The CBB

Share some miscellaneous fun facts about your conlang here.

Kankonian:

Kankonian has a raspberry sound, a voiceless linguolabial trill, which appears in such words as phahus (deep) and haphlaph (leaf). Thos sound was originally /ɸ/, but in the beginning of the Culture Wars in which the rebellious khemehekas fought the social-norm-bound devesas, the khemehekis Kerina assassinated the emperor Phoriphio farting in Phoriphio's face, pronouncing his name in a clowning manner, while he slashed his knife. As Kerina pronounced the PH's as raspberry sounds, he started a hazhu* tradition in the pronunciation of Kankonian's letter phiket. Although it takes a lot of energy to pronounce, Kankonians still pronounce the phiket as a linguolabial trill at least in careful speech, because they are proud of their history.

"Thesh" (to hear) can be put in the passive, with "ab" (from) to indicate an animal sound:

"Ryau", theshizen ab thothu.
meow hear-PSV-PST from cat
"Meow", went the cat.

"Kiga-kiga", theshizen ab kazawak pies.
scuttle-scuttle hear-PSV-PST from crab little
Scuttle-scuttle, went the little crab. ("Kiga-kiga" is the Kankonian onomatopoeia for the sound of a crab scuttling on the rocks.)

Possessives are not used with object nominals describing knowledge, nor with diet:

Zwaniz ad is esmiyass safga kamshitmuyas.
sister to 1s learn-PRS PROG ABC's
My sister is learning her ABC's.

Ar ukal we os hauess egirerobes na gohup.
2s clear ADV NEG know-PRS combination-PL of multiplication
You clearly don't know your multiplication tables.

Murtha novosen pure *in az notas ad wan abamosen virtlas.
Murtha try-PST always get that child-PL to 3s eat-FUT-PST vegetable-PL
Murtha always tried to get her children to eat their vegetables.

But may be used with subject nominals:

Shaleyik na is as swe kmofoshi.
Shaleya-ian of 1s PRS slightly rusty
My Shaleyan is a little rusty.

"Naphet" (sunset) is used to indicate the number of days ago something happened, and "sasharm" (sunrise) to indicate the number of days in the future something will happen: naphet bam (the day before yesterday), sasharm bam (the day after tomorrow), naphet kyu (five days ago), sasharm hosp-hol (forty-four days from now):

Amba wakhiren wakhir meitel na wan naphet em.
camel drink-PST drink previous of 3s sunset three
The camel had its last drink three days ago.

A selfie is called a tzevuihem (from tzevu, dolphin, and ihem, to face) in Kankonian because you and the cellphone are facing each other as two dolphins face each other during intercourse.

Miscellanous trivia about griuskant:
* It is one of the few conlangs to have the trigger morphosyntactic alignment.
* It is one of the few conlangs to have at least 10 storybooks written in it, despite using only 3000+ word entries in the dictionary.
* It has /zˤ/ but not /z/, and this is the only pharyngealised consonant as well.
* Because any combination of affixes can be added to any word theoretically, practically one gets passive nouns, possessive verbs, imperative prepositions, passive intransitives, active modals etc, amongst the more common short permutations.
* Its average word length is 3.8 phonemes/graphemes, which is quite sad for an "agglutinative" language. (English has 5~8 letters per word)

Reyzadren wrote: ↑25 Nov 2019 01:11 * It is one of the few conlangs to have at least 10 storybooks written in it, despite using only 3000+ word entries in the dictionary.

What a dialectic! And what a distinction! I can't name many conlangs that have lots of books written not about them, but in them. There are lots of Esperanto books published of course, and a number of conlangs will have Alice in Wonderland and/or Winnie the Pooh published in them (Lingua Franca Nova comes to mind), but TEN storybooks! And I've checked out your listings at the Frath Wiki -- an impressive output, I must say!

* It has /zˤ/ but not /z/, and this is the only pharyngealised consonant as well.

Fascinating!

* Because any combination of affixes can be added to any word theoretically, practically one gets passive nouns, possessive verbs, imperative intransitives, active modals etc, amongst the more common short permutations.

