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December 13th, 2009
heronbythesea
 | 04:46 pm - What language is this?
http://www.lycaeum.org/mv/anagrams/PARALINGUA.cgi?article=Jeshap
I have this word in my conlang, jeshap, which means finish or complete. I got curious if perhaps I'd heard that word somewhere before, and typed it in google. This page came up. I'd love to know what language this is!
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December 11th, 2009
heronbythesea
| 04:21 pm - Languages without "to be" in the present tense
I know a little Hebrew, and it does not use "is, am, are" in the present tense. I know there are some other languages like that as well. I find that as I'm constructing my own language, Carichendan, I tend to inadvertently not use the word for is (which is simply, "a" and means all 4 of these: be, is, am, are) in many cases. So, for example, to say "How are you" (literally, "what is your blessing?"), you should technically say "tsa aluva shoyal a?"
tsa = what
aluva = your
shoyal = blessing
a = is
But in speech, and in this case, even in writing, I do not use the "a" in this sentence. It's just "Tsa aluva shoyal?" (What your blessing).
But in the answer, "ana shoyal a shale" (my blessing is peace)
ana = my
shale = peace
I tend to want to use the "a." Maybe it just sounds better.
To ask how someone is who has been sick, you say "How are you?" which is "Kangi alu?"
Kangi = how
alu = you
Technically it would be "Kangi alu a?" (how you are?) but I don't say that. Just "Kangi alu?" (how you?)
In these everyday phrases, the "a" tends to get left out, and sometimes even in other sentences. But most of the time, I think I do use it, although it may not be necessary at all. But there is another problem - Carichendan has a lot of words which end in vowels. So you often end up with a doubling (or even tripling) of the a-sound when you use the present tense "to be." So, for example, "Aliya a alin" (life is easy). In speech, that is inevitably going to be condensed to sound like "Aliya'alin. The tripling of the a-sound is rare, but the doubling is quite common.
Aliya = life
Alin = easy
I was thinking about making it a grammar rule that the present tense "to be" is not necessary. But then I think there may be some complications with this.
In Carichendan, the adjective comes after the noun. So "Aliya alin" means "easy life." So how would you distinguish between "easy life" and "life is easy"? In Hebrew, there are some conventions that can help distinguish sometimes, but other times it is ambiguous. Most of the time, context clears it up. But sometimes, it does not. This has in fact caused some multiplicity of possible meanings of certain sentences in the Bible.
In Hebrew, if you want to say "the red book" you say "the book the red," whereas if you want to say "the book is red," you say "the book red." So that extra "the" which gets added to the adjective clears up the meaning. However, there is also no "a, an" in Hebrew, so there is no way to distinguish "a red book" from "a book is red," since you can't say "a book a red." It's just "book red" either way.
I do have a word for "a, an" in Carichendan, but I do not wish to have to do something like this, where you have to add a "the" or "a, an" to the adjective. What other ways could one make it clear? Or am I getting too uptight about this?!
So, should the present tense "to be" stay or go? What do you think?
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December 10th, 2009
nhpeacenik
 | 07:55 pm - War is Over - Translators Needed
Yoko Ono and friends are collecting versions of John Lennon's famous saying "War is Over! If you want it." at http://www.flickr.com/photos/yokoonoofficial/sets/72157622834909233/.
Conlangs and help with natlangs with odd scripts are particularly in demand :) . Contact admin AT imaginepeace.com is you want to help. I sent in a translation into Ayola:
Current Location: Greenville NH USA
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December 7th, 2009
heronbythesea
| 02:51 pm - Newbie - So many questions!
Shoyalu (hello - lit. "blessing on you"), I'm "Heron by the Sea" and I'm brand new here. I have been creating my own language, Carichendan, and I thought I was crazy. I had no idea that other people did this! I'm thrilled to discover that I'm not alone, and that this is a legitimate hobby. ;-)
I have only just begun really doing anything significant in the creation of my language. I have had the idea for quite some time, and have had a few words and phrases. But now I'm completely working on it.
