Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

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KaiTheHomoSapien
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Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

I mean "on paper" metaphorically, so that can include computer screens. [:)]

I'm just asking if anyone else ever tries to say the words and sentences they create? I don't mean that you necessarily have real-life conversations in your conlang, but whether you ever say anything you've created out loud at all, just to yourself, just to hear it. I like to hear the sound of my language, not just look at morphological tables (as much as I love those), so I often do try and pronounce words and sentences or recite declension tables to myself just for fun. Some day I'd like to write a song in my conlang.

One thing I've always been interested in would be to hear some recordings of people speaking their languages. [:O]
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by lsd »

in oligosynthetic philosophical language, the construction of a word is constrained by its meaning...
Its pronunciation is therefore a surprise that I like to hear as much as to see...
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Sequor
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by Sequor »

No, I pretty much never say things in my conlangs aloud. I like the sound of some of them, but saying them inside my head is enough. I wouldn't record them and put the recordings up on YouTube or the like.
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by kiwikami »

I translate songs and texts into my conlangs, or sometimes write novel songs, to sing or recite to myself quite regularly. My main design focus for any phonology is simply that I like how something sounds, and I too will go through declension tables pronouncing everything for fun (you're not alone in that one, Kai!) [:D]

I'd record things to show people, but I'm rather self-conscious about my (speaking or singing) voice.
Edit: Substituted a string instrument for a French interjection.

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Reyzadren
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by Reyzadren »

I can actually speak my conlang fluently, but ofc I don't go talking to myself around other people lol

Conversation soundclips: Sample 1 Sample 2
Passage with a reading voice: Example
Singing in my conlang? Done that: Song 1 Song 2

All links were sourced from my conlang thread.
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by Pabappa »

At a parade two years ago I was walking behind a baby facing me over their mother's shoulder . The baby started to babble so I responded in kind by saying some words to him in Poswa. I dont remember the words I used other than that a lot of them were verbs ending in the third person transitive marker /-baba/.
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by Clio »

Ser wrote: 27 Mar 2020 20:14 I like the sound of some of [my conlangs], but saying them inside my head is enough.
For my part, I'd say that hearing my conlangs in my head is better than hearing myself stammer them aloud!

I do sometimes chant declensions and conjugations under my breath in an attempt to remember them, but it's always more satisfying to see things on paper.
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by LinguoFranco »

I practice the pronunciation aloud just to see if I like how it sounds. I was working on a conlang with a goal for it to be my ideal language, but I ended up not liking how it sounds, so I scrapped it and started anew.
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by yangfiretiger121 »

I practice pronunciation because the languages I'm working on are spoken in a roleplay setting and I want to be able to say the names, etc. when needed.
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by All4Ɇn »

I try and pronounce all of mine but for some of them I know I’m butchering my own conlang so I try not to do it too much then. That’s especially the case for anything I’ve done with tones.
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by vo1dwalk3r »

About two thirds of conlanging, for me, it seems, is muttering to myself while playing around with strings of phonemes until I get them just right...
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by Khemehekis »

I speak Kankonian out loud a lot, because I can pronounce all its phonemes (even the pharyngeal fricative and the velar lateral and the raspberry).

I can also speak Hapoish, even though it's an alien language. Aside from being nounless, Hapoish has a transoral flap -- you move your tongue from the front of your mouth to the back as you are making a flap consonant, which takes too much effort for humans to botjer with. It also has stridulants, a kind of phonation that involves stridulating the apo (a uvula-equivalent structure at the back of the Reds' mouths). Being human, I don't have an apo, but I just use creaky voice.

Cetonian is spoken with a non-humanoid vocal mechanism, a blowhole, by the cetacean sapients known as the wama. Can't do that. The languages of Psittacotia, inhabited by parrotpeople, are full of a wacky range of syringeals. The languages of Kwemos, spoken by the gwuelatl, just sound like a lot of glubbing to us humans.

The hexamantoids, mantis-descended sapients of the planet Twpia, speak musical languages that involve playing one middle limb with the other middle limb like playing a violin with a bow. Can't do that!

