#conglangs

[fenmere]

We've had some reason to try to figure this out.

How to say "Thank you" in Inmararräo:

bem hihe

"Beauty is you."

Note, the word "hihe" only roughly translates to English as "Beauty". It is less about aesthetics as it is about being harmonious, complex, beneficial, and interesting or informative.

But also, that word order is important. This is not saying "you are beautiful", it is saying that "our ideal of beauty is defined by you (or your actions)".

Of course, it is said just often enough that people often don't think about what it means anymore.

[opashoo]

I'm not sure if you posted it before but where would I find the Yongasabi font? I really like your conlang and I love writing stuff out using fonts like that

I totally forgot to respond to this before, I have a small post about the font on the reddit thread, you can find it here, the font itself and some brief instructions on how to use it. At some point, I'll be making another font that reads better at small sizes, but the current available font looks like this.

PGW)(YHx askiyo! maya chaw'ho, kamasda maeni makida ma? [naw'ag hanil cho'wa nakil] angsil. >..................< sanba'ga nakinakwa taw hoy'ag hamigo sapinae'la kip'o haga.;............

[dramatic-dolphin]

third person pronouns based on gender? sure. based on the SPEAKER's gender! if the person talking about you is female, you're ĩ, if they're male, you're nã

[max1461]

Hmm. Ok, let me preface this by saying that I know that in a general sense you have something of a utopian modernist outlook, and that you frequently interact with people of varying degree of expertise claiming "I know, due to my expertise, that your utopian modernist idea will not work". And often these people are wrong, or their expertise is of a type you reject as non-credible (and I usually agree), and I am concerned about coming off as one of these people.

But.

I think your utopian modernist idea will not work.

Actually, first, I should ask this: what features would a language "better designed than English" have? Setting aside orthography; I'm talking about the structure of the language itself. And how would you measure the improvement?

I ask because people have been trying to design improved spoken languages for a couple hundred years (indeed, it's how conlanging started), and nobody's had any success. This appears not just to be because it's hard to get anybody to learn your conlang. The futility of trying to design a "more logical language" or what-have-you is basically every young conlanger's first lesson. Perhaps it is a lesson ill-learned, but I don't suspect so.

Natural languages are not, uh, randomly distributed in possible-language-space. They all have pretty significant structural similarities. Nobody has a very good overall theory for why this is true, but it is true. The question "if you design a language that violates these patterns, and teach it to children as their native language... what would happen?" is an experiment that has been proposed, but we can't do it for ethical reasons. There's a lot of anecdotal evidence, including from second-language learners of Lojban, (as well as evidence from creolization and studies on neglected children and so on) that says the answer is something like "they would just change it to accord with natural language universals and speak it that way".

I think it's probably impossible to design a language that people actually speak that is fundamentally structurally different from what we have. This seems include to include all kinds of weird and specific constraints that the utopian conlanger would not even be aware of, like "don't center-embed subordinate clauses with depth greater than two" and so on. One of the things you might like to have, and may not be able to have for deep fundamental reasons, is unambiguous parsability.

You might be able to circumvent the human mind's constraints here if you were very clever and had a really good theory of syntax, but, well, nobody has a very good theory of syntax.

I can't say with confidence ''this just isn't possible", because if I could, that would entail a better understanding of the language faculty than anyone actually has. But I think the search for a human-learnable spoken language that is in some significant way structurally different from natural language is a bit like the search for an odd perfect number. I can't promise you you won't find it, but uh... good luck. You will not be the first to have tried.

Right, but, ok, maybe you don't want something deeply structurally new. Maybe you're fine with the overall "shape" of natural language, with its ambiguous parsing and its constantly-developing morphological redundancy and so on, you just want an optimum within these constraints.

Ok, that's where measuring the improvement comes in. Because there are a lot of natural languages already existing, and the question of whether they have any significant impact on cognition is totally unsettled. To do this project you have to, uh, solve the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and then determine what the best features for a natural language are and then invent one with those features and then get everybody to speak it. And then you have to somehow prevent language change, which will incur inevitable drift back to the sorts of structures which it seems to naturally generate (and which characterize the languages we already have). This is a task which every generation has been trying to do at various levels of effort and coordination since ancient Rome and which nobody has yet managed. The kids always talk different than their parents, and nobody has been able to stop them yet. I think the task of preventing language change is, well, probably just flatly impossible with our current levels of technology.

