I have an idea for a new engelang, I wonder if anyone will be interested in working with me on it or if they have any useful feedback (including telling me it won't work or someone has done it before, that's fine!)
It's basically a language that would have the opposite grammar to English, as directly opposite or distantly different as possible. My current name for it is Shilgngí [ʃɪlgˈŋɪ] [SIlg'NI], although I also think of it as "Antinglish". It began with my answer to a question on Quora: https://www.quora.com/Which-language-is ... ew-McVeagh. Having given a list of what features a language grammatically most opposite to English would have, I was then asked to 'write' something in it (when it doesn't yet exist!) so I 'translated' the Babel text into a form of glossing with abbreviated terms for inflections and shifted word order. Even this doesn't include all required features (e.g. gender) but it gives the gist and made me think a lot about what would be required.
Some notes:
- The purpose is to test whether it's possible to create such a language, whether it can be made to work. Does it 'feel' opposite to English? It could be used to help English L1 speakers get out of their heads a bit, stop taking their native grammar for granted. It's not meant to be used in practice or associated with a fictional people or situation.
- It's not meant to be phonologically and lexically opposite as well, as in lots of clicks and ejectives and whatever. Possibly I could use the phonology of English, only switched around temporally (as in [ʃɪlgˈŋɪ], e.g. /ŋ/ is mostly onset, only coda before vowels), or I could just create a random one, as it's not really what the lang is testing. I could back-engineer English lexemes or generate randomly.
- Some issues do not have an obvious 'direct opposite' to the scenario in English, in which case it's a question of what is most alien, what would be most challenging. E.g. what is the 'opposite' of SVO? Some might say OVS, which is literally the reverse - but that shares the feature of "verb in the middle"! I've already decided the morphosyntactic alignment should be tripartite rather than ergative.