If natlangs were conlangs

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Shemtov
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If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Shemtov »

So the the other board has this thread, so why not start one here (I don't go there anymore, because that's were the fun of conlanging goes to die.)

So anyhow:
Who created Gaelic really has a fetish for historical spellings, moreso then the guy who did English. I mean, in his or her "Irish" version /vʲəurə/ is written <Mheabhraigh>, what the Hell? I mean, don't get me wrong, there's a logic to his or her orthography, but why write /u/ with <bh>? Who does that?
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Frislander »

I'm sure Saamic is a diachronic project where someone payed no heed to realism. I mean three-four way lenɡth contrast on consonants?! Are you kiddinɡ? And don't ɡet me started on Southern Saami's vowels: does /i e ɛ y ɨ ʉ u o ɑ/ plus diphthonɡs /ie yø eæ ʉa ʉe ɨe uo oe oæ oa/ look well balanced to you? I think not!
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by markski »

Nuxálk is literally just a kitchen sink someone made after seeing PIE syllabic resonants and thinking "oh mah gawsh I wanna make a language where ALL CONSONANTS ARE SYLLABIC SCREW VOWELS BWAHAHAHA" Like really kw, ʔnc and clhp'xwlhtlhplhhskwts' are all phonotactically legal word structures in this lang srsly.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Frislander »

Who came up with RP English? I mean look at that phonology! They just took a boring old derivative SAE consonant inventory, maybe adding one or two unoriginal phonemes. Then we have the vowels and diphthongs. They must have been using the time-trusted method of throwing darts at an IPA chart, and they have terrible aim. I mean, what a crowded lower-back vowel space (/ɑː ɒ ʌ ɔː/). Are you having a laugh? And those phonotactics, need I say more? I'm surprised they didn't throw in a 10-term tone system as well!

As for the grammar, don't get me started!
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by HinGambleGoth »

Danish is an attempt at making a Germanic conlang where the creator experimented with all sorts of lenition, you can tell since the vowel system is quite generic and not as planned out.

The grammar is also very generic, and very average. As I said the maker just made a one-of trowaway experiment where the goal was to grind down all post-vocalic consonants to vowels or approximants to see if it worked.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Frislander »

What's going on with Arrernte? That guy clearly thought "OK, ow about first we make both prestopped nasals and prenasalised stops phonemic, how does that sound? And transfer rounding as a contrastive feature wholesale from vowels to consonants, and by consonants I mean all of them. Then, in the resulting two-vowel system, instead of buckets of conditioned allophony, let's just have free variation, so the schwa is realised as [ɪ ~ e ~ ə ~ ʊ] as you like. And it's Australia, so there's 6 POAs for stops and nasals, four lateral POAs, two rhotic POAs and no fricatives. And, for a bit of fun, let's do that Paman thing of preferring codas to onsets, and make people think that our language is VC(C). and suppletive suffixes for roots with different numbers of syllables. All this will otherwise use straight-up dependent marking Pama-Nyungan grammar."
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Sglod »

The person who created Japanese created two scripts, then decided they would use the one mainly for grammatical inflection and the other mainly for foreign words. They then couldn't be bothered to create another script so imported and slightly modified Hanzi for the majority of native root words. They then decided to have it so the hanzi in compounds of root words are pronounced in diachronically progressed forms of the Old Chinese readings.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by lsd »

imo, natlangs are old conlangs...
So old that they have been reconstructed so many time by so many speakers they seems finally natural... with no more human intentionality...
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by qwed117 »

Sglod wrote:The person who created Japanese created two scripts, then decided they would use the one mainly for grammatical inflection and the other mainly for foreign words. They then couldn't be bothered to create another script so imported and slightly modified Hanzi for the majority of native root words. They then decided to have it so the hanzi in compounds of root words are pronounced in diachronically progressed forms of the Old Chinese readings.
So unrealistic. They would just use one system or the other. Maybe it could happen if the country were split, but as it is, it's just ridiculous. Why the hell are there two writing systems in one language.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by GrandPiano »

qwed117 wrote:
Sglod wrote:The person who created Japanese created two scripts, then decided they would use the one mainly for grammatical inflection and the other mainly for foreign words. They then couldn't be bothered to create another script so imported and slightly modified Hanzi for the majority of native root words. They then decided to have it so the hanzi in compounds of root words are pronounced in diachronically progressed forms of the Old Chinese readings.
So unrealistic. They would just use one system or the other. Maybe it could happen if the country were split, but as it is, it's just ridiculous. Why the hell are there two writing systems in one language.
Not to mention: If a syllabary is already in use, why in world would they bother to continue using logograms? Using both just seems unnecessarily complicated.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Egerius »