Are imperative intransitives really so strange or counterintuitive a word category? If a hostess says to her guest "Sleep in this bed", is not she using an imperative intransitive?

* Its average word length is 3.8 phonemes/graphemes, which is quite sad for an "agglutinative" language. (English has 5~8 letters per word)

Congrats on calculating that! Is griuskant oligosynthetic?

Khemehekis wrote: ↑25 Nov 2019 02:39

* Because any combination of affixes can be added to any word theoretically, practically one gets passive nouns, possessive verbs, imperative intransitives, active modals etc, amongst the more common short permutations.

Are imperative intransitives really so strange or counterintuitive a word category? If a hostess says to her guest "Sleep in this bed", is not she using an imperative intransitive?

* Its average word length is 3.8 phonemes/graphemes, which is quite sad for an "agglutinative" language. (English has 5~8 letters per word)

Congrats on calculating that! Is griuskant oligosynthetic?

Whoops, that's a typo/brain fart. I was supposed to type "...imperative prepositions, passive intransitives,..." Fixed :)
But yes, I was illustrating that while these simple terms may seem ungrammatical/strange in English, they are totally acceptable in griuskant.

I don't think so, any creature in the conworld would know at least 20000 word entries, so it wouldn't fit the usual criteria. Also, it depends on whether you count it as a morphology category or just an additional add-on parameter, or unless you have a different definition of oligosynthesis.

Reyzadren, do you think that griuskant might be classified as an alien language (exolang), perhaps? It's a fictional (i.e. for a conworld) language that isn't like any human language because its speakers (if I understand correctly) aren't human.

That's...a strange claim tbh. I don't think there's anything alien in it, unless you have other definitions/characteristics of exolangs.

Though it is true that the vast majority of griuskant speakers aren't human(oid)s*, most irl publications and sentences that I posted are shown as if they were written by humans (Henry Jekyll and Sherlock Holmes are humans, no?), so there really isn't any point to view it as a non-human language. More importantly, irl I can speak it, and it looks pretty much like any ordinary conlang without much exoticisms. Surely, one doesn't classify Quenya as an exolang just because it isn't spoken by actual humans there.

*ICly, what we think of as "irl" humans are a subset of humanoids in the conworld, and there is never a classification/reason to make such distinction.

Yatton has ONLY two roots for cardinal directions: East and West.

"Where the sun sets" and "where it rises."

Mwįpwįmwu has some wierd ways of forming plurals. These form into three categories of regular nouns, while there are some exceptions.

1) Plain polysyllabic nouns and some monosyllabic nouns which derive from old polysyllabic nouns only mutate the first consonant (for the purposes of mutation, a null onset is considered a consonant, and it was historically */ʔ/). This mutation derives from historical loss of most initial plosive-vowel syllables, which coincidentally formed a large proportion of the grammatical prefixes.

/pʷʊ/ → /ɸʷʊ/
/tœmʷœ/ → /lœmʷœ/
/pʊa/ → /ʊa/


2) Some monosyllabic nouns take the prefix pa-, which puts the first consonant in the "weak" mutation; in this case, the prefix has been retained because the root was historically monosyllabic.

/tʲʊ/ → /paʊ/
/pʷa/ → /paɸʷa/
/tʊ/ → /palʊ/


3) The plurals of some trisyllabic or quadrisyllabic body part terms are formed in a third way. The second syllable is reduplicated as a prefix, while the new two first syllables both change to the weak mutation, then the last syllable is dropped. This derives from a reduplication of the first two syllables, which caused the mutation, followed by dropping of the first syllable (first only when it was plosive-vowel, then later generalised) and then an irregular dropping of the final syllable of the longer words.

/tʲimʏmʷʊ/ → /mʏ–imʏ/
/pʷɔmaɛ/ → /ma-ɸʷɔma/
/tɨtʲʊʊlɛ/ → /tʲʊʊ-lɨtʲʊʊ/

4) Irregular plurals are occasionally suppletive; there are about a dozen suppletive nouns and a dozen nouns with major irregularities but a consistent root.