I have developed a tentative script. Is there a way to make my own font for this script? I could make it so that the A-sound in my language is covered by the A key and so on, but how would I deal with special characters? There are 31 letters in my language, and in addition, some vowels will need an accent mark in some words. I've been working in Word Perfect, and I have set up macros to deal with accents in the transliteration. So if I want an accent on an A, I just need to hit Ctrl A and it comes up with an accent. For the special letters, I have to use 2 English letters. So for example, Sh, Ch, Eu, Ng, Kh, etc.
I have a few documents in Word Perfect in order to work on my language. One is an English to Carichendan dictionary, another is a Carichendan to English dictionary, one is for grammar, and I also have a .pdf with the alphabet and pronunciation rules. (I also have other documents for info about the Carichendan culture, history and religion).
I have looked at the Language Construction Kit and I feel that I was mostly already doing what it recommends. But I still wonder if maybe there could be something more I can do to avoid any kinds of fundamental errors in creating a new language. I keep tweaking things, and when I do, I have to go back and change some things. Right now, I don't have very many words, but if I get a lot, that could end up being very tedious.
Thanks everyone - and I'm so glad to have found this community!
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/ibrad/bigwink.gif) contemplative
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December 6th, 2009
saizai
 | 01:27 am - Please review my "Conlanging 101" paper
Here is my paper (pdf) for my talk on "Conlanging 101" at 26C3.
It needs to be turned in for printing by the 7th, so any and all comments appreciated.
( Goals )
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December 2nd, 2009
jfran2258
 | 02:21 pm
Something I don't understand about IPA is why it has a dedicated symbol for a voiced labiodental nasal and not a voiceless nasal, even though there are languages that distinguish voiced and voiceless nasals, but there are no languages that distinguish a bilabial nasal and a labiodental nasal.
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December 1st, 2009
jimhenry
| 07:25 pm - Language & Personality Survey
I am posting this on behalf of Mark Henshaw, who posted it to the CONLANG and AUXLANG mailing lists and later asked people to forward it further through the conlanger community. So the deadline for responding is kind of short (4 December); apologies. Please send your responses offlist to Mark at the spam-protected email address below, not to me and not posting them here (or at least, not just posting them here).
( On to Mark's actual survey )
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November 28th, 2009
alishenai
| 12:38 pm - four-way distinction's
Hi. I've been doing a bit more research into demonstratives and how they became articles so I think I undestand the basic's. However it occured to me that it would be really nice to have a four-way distinction for the demonstratives "this" and "that." For instance I would like to have something like the demonstratives in Northern Sami:
Dát biila
"this car"
Diet biila
"that car (near you)"
Duot biila
"that car (over there, away from both of us but rather near)"
Dot biila
"that car (over there, far away)"
(example from wiki)
So the problem is where would the word "the" originate from if there are three words for "that?"
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November 26th, 2009
rii_namuras
 | 10:19 pm - Conlangs and Webcomics question
I have a question about the use of a conlang in a webcomic I'm working on.
The Eraminians [or dragons] in this story have their own language, and it is used. While it does have it's own script [which bears a small bit of resemblance to our alphabet - in the story-verse, the Eraminians taught the rest of the people on that continent to read and write] and that could be used since I'm hand-lettering, I'm still not sure whether to use that or just transcribe it into our regular alphabet.
While I realize a separate script would emphasize the alienness of the language, at this point in the story Eraminian is heard through the viewpoint of a group of characters from neighboring nations who have never heard it before and would really have no idea that there even is a separate script, plus because of that they would likely remember it through the lens of their own alphabet.
I was thinking perhaps using our alphabet when the travelers are around, and using its script when it's just Eraminians talking to each other, as that does happen later in the story. But I'm not sure - what do you guys think? What would you prefer to read?
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November 24th, 2009
fallingupthesky
 | 08:58 am
Two unrelated things I've been wondering recently.
The first isn't directly related to linguistics and requires a bit of setup: A day can be conceptualized as a "sun-cycle" and a month as a "moon-cycle" - in fact, most languages seem to have those words derived as such, if not outright calling a day "sun" or a month "moon". A year could be conceptualized as either an "earth-cycle" (given modern astronomical knowledge) or a "star-cycle" (since some late stone-age or early bronze-age societies measured a year by the position of a particular star, most often Sirius, at a particular time of night). Is there any other meaningful way that either "earth-cycle" or "star-cycle" could apply as a time measurement, just so a language could use both terms to mean different things?
