Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

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MissTerry
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by MissTerry »

I made myself a practical language which I can use for different purposes, especially to write private/secret stuff about my life in my diary. I'm working on a conlang script at the moment, and will soon get someone on Fiverr to make me a font to use. And so, my conlang isn't fancy or historical. It's just fun and useful.

I often need to borrow words into my conlang to talk about certain things. "Borrow" is a weird word to use with conlangs, because you can just invent a new word. What I mean by "borrow" is that my conlang's "native" words are entirely Sanskrit derivatives. Natural languages borrow words often. And so sometimes I'll "import" words from a natural language [mostly English or the Asian language me and my family speak] into my conlang. I like borrowing those "untranslatable" words from my Asian language which just doesn't exist in English or an English weltanschauung. Occasionally, I will borrow a word I like from another conlang, such as some older abandoned conlang I have.

And so I have an infix to indicate that the word it is appended to is a loanword. The infix is: -vh- [the vh makes an /F/ sound]. There is no individual/independent letter "F" in my conlang, and no "native" word in my conlang has the /f/ phoneme in it, so I decided to use that voice/phoneme because it stands out.

One of the first English words I borrowed into my conlang was "kokovha" which means "hot coco/chocolate" which I like to drink during those cold rainy mornings. Another word I borrowed was "kavhevha" which means "coffee." I have "amatsonvhatum" to mean "shopping and buying things on Amazon." When I borrow words I spell them phonetically using what phonemes/letters I have in my conlang. I'm born and raised a Theravada Buddhist, so I also like to borrow Buddhist words/concepts into my conlang also. Theravada words are in Pali, which is a vulgar dialect of Brahminical Sanskrit. And so I have Buddhist words like "dhammavha" which comes from the Pali/Theravada word "dhamma." "Kammavha" means the Theravada concept of "kamma." I borrowed a few very hard to translate words [into English] from my Asian language into my conlang which is "sojhivatovha," "guonvha" and so on.

Once I borrow those words with the -vh- infix, then I can use the affixes in my conlang to make new words out of those borrowed words: "kokovhatum" mean "to make hot coco." "kavhevhatahe" means "to be drinking coffee." "Adhammavhayesatum" means "to wish or to desire to cause or to do or to commit an act or behavior which is against the teachings of the Buddha or the principles of Buddhism." "Akammavhekas" means "a person who is ignorant of the concept of the casual nature of cause and effect and in such ignorance behaves in such a way where that their actions produce end results which harms or hinders their own self and their own life and the lives of those around them."

The more I use that simple loanword infix, the more useful it becomes for me.
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by MissTerry »

Image

The concept behind my conlang's script is based on its fictional alternative historical story: it developed as a sister language of ancient Vedic Sanskrit, back many thousands of years ago, when human language had very few writing systems in use. And so, the written alphabets of that ancient time period were used to develop the characters. The characters were developed from mostly Egyptian Demotic, but also from proto-Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaic, and Brahmi.

I wanted a concept also like Greek where there are capital letters which are generally angular and lowercase letters which are more round. And so the capital letters are the ones genetically related to Demotic and so on. The lowercase letters are further developments of the capital letters, with a more rounded and feminine look/elan. The script has 43 characters, with the lowercase, makes 86 all together.

Like Sanskrit's eventual Devanagari script, my conlang uses Threads [the bar above the letters] which weaves the letters together into words. "Tan," the root in the word "Tantra" means "Thread, Line, Fabric, Wire, Seam." Interestingly, using the bar to thread the letters together into words makes reading the text very easy on your eyes and brain, because each word is distinctly and clearly separated apart from other words. You don't unconsciously strain to look for words and separate words from one another.

The feel and spirit of your conlang changes when it has developed its own dedicated script, where each character of its script represents each of the unique sounds and voices of each phoneme of your unique conlang. Where, no longer does the everyday English/Latin alphabet, or even IPA, clumsily, is used to carry your conlang and its unique patterns of sounds and intonations. It's almost as if the conlang, once a textual/written corpse has the Breath of Life breathed into it and it becomes alive.