/ɨlʊ/ → /lœ/
/tʲilɛ/ → /apʷi/
/ʊa/ → /mʷʊa/
/omaʏpʷʊ/ → /poʏpʷʊ/


This is currently just at the sketching stage, so I'll likely add more irregularities as I refine the diachronics. And of course there are the dual forms to do.

Great thread idea!

Reading these posts just reminds me that my conlang is relatively humdrum.

I will say, however, that Lihmelinyan (at least in some dialects) utilizes a sound so rare, that it appears only in one dialect of one natlang (Circassian), that is, the voiceless bidental fricative. Spelled <fh> or <hh>. Corresponds to /f/ in other dialects.

fhéntas - /ˈh̪͆ɛn.tas/ "young man"

in nytanyteny there is no word, a text is only a concatenation of semantic primes...
so there is no verb, no sentence, no act of speech...
just a big compound that grows in all directions to describe a state of the things that could potentially enclose the whole universe...
sure, for now it is very experimental, and the description is partial and limited to simple discrete facts... just chunks not enough organized in the potential rhizome that they should build...

Vrkhazhian...

• Has /ɬ ɬʼ ɮ/ but no /l/
• Possesses a triconsonantal root system
• Possesses a verbal infix -ess- that indicates an anaphoric reference or relative clause
• Is written in a vertical cursive script
• Possesses a secundative alignment for ditransitive verbs, whereby the recipient is treated as a patient and the theme is marked with another case (e.g. instrumental), rather than an indirect object alignment, where the theme is treated as a patient and the recipient marked with another case (e.g. dative)

Pekaw (placeholder name) has prenasalized stops, which I haven't seen in too many conlangs (although I don't peruse other people's phonemic inventories often, beyond this site.

It also has a collective/singulative number, with some nouns being unmarked when there is more than one of that noun, and a singulative affix is added when there is specifically only one of that noun. /tai.ne/ is 'horses' while /tai.ne.mo/ is '(a) horse.'

LinguoFranco wrote: ↑30 Nov 2019 03:09 Pekaw (placeholder name) has prenasalized stops, which I haven't seen in too many conlangs (although I don't peruse other people's phonemic inventories often, beyond this site.

Źilaa Ruńu also has them :)

Ak'aleniw is spoken in a fantasy world by a group of people who are able to travel through a sort a of portal dimension. Their unique perception of distance is reflected in the language's system of demonstratives:
keh - this, here (used both inside and outside the portals)
mya - that, there (a medial distance in normal space)
awa - that (distal, in normal space, usually out of sight).
liya - a medial distance while the speaker is in the portal dimension, somewhere they can sense or at least reach by the same path they're walking at the moment
yan far away in the portal dimension, where the speaker can't sense or reach directly; also used for things outside in the normal world while the speaker is inside

All the demonstratives are used together with a definite article on the noun, and they're only optional. The article is often used without a demonstrative if the noun is too general or too abstract to fit in one of the above categories.

Oraataā has words for earth, water, air and fire, and also words for solid, liquid, gas and plasma. In its setting, the four elements (and positive and negative energy) really are the basic components of everything, and all four can exist in any of the four states. Lava? Earth with a great deal of positive energy. The opening to "Paul and the Blue Ox" would be an obvious tall tale because cold intense enough to freeze a campfire would have killed Paul and Babe.

Reyzadren wrote: ↑26 Nov 2019 21:16 That's...a strange claim tbh. I don't think there's anything alien in it, unless you have other definitions/characteristics of exolangs.

Though it is true that the vast majority of griuskant speakers aren't human(oid)s*, most irl publications and sentences that I posted are shown as if they were written by humans (Henry Jekyll and Sherlock Holmes are humans, no?), so there really isn't any point to view it as a non-human language. More importantly, irl I can speak it, and it looks pretty much like any ordinary conlang without much exoticisms. Surely, one doesn't classify Quenya as an exolang just because it isn't spoken by actual humans there.

Certainly, Quenya is not an exolang, but you said griuskant would get "passive nouns, possessive verbs, imperative prepositions, passive intransitives, active modals etc." Isn't this something that would never happen in a human natlang, or am I up for an ANADEW surprise here?

