If natlangs were conlangs

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All4Ɇn
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by All4Ɇn »

Imralu wrote:
Axiem wrote:
Imralu wrote:
qwed117 wrote:Look, creator of the Austronesian languages: changing one letter doesn't make a new language. At best it's a dialect. And this is for virtually every language you made. Seriously, in every language you made, the word for eye is "mata"
No, it's maka in Hawaiian. #creativity
Aren't /k/ and /t/ allophonic in Hawaiian?
Yes, but as I understand it, [t] only occurs in certain dialects and is absent from most Hawaiian.
Even where it does exist, [t] mostly only occurs before /i/
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by k1234567890y »

All4Ɇn wrote:
Imralu wrote:
Axiem wrote:
Imralu wrote:
qwed117 wrote:Look, creator of the Austronesian languages: changing one letter doesn't make a new language. At best it's a dialect. And this is for virtually every language you made. Seriously, in every language you made, the word for eye is "mata"
No, it's maka in Hawaiian. #creativity
Aren't /k/ and /t/ allophonic in Hawaiian?
Yes, but as I understand it, [t] only occurs in certain dialects and is absent from most Hawaiian.
Even where it does exist, [t] mostly only occurs before /i/
pretty much the opposite to Japanese, where [t] never occurs before high vowels like /i/ except for some recent loanwords.

speakng of Hawaiian, I have read somewhere that Jennifer is "Kinipela" in Hawaiian.
I prefer to not be referred to with masculine pronouns and nouns such as “he/him/his”.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by GrandPiano »

k1234567890y wrote:speakng of Hawaiian, I have read somewhere that Jennifer is "Kinipela" in Hawaiian.
And Christmas is "Kalikimaka".
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Iyionaku »

Someone who must have been a real beginner just thought "Hey look, French has some strange things on their letters, I will do this but I will totally overdo it so everyone thinks my language is super cool and special"

Tất cả mọi người sinh ra đều được tự do và bình đẳng về nhân phẩm và quyền. Mọi con người đều được tạo hoá ban cho lý trí và lương tâm và cần phải đối xử với nhau trong tình bằng hữu.

Plus, it seems like he uses <d> for /j/, <gi> for /z/ and <x> for /s/ ...really!? You didn't even invent any grammar, dude.
Edit:
Spoiler:
I used "grammar" instead of "morphology" in order to match the purpose of this thread - entire jocular sillyness :D I am currently learning Chinese and so I know what a pain in the ass a merely syntactical language can be, even without morphology. But thanks for highlighting, Frislander :)
Last edited by Iyionaku on 06 Feb 2017 14:08, edited 3 times in total.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Frislander »

Iyionaku wrote:Someone who must have been a real beginner just thought "Hey look, French has some strange things on their letters, I will do this but I will totally overdo it so everyone thinks my language is super cool and special"

Tất cả mọi người sinh ra đều được tự do và bình đẳng về nhân phẩm và quyền. Mọi con người đều được tạo hoá ban cho lý trí và lương tâm và cần phải đối xử với nhau trong tình bằng hữu.

Plus, it seems like he uses <d> for /j/, <gi> for /z/ and <x> for /s/ ...really!? You didn't even invent any grammar, dude.
And they have like, crazy gaps in their phonology, like no word-initial /p/ in native words, but having /ɓ/, and the only aspirate being /tʰ/.

And then they try and claim that they derived this from someone else's proto-language with infixing morphology and loads of clusters, but they didn't like that so they got rid of it all to leave just boring-old syntax.
Spoiler:
Important note: Vietnamese does have grammar, just not morphology: don't confuse the two.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

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Iyionaku wrote:Someone who must have been a real beginner just thought "Hey look, French has some strange things on their letters, I will do this but I will totally overdo it so everyone thinks my language is super cool and special"

Tất cả mọi người sinh ra đều được tự do và bình đẳng về nhân phẩm và quyền. Mọi con người đều được tạo hoá ban cho lý trí và lương tâm và cần phải đối xử với nhau trong tình bằng hữu.

Plus, it seems like he uses <d> for /j/, <gi> for /z/ and <x> for /s/ ...really!? You didn't even invent any grammar, dude.
Edit:
Spoiler:
I used "grammar" instead of "morphology" in order to match the purpose of this thread - entire jocular sillyness :D I am currently learning Chinese and so I know what a pain in the ass a merely syntactical language can be, even without morphology. But thanks for highlighting, Frislander :)
A masterpiece of diachronic and dialectal conlanging [:)]
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by All4Ɇn »

I mean if you're going to have a heavily Chinese influenced conlang, complete with tones and everything, at least have the audacity to use Chinese characters like that Japanese one.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Frislander »

All4Ɇn wrote:I mean if you're going to have a heavily Chinese influenced conlang, complete with tones and everything, at least have the audacity to use Chinese characters like that Japanese one.
They tried and it worked fairly well, but the creator must have chickened out, what with all the effort it would have taken.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by All4Ɇn »

Frislander wrote:
All4Ɇn wrote:I mean if you're going to have a heavily Chinese influenced conlang, complete with tones and everything, at least have the audacity to use Chinese characters like that Japanese one.
They tried and it worked fairly well, but the creator must have chickened out, what with all the effort it would have taken.
At least they tried being creative with it what with all the new characters for words that already had Chinese characters
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by GrandPiano »

