#god we love grammatical grammar (<guy who doesn't have a strong enough sense of gender to remember der and die properly) | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

mantisgodsdomain · 11 months ago

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More notes for Roach conlanging. Roach has grammatical gender, in which only Male, Female, and Object are grammatical genders, whereas Worker uses feminine grammar, Queen and King use a slight variant on feminine grammar, and Drone, and Queen-Alate use masculine grammar. This is because King is derived from Queen, due to their similar positions in a colony, and Queen-Alate is derived from Drone, as both are forms of alate.

Queen is an alteration of feminine grammar that functionally just adds a handful of extra syllables to it, and King is an offsprout of Queen that uses the same grammar with different pronouns. Queen-Alate, despite the name, is derived from Drone, as they are both for referring to different types of alate ant.

Most Roach dialects are intelligible to speakers of Snakemouth Den Cordyceps Roach, but Snakemouth Den Cordyceps Roach is not entirely intelligable to speakers of Roach dialects due to a mix of the excessively specialized vocabulary caused by the specific needs of its speakers, the fact that its speakers do not necessarily have Roach mouthparts and thus may not pronounce syllables in a similar way, and due to the fact that Inanimate Object is a full grammatical gender that does not exist in any other dialect of roach and replaces a decent chunk of terminology for things that previously had Other Words For Them.

#we speak #conlang #bug fables #please excuse us if we're mangling the terminology here btw. we cannot for the life of us remember the proper terms for half of this #and every time we try to google things it winds up turning up nothing #probably because we're googling shit like “the term for the thing where self reference is different if youre a guy or a girl”#and like. “part of speech that you use to refer to other people that isnt pronouns or a name that has title associations”#if we reread some textbooks we will probably remember but unfortunately these are not our textbook reference posts #they are our “what if we told you about the cool ways that we did grammar in here” post #god we love grammatical grammar (<guy who doesn't have a strong enough sense of gender to remember der and die properly)#(because we are the specific type of speaker where we're half operating based on what Feels Right with the word and we are)#(so fucking bad at remembering how gendering words is meant to go)#(the secret reason we hate phonetics is because we have to contend with both figuring out how mouthparts would work and like)#(Working Out A Reasonable Collection Of Sounds To Have In Our Language. which means we have to actually like. name things)#(cruel and unusual that we have to make actual words rather than loosely tossing building blocks on the floor. honestly.)#anyways snakemouth den roach is one of those dialects where it's on the verge of becoming a language on its own #where it's very debatable on if it's Actually A New Language or just a very specific dialect of an old one because. well. boxes #picture it as like. trying to speak to someone who you Think is speaking french but they have an extremely thick regional accent #and they keep using like ten-syllable words that you probably don't know but that seem to refer to things that could be referred to #way more concisely?#and also rather than just le and la they have added an entire new lu to the mix and you are unclear if its the accent or a new word entirel #(note: we are not a specialist on french as we primarily know it in the “we've been around it long enough to vaguely know what's being said #way and are not currently caught up enough on whatever they have going on to know about any major grammar stuff going on over there)#(but we are terrible enough with remembering the grammar of the german that we do speak that we do not trust ourself to not be Worse there)

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