#conlangs

[max1461]

Holy shit. Gemini Pro 2.5 can, on the basis of a (very incomplete) grammatical description + dictionary of one of my conlangs:

compose novel, grammatically correct sentences in this conlang

understand sentences I have written in the conlang (even when I make grammatical errors myself!) and reply with its own novel, grammatically correct, and contextually appropriate sentences

write a (mostly) grammatically correct short story in this conlang

This is from a written description of the grammar, together with a dictionary. This conlang is nowhere online, so it's not in the training data. The grammar description itself has relatively few example sentences, it's mostly morphological tables and written descriptions of grammatical features.

Wow! That's really something to me, above and beyond what I already knew LLMs could do.

The language has some quite subtle features involving things like animacy hierarchy based morphosyntactic shifts that involve thinking about the semantics + pragmatic relationships between certain words (in a conlang! not words the Gemini base model already knows!) and selecting different constructions appropriately. I guess that's what all of grammar is, but the animacy hierarchy stuff impressed me especially.

The biggest errors the model made were due to weird text encoding issues in the grammar PDF that confused it, but it usually managed to figure out how to make a correct sentence in the end.

This is pretty impressive to me.

[dandelionjack]

circular gallifreyan is circular because doctor who is a circular narrative 🌀 when you are a time-sensitive like them you conceptualise everything as a cycle with no beginning or end. including language. which is also music. yay

[moist-duckling]

ngl, schwa is actually kinda mid.

[intuitive-revelations]

Headcanon: one of the reasons why Gallifreyan is a) so complex, and b) so inconsistent, is because it's less one language and more a complex mishmash of thousands of languages and dialects.

Think about how one of the reasons English can be complex to learn is because of the mix of Germanic and romance language roots, and now take it up to 11.

While one might expect Gallifrey to be monolingual, given its age and class structure, this probably isn't technically the case. After all, why limit your culture to one language when the average citizen is effectively panlingual (to the point that TARDIS translation circuits are actually dependent on their pilots' knowledge, rather than the other way round)?

Thus, if there once were distinct languages on Gallifrey, they probably have all been merged at this point into modern Gallifrey's super-Esperanto. Add in loan words from notable civilisations across all of spacetime (but likely primarily from Gallifreyan colonies and allies like Dronid, Minyos, Cartego etc.), and it quickly becomes quite unwieldy.

It's also likely that there's a lot of overlap between these sub-languages, which can make distinguishing meaning hard to an outsider. Gallifreyans likely get around this courtesy of their telepathic connections.

TBH, given Time Lord sensibilities, it's likely that every single word variation has its own delicate meanings, derived not just from their societal uses but also from the etymology and history of each one. Canonically (though I don't have a source) we know that there are 30 different words meaning "culture shock", for example, which likely have very minor distinctions in meaning. We also know, unsurprisingly, that there's at least 208 tenses to help in describing time travel.

As an example - imagine being a Sunari ambassador at an embassy gathering and accidentally offending every Time Lord in the room because you accidentally used a definite article derived from the memeovored Old High Tersuran colony dialect, now considered low-brow by association with modern Tersuran, when you intended to use a nearly identical form of the word originating from the Founding Conflict, a triumphant post-Rassilonian intervention, distinguished by a near-imperceptible glottal stop.

It's likely that some of these Gallifreyan sub-languages/dialects may still be spoken with increased frequency under certain conditions, such as in one's own House or when visiting other city complexes. We know, for example, that Arcadia seems to be associated with a "Northern English" accent (which Nine picked up subconsciously post-regeneration, with the Fall of Arcadia being one of the last things the War Doctor remembered before DOTD's multi-Doctor event - hence "lots of planets have a north") when translated, which may indicate some dialect differences in the original language. I suspect there is a societal expectation for Gallifreyans to code-switch depending on the situation, with Citadel business generally expecting the Gallifreyan equivalent of RP, though it's relatively common for Time Lords less concerned with respectability and politicking to not comply.

One nice benefit of all this complexity, and the reason I made this post, is that there's a good argument to be made that every fan attempt to construct a Gallifreyan language can be 'canon', contradictions and all.

Greencook Gallifreyan? A formal evolution of Pythian prophecy scripture into the post-Intuitive Revelation era (based on its similarities with the Visionary's scrawling in The End of Time).