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote: ↑27 Nov 2019 17:41 Great thread idea!

Thanks!

Reading these posts just reminds me that my conlang is relatively humdrum.

I will say, however, that Lihmelinyan (at least in some dialects) utilizes a sound so rare, that it appears only in one dialect of one natlang (Circassian), that is, the voiceless bidental fricative. Spelled <fh> or <hh>. Corresponds to /f/ in other dialects.

fhéntas - /ˈh̪͆ɛn.tas/ "young man"

Oh well, at least it has a really rare phoneme, and that's pretty exciting. Maybe if you find it "humdrum", you can whip up some playful-fun grammar rules, like my "theshizen ab" thing, or my rule for when and when not to use a possessive with knowledge or diet. Or something interesting with lexicon. I am thinking right now about Dormouse's Silvish. Even though it's a Romance language, Dormouse always comes up with so many fun tidbits about Silvish to put in the language and share with us (I never tire of reading the notes on it in the Snowball Game thread).

lsd wrote: ↑27 Nov 2019 20:13 in nytanyteny there is no word, a text is only a concatenation of semantic primes...
so there is no verb, no sentence, no act of speech...
just a big compound that grows in all directions to describe a state of the things that could potentially enclose the whole universe...
sure, for now it is very experimental, and the description is partial and limited to simple discrete facts... just chunks not enough organized in the potential rhizome that they should build...

Mind = blown

Tuyono wrote: ↑30 Nov 2019 08:17 Ak'aleniw is spoken in a fantasy world by a group of people who are able to travel through a sort a of portal dimension. Their unique perception of distance is reflected in the language's system of demonstratives:
keh - this, here (used both inside and outside the portals)
mya - that, there (a medial distance in normal space)
awa - that (distal, in normal space, usually out of sight).
liya - a medial distance while the speaker is in the portal dimension, somewhere they can sense or at least reach by the same path they're walking at the moment
yan far away in the portal dimension, where the speaker can't sense or reach directly; also used for things outside in the normal world while the speaker is inside

All the demonstratives are used together with a definite article on the noun, and they're only optional. The article is often used without a demonstrative if the noun is too general or too abstract to fit in one of the above categories.

Oh, cool!

The glomas (singular glomos) of the planet Doyatl have something similar. All of them except for a few disabled glomas are capable of traveling back and forth through time at mental will. As a result, their verbs have two vowel slots. The first slot is filled a vowel that indicates verb tense on one's personal timeline, and the second slot is filled with a vowel that indicates verb tense on the external timeline.

Khemehekis wrote: ↑02 Dec 2019 06:02Certainly, Quenya is not an exolang, but you said griuskant would get "passive nouns, possessive verbs, imperative prepositions, passive intransitives, active modals etc." Isn't this something that would never happen in a human natlang, or am I up for an ANADEW surprise here?

Uh, I'm bilingual and speak another natlang fluently, and those things are pretty much commmon there, as well as other (non-)languages, so I don't see what's the big deal/surprise? Perhaps they are linguistically called something else or not analysed like that. I just had them more real, thicc, f.ierce and easy in my conlang.

Reyzadren wrote: ↑02 Dec 2019 22:20

Khemehekis wrote: ↑02 Dec 2019 06:02Certainly, Quenya is not an exolang, but you said griuskant would get "passive nouns, possessive verbs, imperative prepositions, passive intransitives, active modals etc." Isn't this something that would never happen in a human natlang, or am I up for an ANADEW surprise here?

Uh, I'm bilingual and speak another natlang fluently, and those things are pretty much commmon there, as well as other (non-)languages, so I don't see what's the big deal/surprise? Perhaps they are linguistically called something else or not analysed like that. I just had them more real, thicc, f.ierce and easy in my conlang.

Uh, and what natlang is it that you happen to speak? "Passive noun" and "possessive verb" don't sound like normal terms at all, especially because in your post you seemingly imply these terms stand for "passive derived from a noun" and "possessive derived from a verb" (as opposed to "passive verbal noun derived from a verb", etc.). I know nothing about Griuskant though, perhaps it'd make sense to me if I read about it.