Conlang mini-ideas

[Salmoneus]

Some of them, they might be not interesting:

- a language "spoken" by octopus that uses shapes and patterns as its phonology

There was this alienlang, that got a smiley award. It used something like this, but I forgot it's name.

Rikchik, I believe.

(and, in case anyone wants a link to it - http://dedalvs.conlang.org/smileys/2012.html )

FWIW, I've occasionally given brief descriptions of my own conlang-concept, 'U', which is also an alien sign language spoken by octopuses (well, nautiloids actually).
[It's more alien, though, in that it doesn't have morphemes at all - there's no concept of the 'word' as a sign or symbol representing a concept or thing.]

I guess I should write up a proper description of that sometime.

[LinguoFranco]

More ideas:

-An auxlang with three vowels /a i u/. A few languages have /a e o/ or /a i o/, and I know Quecha pronounces /a i u/ differently, so the auxlang would allow free variance with vowel phonemes. It's not that interesting of an idea, but I have wondered why most auxlangs I know about stick with the five vowel system when I believe such languages should be as minimalistic as possible. There probably is an auxlang with the three vowels, I just don't know of any.

- An East Asian language with gender and plurals since Mandarin and Japanese lack gender. Idk about Korean.

- A languge with syllables based on the abbreviations of the elements of the Periodic Table. I got the idea from Solresol, which uses music notes. Of course, some of the abbreviations wouldn't flow well together, so some of them are linked together with a vowel linked between consonants. There are also 118 of them, which equals 118 syllables.

[elemtilas]

FWIW, I've occasionally given brief descriptions of my own conlang-concept, 'U', which is also an alien sign language spoken by octopuses (well, nautiloids actually). [It's more alien, though, in that it doesn't have morphemes at all - there's no concept of the 'word' as a sign or symbol representing a concept or thing.]

I guess I should write up a proper description of that sometime.

Do it! That'd be interesting to see. You could certainly submit it to Fiat Lingua or the Speculative Grammarian.

[Keenir]

More ideas:
-An auxlang with three vowels /a i u/. A few languages have /a e o/ or /a i o/, and I know Quecha pronounces /a i u/ differently, so the auxlang would allow free variance with vowel phonemes. It's not that interesting of an idea, but I have wondered why most auxlangs I know about stick with the five vowel system when I believe such languages should be as minimalistic as possible.

its harder with the fewest of everything, so they give leeway with vowels? *shrugs*

- A languge with syllables based on the abbreviations of the elements of the Periodic Table. I got the idea from Solresol, which uses music notes. Of course, some of the abbreviations wouldn't flow well together, so some of them are linked together with a vowel linked between consonants. There are also 118 of them, which equals 118 syllables.

that sounds like an intriging syllabary.

[Frislander]

-An auxlang with three vowels /a i u/. A few languages have /a e o/ or /a i o/, and I know Quecha pronounces /a i u/ differently, so the auxlang would allow free variance with vowel phonemes. It's not that interesting of an idea, but I have wondered why most auxlangs I know about stick with the five vowel system when I believe such languages should be as minimalistic as possible. There probably is an auxlang with the three vowels, I just don't know of any.

Minimalistic as possible? Well then why don't you go for something like this:

/p t k/
/β ɾ/

/a ə/

(C)V

(based on real systems in natlangs)

[k1234567890y]

-An auxlang with three vowels /a i u/. A few languages have /a e o/ or /a i o/, and I know Quecha pronounces /a i u/ differently, so the auxlang would allow free variance with vowel phonemes. It's not that interesting of an idea, but I have wondered why most auxlangs I know about stick with the five vowel system when I believe such languages should be as minimalistic as possible. There probably is an auxlang with the three vowels, I just don't know of any.

Minimalistic as possible? Well then why don't you go for something like this:

/p t k/
/β ɾ/

/a ə/

(C)V

(based on real systems in natlangs)

wow this is super simplistic, it has a Rotokas consonant system with a Ubykh vowel system.

[Frislander]

-An auxlang with three vowels /a i u/. A few languages have /a e o/ or /a i o/, and I know Quecha pronounces /a i u/ differently, so the auxlang would allow free variance with vowel phonemes. It's not that interesting of an idea, but I have wondered why most auxlangs I know about stick with the five vowel system when I believe such languages should be as minimalistic as possible. There probably is an auxlang with the three vowels, I just don't know of any.

Minimalistic as possible? Well then why don't you go for something like this:

/p t k/
/β ɾ/

/a ə/

(C)V

(based on real systems in natlangs)

wow this is super simplistic, it has a Rotokas consonant system with a Ubykh vowel system.