Sherman Gallifreyan? A modern katakana-like phonetic alphabet for the rapid-onslaught of new loan words following President Romana's open academy policies. Recently adopted by the Fifteenth Doctor for writing human proverbs.

Teegarden Gallifreyan? An archaic but recognisable near-Capitolian dialect from the Prydonian mountains, once spoken by Oldblood houses like Lungbarrow and Blyledge.

Or, in a nutshell, the state of Gallifreyan conlangs (and maybe in-universe Gallifreyan dialects):

I guess the dream project would be to accept the complexity and create some sort of grand modular "meta-Gallifreyan" conlang, merging as many fan interpretations as possible with their own distinctions and overlaps, that can continue to be updated as new ideas come up and new stories are released...

[incognitopolls]

We ask your questions anonymously so you don’t have to! Submissions are open on the 1st and 15th of the month.

[paizau]

inside me there are two wolves. one wants to create the most elaborate and overcrowded vowel system you've ever seen. the other thinks it's time to give a more conventional system a try.

[o-craven-canto]

U is a Zen constructed language (conlang) created by the conlanger arseniiv in 2013. The phonemic inventory of U consists solely of the phoneme /u/, which encompasses all possible realizations due to the absence of minimal pairs. The lexicon of U comprises a single word u /u/, signifying various meanings such as it's pointless, it's nonsense, it's not necessary, it does not exist, or symbolically represented by ⊥. The repetition or absence of the word does not alter its meaning. U utilizes phonetic writing, where any text can be interpreted as representing the phoneme /u/. Distinguishing whether a text is written in U or not, or discerning if a spoken utterance is in U or not, is not feasible, hence prompting the rhetorical question: "Is it u, and is it not u?" Anyway, u.

[tower-of-hana]

All gender is made up but my gender is more made up than yours because I am a conlanger.

[evegwood]

The Language of the Lords reflects everything the ruling class holds dear: triumph, treasure, and the elite status of the demonic race. Poems and stories are shared through the oral tradition of performance and writing is usually reserved for "historical" documents, grandiose retellings of events that may or may not have gone down quite as recorded. For this reason, the demonic writing style does not lend itself well to quick note-taking or casual texts.

The demonic script is made up of glyphs featuring imagery important to demons; angel imagery is usually reserved for phonetic symbols or less important elements. The script contains several different types of glyphs: heads, slabs, flags, pillars, and banners. Each serves a different phonetic and grammatical purpose.

Heads are used to indicate important words like nouns and verb roots. A single head represents one syllable; words comprised of more than one syllable are made up of multiple heads in a row biting each other. The head is made up of four parts: the eye (initial consonant), nose (vowel), mouth (final consonant), and the ornamentation.

The Language of the Lords has a limited number of syllables and features many homonyms. To avoid confusion, context is given through a head's ornamentation, indicating to the reader which category that word belongs to. For example, fa could mean "rib", "spruce", or "nail"; by using the body, plant or tool ornamentation respectively, the intended meaning is clear. While the category of word is often omitted in spoken conversation, it is always included in writing. If a word is made up of multiple heads, the ornamentation is placed on the final head.

Left: madlas(shi), "snow Right: hebdod(be), "oil substance"

You can read more about the Language of the Lords here!

[badconlangingideas]

#542

A triconsonantal root language where for a given root R, the pattern "aCoCaC" means "a mid romantasy about R".

[prokopetz]

do you have any opinions of conlangs like at all

I think studying conlangs has been edifying because it's helped to put into perspective that a lot of the things that annoy me about the English language are probably just inherent features of the act of communication. It's one thing to be told in academic terms that all communicative acts will necessarily express certain shortcomings, and quite another to see it illustrated via demonstration that, oh, a lot of people who are way more autistic than I am have been trying for hundreds of years to invent a language that doesn't have these problems and met with comprehensive failure!

[kelasian]

get ready for stupid shitposting in conlangs

[jorisjurgen]

[roundearthsociety]

[sonoftenezi]

Djeshānwo Djamilo "JJ" Mbande

Age: 20

Pronouns: He/They

College Major: Religion and Chukwezi Studies

Romantic Partner: Nzambo Djayēmi Mbobo

-Deeply Spiritual

-Socialist

-Autistic

-Can Speak Chukwezi and Þeodisć, can understand Fōfi