And then, of course, I'll make my final objection, which is... is living in a multilingual world actually much of a problem? I just am not sure that it is. I know it rubs up against the nerd aesthetic taste for standardization and consistency, but like... aside from discrimination on the basis of language and so on, in terms of the direct social and economic impact of multilingualism, is it significant? I asked this of @deaths-accountant at one point and they said they did not know of any studies on it. We don't have the technology to enforce even a slowing of language change (and even if we did, the policies required would be ghastly authoritarian), and we don't know what an "improved" language would even constitute, and we don't know if one would even be cognitively possible. But we do have the technology for really good, really fast machine translation, that (especially with the rapid growth of LLMs) I would bet will make cheap, accurate, live interpretation accessible to almost anyone within the decade. Surely that's a safer bet than than a new Esparantism!

linguistic diversity is so cool but so inconvenient. everything should be written in some language that's better-designed than English that i already learned from birth and never have to study

[doodlebeeberry]

Can you tell us about the structural quirk? Im interested!

YAY im so glad you asked! i hope your ready for several paragraphs of object show conlang silly stuff annon.

this got pretty long so i put it under a readmore. i also added a couple doodle is there for fun and to hopefully make some of it a little clearer hehe

(btw this ask is in reference to my notes on this abt a quirk with a word i used in the drawing)

So! Something of relevance to keep in mind about Roadspeak, as ive taken to calling it, is its function in the world of fwd: itself. in-universe it is kind of similar to something like Esperanto, both being kinda constructed languages that arent spoken by any one country or group as a main language (nor are they meant to be). The creation process for both, though, was different. While Esperanto was created explicitly for the purpose of being a lingua franca (or universal second language, if you prefer) Roadspeak, despite becoming one, uh, wasn't.

It developed among traders, travelers, merchants and similar groups as a means of bridging gaps in communication between both customers and peers when out on the road. This is where the name Roadspeak comes from--its the speak of the road! it is a very clever name i know.

(in particular, it formed by means of just...smashing languages together and jumbling up their sounds, words, and grammatical rules. into a big melting pot of mess. not going into detail on this for brevity's sake but it makes for some Mess lol)

As such, Roadspeak is considered first and foremost a language of travel and commerce. Though its used for many, many other things now, thats is what its purpose was and is deep deep down at its core, which gets reflected in its vocab and rules. One particular quirk is in the way some verbs are sort-of conjugated.

See, Roadspeak is a gender neutral language (as objects in fwd dont have genders) as well as an object-type neutral one. Rather, verb forms are decided by the position and/or direction of the subject carrying out the verb relative to the direct object, or the tlaow and lors as they call it. usually this is done by using one or two prefixes slapped onto the base/non-finite verb.

the tlaow (position) comes first and is also generally the less important one. you pull from a different prefix set depending on what your direct object is: if its a person/animal/inanimate thing, youd use something more like below, above, left, right, in front, so on. for a place though you use cardinal directions like north/south/east/west while concepts like numbers or thoughts are exempt from tlaow conjugation all together. some dialects of roadspeak kinda just forgo the tlaow entirely sometimes, this one is a liiiitle be optional, but still get used and taught.

the lors (direction) comes second. Unlike tlaow, this only pulls from one set of prefixes regardless of what the object is: forwards, backwards, sideways, around, upwards, and downwards. this is also seen as more of a requirement when conjugating in most applicable circumstances.

Its worth noting that not all verbs get conjugated on the basis of tlaow and lors. Generally this only applies to action verbs, and only ones that are viewed as being more physical, for lack of better term, or as occurring in a direction as a necessity. run, jump, fall, reach, grab, dance, all these kinds of words would be conjugated. think, sing, blink, dream, sell (sometimes), be, words like this dont really need to be conjugated. you still can, but its not ungrammatical or anything.

as an example, look at the sentence "Sweet sits with Mp3."