English revisitedorthography:
Someone played around with the sound changes and forgot to update the orthography accordingly. Then others took over and only tweaked unnecessary details! What even...?
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by qwed117 »

Basque: look, I know that it might not be fun to diachronically derive all the languages on your continent, but this is just laziness. Put it on an island or something.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by LinguoFranco »

Shemtov wrote:So the the other board has this thread, so why not start one here (I don't go there anymore, because that's were the fun of conlanging goes to die.)

So anyhow:
Who created Gaelic really has a fetish for historical spellings, moreso then the guy who did English. I mean, in his or her "Irish" version /vʲəurə/ is written <Mheabhraigh>, what the Hell? I mean, don't get me wrong, there's a logic to his or her orthography, but why write /u/ with <bh>? Who does that?
I find Celtic spelling unintuitive but aesthetically pleasant.

English is an idea somebody had to make a language with Germanic grammar, with a significant amount of Romance influenced words thrown in, creating a hybrid.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by All4Ɇn »

God whoever came up with Mandarin has no idea what they're doing. For one, a lot of rhotacized vowel phonemes only exist in weird combinations with a diminutive suffix. I could see a language keeping them if they used them more but it's ridiculous for something that uncommon to have that many different vowels. /ɻ/ is such a rare consonant anyway that you can't use it without the language automatically sounding like American English. What's even more ridiculous is it's something they couldn't even bother to implement in a lot of other dialects.

Don't even get me started on the orthography. How the hell is someone supposed to learn that many characters? Doesn't make sense on a logistical scale. Couldn't they at least use an alphabet for new technological terms or foreign names? And what's going on with that romanization. If you went through the effort of romanizing something you should at least have the curtesy to give me something I could vaguely pronounce. How was I supposed to know that q represented /t͡ɕʰ/. Where'd they even come up with that?
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by GrandPiano »

All4Ɇn wrote:God whoever came up with Mandarin has no idea what they're doing. For one, a lot of rhotacized vowel phonemes only exist in weird combinations with a diminutive suffix. I could see a language keeping them if they used them more but it's ridiculous for something that uncommon to have that many different vowels. /ɻ/ is such a rare consonant anyway that you can't use it without the language automatically sounding like American English. What's even more ridiculous is it's something they couldn't even bother to implement in a lot of other dialects.
Even weirder: Coda /ɻ/ exists in non-suffixed words, but only in the syllable [ɑɻ]. Also, the suffix in question isn't necessarily a diminutive suffix. For example, sometimes it's just added to specific words in certain dialects for no apparent reason at all.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by DesEsseintes »

The thing I find the most fake and unrealistic about Mandarin as a conlang is the classical standard they invented for the language where you have to write in four-character phrases all the time. There's no way that would happen in real life.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by protondonor »