With it's own script, writing your conlang becomes artistic in a sense. Like how calligraphy was back in the old days when language was handwritten with feather and parchment. Not just to write text, but to express thought from your mind, out into the real world as images. Each image is a word. Each word was a formless element and archetypal thought in your mind. Tantra is magic and creation. The magic of the formless and immaterial manifesting as something formed, observable, and experienceable. Much like the formless archetypal patterns in the mind of Brahma manifesting as the physical world of experience. Like how the formless archetypal patterns in our own unconscious mind manifests as the dream worlds we experience. With its own script to express itself and manifest, there is a kind of magic to your conlang.
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Acipencer »

This is likely ANADEW, but I've always found it really neat. I have a conlang called Selekain that marks verbs for voice. Due to a quirk of its morphosyntax, there are some instances where certain verbs are marked simultaneously with both passive and antipassive morphology.
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Creyeditor »

This sounds interesting. Is the resulting verb left without any arguments?
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Acipencer »

Creyeditor wrote: 07 May 2022 16:08 This sounds interesting. Is the resulting verb left without any arguments?
Verbs in this situation do still have at least one or more arguments. For this to happen, you need an antipassive deponant verb and a relative clause.

I don't have my grammer document with me right now so I will make up the word "dak-" to demonstrate. Imagine dak- is an antipassive deponant verb that means "to date", and I want to say "The woman that I am dating". The issue here is that "woman" is the object of a dependant clause and Selekain can only relativise the subject of a dependent clause. The way Selekain usually solves this is to raise the object by making the verb passive. Notably, this strategy even applies to deponent verbs that are already marked with a different voice. So, the way you'd say "the woman that I am dating" is:

Kere en dakitil (ma) / Kere en dakilit (ma)
kere en dak-i=t=il (ma)/ kere en dak-i=l=it (ma)
woman this date-PRS=ANTIP=PASS (I) / woman this date-PRS=PASS=ANTIP (I)
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Creyeditor »

Oh, so your conlang has a class of antipassive-deponent verbs that take an antipassive marker =t even though they are not antipassive semantically or syntactically? That is indeed neat amd original (AFAIK) [:)]
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by MissTerry »

Like Sanskrit and Dravidian and most dialects/languages of India, Humrayan has retroflexive consonants.

Image
Image
Image

It took me a while to learn to pronounce those retroflex consonants. I had to watch a bunch of youtube videos. It bugs me not being able to actually pronounce words from my own conlang!

When I type on the computer words in Humrayan using the normal Latin script [English alphabet on my keyboard] I write the retroflex <T> as a "dt" and the retroflex <TH> as "dth." I write the retroflex <SH> [the <S> with the dot underneath] as "sch," and the retroflex <L> as "ll." In its own alphabet, each of those retroflex consonants have their own individual letter/character.

The letters <D> and <R> are special because they make both the normal sounds and the reflexive depending on various things. The <D> becomes a retroflex D when it comes before a Long Vowel. The <R> becomes retroflex when it comes before a consonant, otherwise it is quickly trilled.

In the beginning, I thought about not even using those retroflex phonemes, because they don't exist in the two natural languages I know and speak, and so its was hard for me to say those consonants and also hard for me to hear the difference. But I decided to keep those retroflex consonants so that Humrayan can remain true to its Indo-Aryan/Vedic/Sanskrit roots. Now that I can make those retroflex sounds and can hear the difference, I end up really liking them a lot.
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Khemehekis »

Hurray for retroflex consonants! The Ritoniqa Dzhapa'u language of the planet Zidrova uses them! https://khemehekis.angelfire.com/zidrova.htm
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by MissTerry »

Khemehekis wrote: 13 Aug 2022 00:53 Hurray for retroflex consonants! The Ritoniqa Dzhapa'u language of the planet Zidrova uses them! https://khemehekis.angelfire.com/zidrova.htm
Whoa, that's a complicated language! I really like how the meaning is encoded directly into the word!
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Arayaz »