The languages of Syprian are "spoken" by the tamepo, a cephalopod people. I absolutely CANNOT speak any of them, because they all involve changing color.
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KaiTheHomoSapien
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

Thanks for all your answers. [:)] Nice to know I'm not the only one who does this.
Reyzadren wrote: 27 Mar 2020 23:42 I can actually speak my conlang fluently, but ofc I don't go talking to myself around other people lol

Conversation soundclips: Sample 1 Sample 2
Passage with a reading voice: Example
Singing in my conlang? Done that: Song 1 Song 2

All links were sourced from my conlang thread.
Amazing! Thanks for that. You sound like a native speaker! When I try and speak Lihmelinyan it's too slow and doesn't sound like I'm fluent (which I'm not lol). I'll have to work on that.
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J_from_Holland
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by J_from_Holland »

Reyzadren wrote: 27 Mar 2020 23:42 I can actually speak my conlang fluently, but ofc I don't go talking to myself around other people lol

Conversation soundclips: Sample 1 Sample 2
Passage with a reading voice: Example
Singing in my conlang? Done that: Song 1 Song 2

All links were sourced from my conlang thread.
Oh this sounds amazing.
How did you teach it yourself? You can't have a conversation with other people to get better at speaking the language.
Knowing the grammar of your lang is one thing but being able to apply it at this speed is something else.

Also, I do enjoy endlessly re-tweaking my grammar but that blocks me from actually learning it.
That has been haunting me for years, since fluency in Barmish is an end goal for me.
A few years, I posted about Bløjhvåtterskyll. That's Barmish nowadays, and it's quite different from back then.
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by Vlürch »

Yeah, I also (try to) say words and sentences of my conlangs out loud sometimes. Usually just short phrases of a couple of words, and even then it's almost always too slow and just doesn't sound right. I've yet to make a single song in a conlang, too, even after making dozens of songs in literal gibberish... sometimes even typed-out gibberish with "inflectional suffixes" and whatnot, just completely meaningless. :roll:
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by Curlyjimsam »

I try to pronounce bits occasionally, but my accent is appalling!
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Reyzadren
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by Reyzadren »

J_from_Holland wrote: 14 Apr 2020 11:24
Reyzadren wrote: 27 Mar 2020 23:42 I can actually speak my conlang fluently, but ofc I don't go talking to myself around other people lol

Conversation soundclips: Sample 1 Sample 2
Passage with a reading voice: Example
Singing in my conlang? Done that: Song 1 Song 2

All links were sourced from my conlang thread.
Oh this sounds amazing.
How did you teach it yourself? You can't have a conversation with other people to get better at speaking the language.
Knowing the grammar of your lang is one thing but being able to apply it at this speed is something else.

Also, I do enjoy endlessly re-tweaking my grammar but that blocks me from actually learning it.
That has been haunting me for years, since fluency in Barmish is an end goal for me.
I didn't need to learn it because I've always had that language as a kid. Also, there is no need to have other irl people because I can systematically derive everything correctly, and there are almost no irregularities in my conlang to be checked by someone else unlike natlangs.

Having simple grammar and easy phonemes also help, so I'm not sure if my advice is applicable to your language if it is complicated. You could try setting a time limit (For example: "The grammar can be undecided, but after 5 years, I must lock the changes and start learning it").
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Mándinrùh
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by Mándinrùh »

Oh, sure. I have, on several occasions, just read through all the examples in my reference grammar to check that they are consistent. I have a couple longer recordings on my website:

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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by Pabappa »

Few people will mistake Poswa or Pabappa for an ordinary language unless what I say is very short, so I did it again today .... as i was walking home, someone I dont recognize addressed me by name and said, "I dont know how many drugs youre on, but ..." and asked me for beer money. I just said in reply, Piaba basia , with a sing-song tone. Its not really grammatical, but the words mean "grows it of a vine" (sic). I didnt put much thought into what I said, and just kept on walking. Later i realized maybe i was telling him to drink wine instead of beer.
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Re: Does anyone else try and actually speak or pronounce their conlang or is it all on paper?

Post by eldin raigmore »

I try to pronounce some of mine. I don’t really have enough of one yet to “speak” it more than about one word at a time.
Last edited by eldin raigmore on 14 Jun 2020 22:25, edited 1 time in total.
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