Second, is there any good reason why no language has ever developed its written form as a "reverse abjad"? You know, base symbols are vowels and maybe some dipthongs, probably also with a null vowel placeholder for words that start or end with a consonant and/or optional consonant marks?
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argylegasm
 | 12:23 am - Twitter
I'm now Tweeting in my conlang, Dod
Click HERE to follow. =]
Here's some basic info on Dod:
It's an a priori language that is mainly VSO - it has its own script but can be written perfectly well in the Latin alphabet. The grammar is basically complete, the only thing lacking is lexicon, which I work on pretty much daily. Dod has a nice derivational system that allows me to create new words without too many worries; it also compounds pretty readily, though compounding itself is a bit random (alfodióras [consonant] is literally 'letter-of-body', while natiínsistem [phonology] is 'sound-system', so basically sometimes you just tack nouns together and other times you make a fake genitive constuction).
I haven't quite figured out how to share the grammar and lexicon of Dod yet - it's all on GoogleDocs, so I may just give viewing access to those who want it, but til then, enjoy the tweets - or the tuíit, as said in Dod. =]
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November 21st, 2009
alishenai
| 12:22 pm - Old English
Does anyone know some good sites which explain the use of Old English demonstrative pronouns and how they became articles? What I need is some sentence examples in Old English translated into modern English. Thanks in advance.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/ibrad/upsidedown.gif) curious
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November 19th, 2009
arimah
 | 06:38 pm - IPA Helper
I’ve spoken to a great many conlangers about all things language-related, and it seems a major headache for most of them – myself included – is this lovely little thing commonly known as the IPA.
As wonderful and useful as it may be, it relies a lot on obscure characters hiding in a corner somewhere in Unicode. Most people cannot input these characters with their regular keyboard layout, and in many cases, one has to resort to a game of hide-and-seek with charmap. Even worse, still, is when IPA characters are needed on a website which may not use a sensible Unicode encoding for its text, and you have to use HTML entities instead – ː and so on.
As a solution – hopefully – to these issues, I present a very simple little thing I spent a little while implementing:
My IPA Helper.
This thing should make it at least a little bit easier to input IPA characters for those of you who aren’t using a custom keyboard layout. Simply click on an IPA character or symbol in any one of the tables, and it’ll be added to the plain-text and HTML text boxes.
If there is anything missing or if something appears broken in your browser, please let me know either by commenting below, or by using the contact form on my new and unfinished website prototype (which has numerous dead links).
I hope this might be of use to some of you out there; it’s already proven useful to me!
The IPA Helper is distributed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial licence, which means you can do whatever you want with it as long as you don’t try to sell it. Everything needed for the IPA Helper to work is contained within that one file; feel free to save it and use it locally. Also note that you’ll need a Unicode-compatible browser with IPA fonts installed to actually see the IPA.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/ibrad/rotate.gif) creative
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fallingupthesky
| 12:10 am
I found this mostly by accident a few months ago. I don't have any conlangs yet - okay, I have two, but they're a long way from finished - but I felt like sharing a personal story involving this subject in case it might be of interest to those who regularly read and/or post here. (If it's not appropriate, I apologize.)
In the mid-1980s, when I was still a child, I became semi-obsessed with creating a universal international language. I knew nothing of linguistics, and decided that the best way to do this was to learn at least a little of as many languages as possible. The local library had dictionaries for French, German, Chinese, and Italian, and a few books on Egyptian Hieroglyphics, but that's all. I was also aware of a lot of Greek and Latin roots in English and what they meant. Those things alone didn't seem to be nearly enough, so I eventually abandoned it.
Later on I became aware of Esperanto. And rejected it. It was too obviously latin-based, not globally inclusive enough, and didn't sound like a natural language.
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November 15th, 2009
saizai
| 12:38 pm - 26C3 / visiting Europe
So, I submitted a talk to 26C3 on "Conlanging 101". And it actually got accepted (with flight paid!).
Which means I get to go to Berlin and attend an awesome hacker conference, and all I have to do is give a talk I'll enjoy. W00tage.