Ăsă has VSO word order normally. However, in the past tense, it becomes VOS, and in the future or immediate future, it becomes SVO. The verb does not change form, but a word-initial auxiliary is inserted; the 3rd person singular forms are (respectively) ūlan, ian, and vaun. The word order changes come from the sources of the auxiliaries: the past tense comes from "come from," so the past was interpreted as a sentence with the verb being "come," followed by a prepositional phrase "from" and the old verb phrase - hence (aux)-VO-S. The future comes from "to want," and the immediate from a verb meaning "go to." Both of these were interpreted as sentences with the verb being "want" or "go to," the subject being the old subject, and the object being the old verb phrase - hence (aux)-S-VO.

Example:
Nāles-an liăsi ă-wasū.
eat-3sg bird acc-fish
The bird eats the fish.

Ūlan nāles ă-wasū liăsi.
PST-3sg eat acc-fish bird
The bird ate the fish

Vaun liăsi nāles ă-wasū.
IMFUT-3sg bird eat acc-fish
The bird is about to eat the fish.

Ian liăsi nāles ă-wasū.
FUT-3sg bird eat acc-fish
The bird will eat the fish.

Edit: I made a typo in the italics tag and made the whole thing italic.
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Larryrl »

In Yiyule the words for less than and more than, can be used as prefixes.

da means less, less than, under, lower, or left.
ma means more, more than, above, over, higher or right (direction).
Te means equal, about the same size as or about the same as

home is ka
If you add da to the beginning of ka , you get shack or hovel.
If you add ma to the beginning of ka you get mansion?

evil is ut .
good is tu
If you add da to the beginning of tu , or ut you get a lesser amount of good or evil.
If you add ma to the beginning of tu , or ut you get a greater amount of good or evil
If you add te to tul, or ut you get about the same amount of good or evil as. This helps in comparing people like who seems the most trustworthy. It’s like the devil you know versus the devil you don’t.


up is nu
down is ni
vertical is nuni literally up and down.
horizontal is dama which also means across . Literally left or right .
Bu mac zoom pana shem.
Me too sexy for shirt.
Bu mac zoom pana shem.
Me too sexy for shirt.
Kle mac bu run
So sexyI hurt


Beef steak is good
wos pis ho tu
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Iyionaku »

In Yélian, there is only one single root that uses the grapheme <û>: staû "power". This is because of an earlier sound shift that elided a glottal stop before /u/, but in all other instances of an /aʔu/ sequence, the stress lay on the /a/. Just in this one root the final /u/ was stressed, which already is very rare and is only the case for a handful of words.
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by LWFlouisa »

As the original conception was something like a speculative creole language, and not something I made up on the fly, do to the fact much of its vocabulary is derived from both Western Romance, Alsace-Lorraine, and Japan / South Korea, it inherently a lot of...oddities unique to those languages, while having its own.

For example do to some compound words being half French and half Japanese, this creates a situation where I have to decide whether to use the guttural R sound or the type that flaps between D and L.

Ex. [jakata] [de] [aʁbʁe], or just aʁbʁejakata

A type of tree house shaped like a boat, that can used in an emergency as an arc like boat for your family, and came out during great floods.

Also I referenced Solfege, and ultimately I see this becoming more of a music language than a story telling language, although this is overlap.
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Khemehekis »

LWFlouisa wrote: 10 Dec 2022 10:57 Ex. [jakata] [de] [aʁbʁe], or just aʁbʁejakata

A type of tree house shaped like a boat, that can used in an emergency as an arc like boat for your family, and came out during great floods.
This sounds so cool!

On some planets in the Lehola Galaxy, such as Querre, they have something called a cablehouse. A cablehouse is like a treehouse, but it hangs from a cable. Ziplining with your friends!
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Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels

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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by LWFlouisa »

Khemehekis wrote: 01 Jan 2023 11:37
LWFlouisa wrote: 10 Dec 2022 10:57 Ex. [jakata] [de] [aʁbʁe], or just aʁbʁejakata

A type of tree house shaped like a boat, that can used in an emergency as an arc like boat for your family, and came out during great floods.
This sounds so cool!