plopping this into Roadspeak's structure, you'd need to figure out what sweet's position is relative to mp3, and what direction she moved when she sat. if she sat down alongside them, (and also noting that, in roadspeak, the position of the subject and object are flipped in a sentence) then the sentence would literally translate to "Mp3 beside-downwards-sits Sweet". Meanwhile, if she sits up in front of them, it would be "Mp3 front-upwards-sits Sweet". If all you know is that she sat down, though, then youd just say "Mp3 downwards-sits Sweetie".

does that make sense? I hope it does! heres another example, this time using actual Roadspeak:

(yes this is just the daily that spurned this ask lol)

the letters there read "jodit mi pavirrthol me!" with the verb in this case being "pavirrthol," or forward-give. "thol" means give, which is considered an tlaow/lors verb. When you present someone with something, you are giving it to them in a forward-facing, direct sense, so you would use "pavirr-" for the directional/lors. However, while the use of 'you' would imply the use of a tlaow prefix, theres no way for them to actually know what their position is relative to you when speaking here. Are they below you? in front? its impossible for them to know! so instead, the tlaow prefix is skipped entirely due to that lack of info. this leaves us with the word "pavirrthol" !

and thats the long and short of it! tldr: the quirk is that the word "pavirrthol" is conjugated on the basis of direction and position, but doesnt technically follow the formal rules required for doing so.

id rattle off more details, like the rest of the prefix list or contexts in which youd tlaow/lors conjugate non-directional verbs (like think) but i think this post has perhaps gone on long enough hehe.

[pyrriax]

love it when conlanging

[sploon-fic-fan]

wait, better idea: baba is you as a conlang. and no using [ME] or [IT] to cheat the rules, we'll be using names, shortened to fit the game's style if needed.

for example "i love/am inspired by/ect. you" said by someone named LULU to someone named LALA would translate to something like "[LULU] FOLLOW [LALA]"

idea: baba is you poetry

[deadpoet117]

Are there any fairly active and friendly conlanging servers out there? I like the content here on tumblr but I Crave More

[cccc-reference-counter]

is that profile picture lawa pilin kon or am i hallucinating sitelen pona where there is none

nope! that’s exactly what they are <2

[fenmere]

Some grammar details of Inmararräo written in the language itself, with translations:

ket kyorr no paragraphs there

ʔena rregfo bungtueshon wofoyosherr kri to nagnu nebfi and instead of punctuation requires a new line each sentence

wanfäfnäʔe rrobak rräofrra furthermore strict the word order

rarig gomo känäkshawäong koburla ʔabishefo riddled with implied copulas the language

hurefogirr gar ketashete me write like ktletaccete we

ʔii ʔäf ketashete bem ask who the ktletaccete you

me we

ʔii rräofrräorirr me ʔen ask speak we what

inmararräo inmararräo

--- This is officially Ancient Inmararräo. We do intent to refine the language further in the future, shift some vowels and consonants, possibly swap the consonant order in a few places for ease of pronunciation, and maybe even outright replace some words. Also, probably introduce a set of slang words, once we get a grip on the drift of the aesthetics of the language.

[wordwings]

me when I first started writing fantasy: I don’t need to go deep on the worldbuilding, surface level is fine, the magical dimension people speak English because why not

me now: there is no such thing as surface level, everything is connected, how does the magic work, how does that influence science, what are the social structures that make this society what it is, I’m going to need to start conlanging aren’t I

[alsteneldoeight]

Redrawing the very first drawing I had of a particular OC (the old drawing is the third image btw-)

i toasted his fracking hair!!!

[bells-n-wisps]

mau tsiyau noo-ie??

[ausiikiiltur]

"Bii fa tuur dream irma thu gaez innei gholbe" en fa Austro-Amiircan Langiiri. Heap's Inresin!

[deadpoet117]

I’m giving the old elves 34 vowels (a, i, e, é, o, ɔ, and ü, then those nasalized, then those reduplicated, then those nasalized AND reduplicated) and no one can stop me

[nuttysaladtree]

If you have at least one conlang and are age 18 or older, @edsmore is doing a study and would love you to complete a survey! Below is from his pinned post (which you can view for more details and reblog to make this frog happy! 🐸 ):

LINKS TO PARTICIPATE: Part 1, Part 2

DEADLINE: I’ll close submissions in June, but if you want to be considered for an interview, get it done by the end of May!

Obligatory reference to sample size.