The talk is a) an intro / overview to conlanging (like an expanded version of my lightning talk at Toorcamp - http://conlang.org/toorcamp.pdf) plus b) conlanging-by-crowd-committee where I'll (albeit very quickly) go through actually making a new language on the spot good enough to translate part of the Babel text (like a super-compressed version of my Berkeley DE-Cal class). Plus workshop afterwards.
Most likely what I'm going to do is spend ~10 minutes giving a fairly fast-paced overview, ~35-40 going through making a language on the spot, and anything left over on Q&A.
Anywho:
a) got ideas for how to improve the talk / workshop? (German speakers: anything I should be aware of, or any good jokes to make? Ich spreche keine Deutsch. :()
b) anyone else going?
c) anyone in the area (even vaguely, as in Western Europe; I'm somewhat tempted to make it an excuse to visit other places in Europe) who's either interested having a visitor or willing to host me for a couple days? (if yes, please email me directly)
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November 14th, 2009
vaxjedi
 | 11:01 am - Waving the secret vice
If you are in Google Wave, someone has started a collaborative conlang project in there:
https://wave.google.com/wave/#restored:wave:googlewave.com!w%252B5TBtlj0WD
They are going for more of an auxlang approach. I've been piping in, but I figured it might be fun if more people were churning away at it :)
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November 13th, 2009
yuri93
 | 10:14 am
This question's possibly a little technical, and maybe belongs on ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) linguaphiles or something like that, but it is related to a conlang I'm putting together, so I hope you'll bear with me!
Right now I'm building a conlang that's basically the love-child of Tibetan and Nepali for a pseudo-Tibetan society in some fic I'm writing. Tibetan's agglutinative (and Nepali is mixed agglutinative and inflective) so my morphology for this project is agglutinative. The problem is I'm not sure where to go from there.
I've studied Japanese, which is heavily agglutinative and primarily uses mostly suffixes with a handful of prefixes (like o- for formality). I've also taken a stab at Coptic, which, if memory serves, has prefixes (though I don't remember if it's agglutinative). Cue confused linguistics student.
I've also got a whole lot of different classes of affixes going on. I've never actually taken morphology so I'm not clear on the exact terminology here, but my conlang thus far features several different classes of morphemes that can be appended to verbs, including person, tense, formality, and various other factors (was it personally witnessed? Is the speaker voicing an opinion? etc). Some of the latter class of affixes are also functioning like free-morpheme copulas in some simpler sentences--this might be a problem. Mostly, though, I'm worried that this is getting maybe a little too complicated, and I'm having trouble figuring out what orders to put these suffixes in, when I'm merrily adding three or more bound morphemes to a verb.
I'm concerned particularly with verbs in my three main questions:
1) How typologically rare are languages (like Coptic) that conjugate by adding prefixes rather than adding suffixes? (In other words, is this implausible in a real-world language?)
2) How about using both prefixes and suffixes to form verbs? Is this implausible in a real-world language?
3) Could you give me some examples of how, in heavily agglutinative languages, prefixes and suffixes are ordered? If you've made a heavily agglutinative language, how did you handle this? (I could just look up how Tibetan and Nepali do it, but that's proving a little difficult to dig up, and I'd really rather deviate somehow from the source material...)
Thank you in advance!
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November 11th, 2009
clydepr
 | 09:17 pm - Im working on a conlang...
anyone know of any good logical ways to create new words? Not talking about just a word generator, but some logical ways of combining suffixes, prefixes and infixes, etc to formulate a system for creating all words. Not sure if there are any tried and true methods here.
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November 9th, 2009
andriard
 | 06:41 pm - spanish verbs
i was lurking through a book shelf , when i found a spanish grammar book. it's the better one i've seen. i havne't studied spanish a lot, as it is my native language but sometimes i've done some research specially on reflexives.
i was looking at the verb section and said, " holy ***" so many verb forms! i was counted in total 22 posible conjugations. the book said " verbs in english might have at least 20 possible forms counting person. spanish verbs have 102 possible conjugations." there are some conjugations that i rarely use like (yo hubiere cantado).
normally in a conlang i put past, present, future not perfect and one subjunctive.
maybe next time i'll try all of them
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/ibrad/smile.gif) shocked
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November 5th, 2009
jfran2258
 | 05:19 pm - voiceless nasals and other unusual sounds
Is there a recording on the internet contrasting voiced and unvoiced nasals? I haven't been able to find any. Are there any contrasting voiced and voiceless /r/ or /l/? Any help would be greatly appreciated.