On some planets in the Lehola Galaxy, such as Querre, they have something called a cablehouse. A cablehouse is like a treehouse, but it hangs from a cable. Ziplining with your friends!
I might look into that. One of the issues I'm having at the moment is figuring out what words should exist for a limited post apocalyptic setting.

It also occurred to me a few days ago what to call the neighboring similar but unrelated language. I suspect I may unintentionally create a domino effect of new vocabulary from the interaction between them.

Ex. There isn't really a context in this conlang for why Tokkipisica, and similar words, is present unless it was influenced in some way by other languages. That language loosely translated to "Rabbit-Cat".

Actually I might make a thread about it later, but I'm finding more and more that with some fictional cultures it's not really possible to meaningful separate the develop a language outside of the context of their musical tradition: poetry forms develop in certain ways based on natural speech patterns for example. So a syllable timed language will sound differently from a stressed timed, even with the same lyrics.

So as I develop the music alongside in, I'm finding out things I didn't really anticipate going in.
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by appakling »

in every conlang I attempt to make, the phonology for the letter J is never /ʤ/. it's always /j/
because of these two reasons
A: I like /j/
B: I can't type phonetic symbols on a Chromebook [:'(] (yep. a chromebook)
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Arayaz »

appakling wrote: 10 Mar 2023 14:05 in every conlang I attempt to make, the phonology for the letter J is never /ʤ/. it's always /j/
because of these two reasons
A: I like /j/
B: I can't type phonetic symbols on a Chromebook [:'(] (yep. a chromebook)
I use a Chromebook too, and I'll recommend two things to you:
1. Use the Brazilian Portuguese keyboard layout (in Settings). It takes some getting used to, but you get all the diacritics (yep, all of them: ą̣̈́) and quite a few phonetic symbols (e.g. /ø/, /ð/) using the right alt key.
2. Pressing search+v lets you access a menu of the five things you most recently copy-pasted. I use this to store symbols I can't type. Like right now, here they are:
ʃ
ˈʎ
ʔ
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by appakling »

ooh, that's good to know! (I knew about the copy menu- I use that quite often!) I will try out that Brazilian Portuguese keyboard layout. thanks!
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Iyionaku »

appakling wrote: 11 May 2023 18:24 ooh, that's good to know! (I knew about the copy menu- I use that quite often!) I will try out that Brazilian Portuguese keyboard layout. thanks!
I personally always use the web page ipa.typeit.org/full. It has almost every IPA character and suprasegmental, and with a keyboard it's really easy to use.
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Re: Miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang to share and know

Post by Nel Fie »

I haven't been active in a while, partly due to other chores and necessities, but also because my conlang projects are still a while off due to me having to do a lot of preparatory work before I get to develop and share them. So I thought I'd share at least one idea, if only to contribute something to this forum for a change:

One of my projects has Direct Alignment, at least on a surface level analysis. Verbs (or verbal structures, with additional influence of the specific verb/noun combination) very frequently have what I call "lexical/semantic agreement" (e.g. if the verb implies a semantically animate agent, it is assumed that whichever noun is semantically animate is the agent, for example).
However part of the project also aims at a deep-dive into pragmatics, conculture and meaning-by-context as well as aesthetic sensitivities of the speakers, so I intend for a lot of generally unexpected behaviours in syntax and word use and combinations (e.g. similar how memes and cultural references lead to a lot of unexpected things in our world). I can't remember the details of my notes or if I took note of this at all, but there might be cases where word order is chosen merely by assonance/alliteration/rhyme or just generally phonological euphony - as part of a greater goal for the language to be extremely heavy in iconicity, sound symbolism, etc...

That said, while I'm taking a lot of cues from naturalism, the speakers are merely humanoid and the project is more aimed at being creative and fun, rather than aggressively realistic from a linguistic perspective.
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