Well, Rotokas mixed with Proto-Lakes-Plain.

[LinguoFranco]

-An auxlang with three vowels /a i u/. A few languages have /a e o/ or /a i o/, and I know Quecha pronounces /a i u/ differently, so the auxlang would allow free variance with vowel phonemes. It's not that interesting of an idea, but I have wondered why most auxlangs I know about stick with the five vowel system when I believe such languages should be as minimalistic as possible. There probably is an auxlang with the three vowels, I just don't know of any.

Minimalistic as possible? Well then why don't you go for something like this:

/p t k/
/β ɾ/

/a ə/

(C)V

(based on real systems in natlangs)

Wouldn't that vowel system be too restricting? Also, natlangs tend to have at least one back rounded vowel, so I'd imagine that one make an appearance on its own eventually.

[Frislander]

-An auxlang with three vowels /a i u/. A few languages have /a e o/ or /a i o/, and I know Quecha pronounces /a i u/ differently, so the auxlang would allow free variance with vowel phonemes. It's not that interesting of an idea, but I have wondered why most auxlangs I know about stick with the five vowel system when I believe such languages should be as minimalistic as possible. There probably is an auxlang with the three vowels, I just don't know of any.

Minimalistic as possible? Well then why don't you go for something like this:

/p t k/
/β ɾ/

/a ə/

(C)V

(based on real systems in natlangs)

Wouldn't that vowel system be too restricting? Also, natlangs tend to have at least one back rounded vowel, so I'd imagine that one make an appearance on its own eventually.

I was partly taking the mick out of your "minimalism" criterion.

Also, you want all-unrounded vowels, then how about this, or this, or this?

[LinguoFranco]

-An auxlang with three vowels /a i u/. A few languages have /a e o/ or /a i o/, and I know Quecha pronounces /a i u/ differently, so the auxlang would allow free variance with vowel phonemes. It's not that interesting of an idea, but I have wondered why most auxlangs I know about stick with the five vowel system when I believe such languages should be as minimalistic as possible. There probably is an auxlang with the three vowels, I just don't know of any.

Minimalistic as possible? Well then why don't you go for something like this:

/p t k/
/β ɾ/

/a ə/

(C)V

(based on real systems in natlangs)

Wouldn't that vowel system be too restricting? Also, natlangs tend to have at least one back rounded vowel, so I'd imagine that one make an appearance on its own eventually.

I was partly taking the mick out of your "minimalism" criterion.

Also, you want all-unrounded vowels, then how about this, or this, or this?

I like that.

I have seen some conlangs do /a i ɯ/ as a vowel system.

[Frislander]

-An auxlang with three vowels /a i u/. A few languages have /a e o/ or /a i o/, and I know Quecha pronounces /a i u/ differently, so the auxlang would allow free variance with vowel phonemes. It's not that interesting of an idea, but I have wondered why most auxlangs I know about stick with the five vowel system when I believe such languages should be as minimalistic as possible. There probably is an auxlang with the three vowels, I just don't know of any.

Minimalistic as possible? Well then why don't you go for something like this:

/p t k/
/β ɾ/

/a ə/

(C)V

(based on real systems in natlangs)

Wouldn't that vowel system be too restricting? Also, natlangs tend to have at least one back rounded vowel, so I'd imagine that one make an appearance on its own eventually.

I was partly taking the mick out of your "minimalism" criterion.

Also, you want all-unrounded vowels, then how about this, or this, or this?

I like that.

I have seen some conlangs do /a i ɯ/ as a vowel system.

What, like mine?

[gach]

Minimalistic as possible? Well then why don't you go for something like this:

/p t k/
/β ɾ/

/a ə/

A vertical two vowel system without having any frontness or roundedness feature transferred to the surrounding consonants might not be that simple to derive naturally, nor does it sound to be that stable. Though, for a purposefully created auxlang only the latter is potentially a problem.

In Nooníí kiskn I tried making a minimalist phonology that might realistically stay stable for a while after a phase of phonological reduction. I went for something a bit different than the quasi Lakes Plain template of voiceless vs. voiced series and ended up with

/t k ʔ/
/s n/

/a o i/

and basic allophony including /t/ > [d ɾ], /k/ > [g w j], /n/ > [ŋ], /o/ > [w], and /i/ > [j]. You could equally well put in some other three vowel system but I like /a o i/ a lot. The system has phonetic glides in it, which gives some variability for the vocabulary, but these are all predictable reflexes of /k o i/. There are also tones in there, but these don't technically increase the number of the phonemic segments.