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November 3rd, 2009
ysabetwordsmith
 | 06:05 pm - Bilingual Science Fiction Poem
I'm holding a poetry fishbowl today, with a theme of "languages and ways of writing." I've already posted the freebie poem, "Space Flight" which is bilingual in Lâadan and English.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/ibrad/talking.gif) busy
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October 28th, 2009
dedalvs
 | 06:37 pm - SpecGram's on Twitter
Speculative Grammarian, the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics, is now on Twitter. You can follow us at http://twitter.com/SpecGram.
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alishenai
| 02:32 pm - enclitc
Since my last post I have been working on my articles which is my next question. If you conlang has enclitic definate articles then how do you manage suffixes? do you place them before the attached definate article or afterwards?
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October 27th, 2009
ysabetwordsmith
| 01:44 pm - Propaganda ... now in new Klingon flavor!
My partner Doug found me this awesome piece of Klingon propaganda, done in animation with all the narration in Klingon. I only recognized a few words, but hey, it's still fun to watch.
Current Mood: busy
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October 18th, 2009
ofrenacschnieve
 | 02:31 am
what are some languages that do not use adjectives?
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October 9th, 2009
alishenai
| 07:59 pm - vowel change
Are there any languages which feature vowel change but not consonant change?
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October 5th, 2009
andriard
| 07:36 pm
last night, i was comparing how long, the same senctence in different languages takes to be said. i was comparing english, spanish, and japanese and i saw that it takes less silables in english than in the other two. i decided to add my conlang to the examples
the woman that was driving didn't know the way; so, we got lost 15 silables
la señora que estaba manejando no sabía el camino, entonces nos perdimos 27 silables
運転していた女性は道を知らなかった、だから迷子になった。
unten shite ita josei ha michi wo shiranakatta, dakara maigo ni natta. 25 silables
zet ahenben ĵutzitze ვk ogatenვie hŕ tźa ziv orakna, riv ჩab'ziau' aofen-farenö 26 silables
so, how do you do your conlangs? do you have to say an array of silable to express something or just a litte. Also, if there's any name for this in linguistics please tell me.
Current Mood: ![[mood icon]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/mood/ibrad/laugh.gif) amused
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September 30th, 2009
alishenai
| 08:19 pm - the sound th
Would it be acceptable if I use "dh" to represent both the "th" sound in "this" and "that" instead of using the Islandic symbol "ð" to represent the later pronunciation? cos I thought that instead of having two seperate symbols to destinguish between the sounds I could instead create rules like "dh" is pronounced like the "th" sound in "this" at the beginning of a word or if it follows a particular vowel, and is pronounced like the "th" sound in "that" when it appears elsewhere in a word.
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September 29th, 2009
jfran2258
| 07:04 pm - Language without nouns
The language I'm working on is a fictional language for non-humans in a story I'm writing. I've tried to make it very different from human languages. It has no labial consonants, contains a click consonant, and is OSV.
I'm thinking of having no nouns. Or at least no words that are expressly nouns. Instead all "nouns" would be gerunds of verbs.
For example, to say "It is a tree." one would say: "It trees," with tree being a verb meaning "to be a tree." To say "The tree has green leaves," one would say "The treeing (gerund) has (verb) greening (participle) leavings (gerund)."
In a sense the language still has words that act as nouns and adjectives, but are forms of a verb.
I want to know what everyone thinks and if you forsee any problems.
Current Mood: caffeine buzz
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argylegasm
| 03:38 pm - More Script
Alas, lots of it. First I have for you the full alphabet used for Dod with the romanization below each letter.
( Current Dod )
Below are the letters from the original mother language's alphabet, Cole, that are no longer in the Dod alphabet. Cole had geminate consonants, front rounded vowels, and contrastive vowel length, which is all reflected in these letters. Long vowels are represented with a macron, geminate consonants are simply doubled.
( Cole )
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