Iyionaku wrote:Plus, it seems like he uses <d> for /j/, <gi> for /z/ and <x> for /s/ ...really!? You didn't even invent any grammar, dude.
Spoiler:
According to Wikipedia, <d> and <gi> actually represent the same sound, but it's [z] in Northern Vietnamese and [j] in Southern Vietnamese.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Shemtov »

Iyionaku wrote: Plus, it seems like he uses <d> for /j/, <gi> for /z/ and <x> for /s/ ...really!?
All makes sense in the conhistory, given the state of the language where he put that De Rhodes Charachter in.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Znex »

All4Ɇn wrote:
Frislander wrote:
All4Ɇn wrote:I mean if you're going to have a heavily Chinese influenced conlang, complete with tones and everything, at least have the audacity to use Chinese characters like that Japanese one.
They tried and it worked fairly well, but the creator must have chickened out, what with all the effort it would have taken.
At least they tried being creative with it what with all the new characters for words that already had Chinese characters
I've always been a fan of this Chinese-influenced script. The creator didn't feel like they had to stick with pictographs; they just made their own from bits and pieces and forcing character parts together. The Chinese conlanger would look at it with complete horror, but I think it just ends up being such an interesting deconstruction and creative way to work with a predecessor conscript.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Iyionaku »

Creator of Basque... it's ok to have some complexity in the language, and I'm always fund of some peculiarities that are hardly explainable, especially in verbal inflection. And as you did an a priori language, you are of course free to go.

But this?? Honestly? Did you even look twice about your verbal pattern?? Plus, either go through with it or leave it altogether. But don't create 5-10 super fancy monstrous verbs, get bored/disappointed/overstrained/demotivated over it and decide that all other verbs don't have any finite forms.

On the other hand, I laughed a straight 10 minutes after I stumbled upon your inside joke of the word eztabaida. Good work on that!
Spoiler:
Eztabaida means 'debate, discussion' and is formed out of the two complete sentences "ez da" and "bai da", literally "No, it's not! Yes, it is!"
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by KaiTheHomoSapien »

PIE creator: I think the reason you never finished this language is because it's too complicated for its own good. Why should a noun ablaut in three different ways in the same paradigm? No /b/ but /bʰ/, only voiced aspirates with no voiceless counterparts, syllabic laryngeals, only mid vowels (if you're only going to have two vowels, at least make one of them /a/!). And I love all the initial syllable reduplication that can mean whatever you want depending on the verb, and the nasal infix with no semantic function at all, but some of this seems a bit arbitrary. This language just makes no sense. It'll die out before it even gets a chance ;)
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Iyionaku »

KaiTheHomoSapien wrote:PIE creator: I think the reason you never finished this language is because it's too complicated for its own good. Why should a noun ablaut in three different ways in the same paradigm? No /b/ but /bʰ/, only voiced aspirates with no voiceless counterparts, syllabic laryngeals, only mid vowels (if you're only going to have two vowels, at least make one of them /a/!). And I love all the initial syllable reduplication that can mean whatever you want depending on the verb, and the nasal infix with no semantic function at all, but some of this seems a bit arbitrary. This language just makes no sense. It'll die out before it even gets a chance ;)
As far as I'm informed, the creator had already been aware of this problem and tried to simplify the language with diachronic conlanging. But he might have thought two or three subfamilies were not enough, so he created about a dozen :roll: And to make them different enough, he did some shit that his very hardly justifible, like a sound shift /dʰ/ > /jɛɾk/ in the Armenian subfamily or just switched out a third of the lexicon in the Germanic subfamily.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

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I feel like this thread is far to negative.
So, kudos to the conlangers creating the Papuan languages. Looks like a collaborative project of the best conlangers in the world. Minimalist phonologies (with some nice quirks), delicious morphophonology, they put a lot of work into the lexicon, created some unique syntactical constructions.
And because everyone is talking about diachronics, they really used every possible feature. Massive borrowings, crazy sound changes. Nobody can figure out what is a family and what is a Sprachbund. I really like it [:)]
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Frislander »

What's going on with Australia? It's like this one guy has gone through several hundred drafts of the same language, gutting the vocabulary, but keeping bits of the morphology and altering the syntax while making at most minimal changes to the phonology. They even had a strong polysynthetic phase with pervasive noun-incorporation, but they have been mostly dependent marking.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by All4Ɇn »

Frislander wrote:What's going on with Australia? It's like this one guy has gone through several hundred drafts of the same language, gutting the vocabulary, but keeping bits of the morphology and altering the syntax while making at most minimal changes to the phonology. They even had a strong polysynthetic phase with pervasive noun-incorporation, but they have been mostly dependent marking.
And instead of creating something truly unique when it came to the conworld they just had all of the languages become endangered due to British imperialism. Really? England conquered an entire continent? Seems unlikely
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by Frislander »

All4Ɇn wrote:
Frislander wrote:What's going on with Australia? It's like this one guy has gone through several hundred drafts of the same language, gutting the vocabulary, but keeping bits of the morphology and altering the syntax while making at most minimal changes to the phonology. They even had a strong polysynthetic phase with pervasive noun-incorporation, but they have been mostly dependent marking.
And instead of creating something truly unique when it came to the conworld they just had all of the languages become endangered due to British imperialism. Really? England conquered an entire continent? Seems unlikely
Well the US and Canada happened, so it's not without precendent.
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Re: If natlangs were conlangs

Post by All4Ɇn »

Frislander wrote:Well the US and Canada happened, so it's not without precendent.
There's still Mexico [;)]
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