Is anyone getting tired of lazy graftlangs? I mean we have:
  • Maltese: oh look, a Semitic language done up in Romance drag. Like no one's ever thought of that before. NEXT.
  • Romanian: okay, you wanted to make a romlang, but you really like Slavic languages and have also been learning Modern Greek. You realize you don't have to combine all your ideas into one project, right?
  • Hiw: [ɡ͡ʟ] is appropriate since I nearly choked on my tongue and accidentally performed a prestopped velar lateral when I saw your ridiculously unrealistic phonology.
  • Zhuang: "I wonder what would happen if you used Chinese characters to write a Thai language." Well, now we know, and you can stop bothering us with it. Wait, no, you didn't have to go make a whole wiki of glyphs. That's way too many glyphs and you can stop now.
  • Hungarian: I don't even know where to begin here. There are way too many cases for a realistic Ugric language; did you just hear about the Finnic languages and think that since they have a lot of cases, you should have a lot of cases too? Dumb kitchen-sink waste of time. Oh and apparently you couldn't find a good dictionary of Khanty or Mansi so instead of using native Ugric vocabulary you just imported a ton of words from Slavic and Turkic and... wait a minute, is this another project by the guy who did Romanian? Screw that guy.
  • Malagasy: I appreciate that you're trying to make an African language! Not enough diachronic conlangers try to do that, IMO, and... hold on, it's Austronesian? How did it even get there? And what the hell, is Bantu not good enough for you?
  • Nahuatl: "Wouldn't it be cool if Paiute were spoken near Mixtec?" Okay, you might have a point there. It's kind of cool. But Whorf's law is the most unrealistic sound change I've ever seen since Hiw.
  • Brahui: if you make a relict Dravidian language spoken in Balochistan, I at least expect to see some Avestan loanwords. Where are my Avestan loanwords? Couldn't find a good Avestan dictionary?
  • Albanian and Armenian: is anyone getting tired of these single language branches of Indo-European? Come on, at least make a whole family to go along with it. And come up with some better sound changes; dw > rk is just silly (although at least it's not Hiw).
ngl I love all these languages so much for their diachronic craziness
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Squall »

English's author wanted to make an ideogram-based script, but they were lazy to draw the symbols and wanted something simple to type. Thus, they decided to use Roman letters to form ideograms.

The native language of Japanese's author is Slavic. The author doesn't distinguish /e/ and /je/ nor /o/ and /wo/. They think that /i/ and /j/ should palatalize anything to make new phonemes. They wanted to put /v/ in the language in the original plan, but decided to try /w/ as a symmetry of semi-vowels absent in Slavic languages. Because they wanted a CVCV language, they removed the stress and expects to avoid clusters and codas.

French was created by a German that was excited after learning Italian. So they added round vowels, because they feel that the phonology is limited; they removed gemiation, because it is difficult; they made some diachronic sound changes and kept the orthography etymological; they removed the stress to make it easier to pronounce without reducing vowels.

Spanish was created by a Portuguese that wanted to make a conlang to learn. It has to be easy to remember, then they cloned Portuguese and made thousands of small changes in order to make it different. The writing became more phonetic, a random phoneme was assigned to J, voiced fricatives became unvoiced, many diphthongs were added or removed to increase the difference (fogo/fuego, vento/viento, estou/estoy, cantarei/cantaré, rei/rey). The author wanted to remove /f v/, but that task is still unfinished.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by GrandPiano »

Squall wrote:a random phoneme was assigned to J
Well, they did justify it diachronically, but... /ʃ/ > /x/? Seriously?
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by tseren »

Shemtov wrote:So the the other board has this thread, so why not start one here (I don't go there anymore, because that's were the fun of conlanging goes to die.)

So anyhow:
Who created Gaelic really has a fetish for historical spellings, moreso then the guy who did English. I mean, in his or her "Irish" version /vʲəurə/ is written <Mheabhraigh>, what the Hell? I mean, don't get me wrong, there's a logic to his or her orthography, but why write /u/ with <bh>? Who does that?
You weren't there for the Old Irish project. There were 42 different consonants, but the orthography only used 13 letters. The system specified the sound based on word position and the flanking vowels. This posed no problem, because there were only 11 monophtongs and 13 diphthongs to use up those five letters, anyway. It's all very intuitive once you get used to it. The whole project was abandoned due to the verb inflection system. At first there, were just the two verb stems, absolute and conjunct. When they added the whole infixed pronouns idea, the stress shifts meant the generation of prototonic and deuterotonic stems as well. Then, the suffixed object pronoun idea really took hold. By the time they were done, we're writing <condidnderoímed> /kondəðnʲdʲe:roi̯ṽʲəðʲ/ "so that he should protect him" and verbs conjugated along the lines of <do·tuitet> "they fall" and <do·rochratar> "they have fallen".

There were also 14 noun declensions. Some people just don't know when to stop. They pretended people spoke this stuff. When they decided to scrap the whole project, half the phonemes got thrown out. The orthography stuck around for a daughter language just to give it a sense of diachrony. The whole thing is just an excuse to see what would happen if you applied a bunch of sandhi to the more obscure PIE inflections while trying to make Classicists cry.
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