

At about the midpoint of that last sound change overhaul, the word for "to hold" was briefly hand [ˈhand].

[GoshDiggityDangit]

I think this counts? In Fesian, the word for sneak is Camio. It is pronounced much like English Cameo, where you kinda sneak a celebrity or the director into a movie. I just made this word, it's from Ca+Mio, go quietly.