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.
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...
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.
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!)
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.
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/.
Pivunuševibe tiufas, mapa pivumūečip taimiibi.
I pointed you to the stars, and all you saw were the tips of my fingers. (Play)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
♂♥♂♀
Squirrels chase koi . . . chase squirrels
My Kankonian-English dictionary: 93,000 words and counting
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.
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. | | | | |
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.
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").
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:
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.
Pivunuševibe tiufas, mapa pivumūečip taimiibi.
I pointed you to the stars, and all you saw were the tips of my fingers. (Play)