[gestaltist]

Thinking about a possible home to my new (unpublished) sketchlang I thought of a new conworld: viewtopic.php?f=24&t=5247&p=235861#p235861

[Porphyrogenitos]

A descendant of Old English set in the medieval New England as recorded in Byzantine sources, with influence from Kartvelian and Circassian languages, gaining a series of ejective stops via loanwords, developing agglutinative verbal morphology, etc. Maybe set in a modern-day autonomous republic of Russia or Georgia.

Or, depending on where exactly you set it, with influence from Turkic languages.

[k1234567890y]

how about having a language where it is impossible to describe something in a neutral, impersonal way and one is forced to add their personal feelings when describing a phenomenon, and if one has a neutral feeling, they must describe it as they had a positive feeling towards it, maybe this can be achieved by the use of evidentials.

A descendant of Old English set in the medieval New England as recorded in Byzantine sources, with influence from Kartvelian and Circassian languages, gaining a series of ejective stops via loanwords, developing agglutinative verbal morphology, etc. Maybe set in a modern-day autonomous republic of Russia or Georgia.

Or, depending on where exactly you set it, with influence from Turkic languages.

this sounds really interesting (: it seems that those emigrants had a lot of intermarriage with local people, and borrowed a lot of Kartvelian and Circassian words, even though they managed to keep their identity and language.

btw, in my opinion, the syllable structure of Georgian might be a result of extensive elision.

[Creyeditor]

how about having a language where it is impossible to describe something in a neutral, impersonal way and one is forced to add their personal feelings when describing a phenomenon, and if one has a neutral feeling, they must describe it as they had a positive feeling towards it, maybe this can be achieved by the use of evidentials.

I thought Láadan had something like that.

[k1234567890y]

how about having a language where it is impossible to describe something in a neutral, impersonal way and one is forced to add their personal feelings when describing a phenomenon, and if one has a neutral feeling, they must describe it as they had a positive feeling towards it, maybe this can be achieved by the use of evidentials.

I thought Láadan had something like that.

ok (:

I have heard that in the Turkana language, almost every compound word is exocentric, maybe we can try this feature?

also, maybe we can consider to make a language without any derivational affix and any convenient(albeit they might be abstract) word like "thing", "property", etc., that is, you must use some other ways to describe certain phenomena where English uses affixes like -ness, -ity, etc., and as far as I know, many ancient languages didn't really have the concept "thing", but they could still describe a lot of concepts.

Even we don't have words for affixes for "-ness", we can still have a way to describe them, it is said that Chinese sometimes combine two antonyms to describe "the quality of..." and some other things, for example, in Chinese, the word "size" is 大小, which is from 大 "(be) big" + 小 "(be) small", although Modern Chinese also uses the morpheme "-性" to denote the meaning "-ness"("-度" also means "-ness", but -度 means the measure rather than the quality), although being a speaker of Chinese, I don't think combinations like "大性" sounds good for "bigness".

[cromulant]

how about having a language where it is impossible to describe something in a neutral, impersonal way and one is forced to add their personal feelings when describing a phenomenon, and if one has a neutral feeling, they must describe it as they had a positive feeling towards it, maybe this can be achieved by the use of evidentials.

I'd think the 'neutral/default ~ happy' morpheme would lose the 'happy' meaning. How can it convey happiness if it also specifically means 'no particular feeling one way or the other'? Unless the speakers have a built-in assumption that the speaker is always happy unless specifically stated otherwise. But again, if happiness is just seen as the default, is it really a thing in its own right anymore?

[k1234567890y]

how about having a language where it is impossible to describe something in a neutral, impersonal way and one is forced to add their personal feelings when describing a phenomenon, and if one has a neutral feeling, they must describe it as they had a positive feeling towards it, maybe this can be achieved by the use of evidentials.

I'd think the 'neutral/default ~ happy' morpheme would lose the 'happy' meaning. How can it convey happiness if it also specifically means 'no particular feeling one way or the other'? Unless the speakers have a built-in assumption that the speaker is always happy unless specifically stated otherwise. But again, if happiness is just seen as the default, is it really a thing in its own right anymore?

hmm...ok, thank you for your opinion (:

[zyma]

Lots of great ideas here, as usual.

Lately I think I've caught the a posteriori bug, so to speak. More specifically, I've caught the Germlang bug. In addition to continuing Visigothic, I've been giving a lot more thought to the South Germanic branch idea I mentioned earlier in this thread, and I've come up with the idea for a Northeast Germanic branch because I've begun taking Finnish.