I know there are a few other dopers who make their own languages. Come say hi.
I was working a language to be as background flavor when I decided I should catalog all the various conlangs I’ve done so I could see them all. Then I got distracted remaking one (it’s changed from isolating to polysynthetic to I’m not really sure, and I redid the phonology - oh English vowels, how you deceived me for too long).
Anyway, tell me about your conlangs. Did you make them to use in something or just for fun? Are they inspired by anything? Are you an actual linguist who would laugh derisively at how English-inspired mine are? (I wouldn’t blame you.) Do you have a dozen started or just one that you’ve worked on for years and years?
I have a sort of nebulous beginning of a conlang–I’ve made up almost no vocabulary, but I’ve established some elements of its structure and usage. It’s the language of a species of highly intelligent feline pack hunters, and it’s sort of a thought experiment in how the language of a race like that would evolve. Spoken vocabulary isn’t really that important, since it would be unpronounceable; the few words I’ve concocted are just so that I’ll have a reference point for inscriptions. (Which are written vertically, generally left to right, in very angular phonetic symbols.)
It’s a very streamlined language, originally derived from hunting signals. The sequence is consistently VOS, but nearly any part of a sentence can be implicit. The object is often implicitly a word that translates roughly as “prey”, but has the broader meaning of “current objective”; it’s a pronoun-like element that is generally declared as a preface. The subject can be implicit, if it’s the general “you”, “we”, or “everybody”. Even the verb can be implicit, if the sentence is simple information about an objective, like direction, location, or identifying features.
Oddly enough, given that it’s not language well-suited to poetry, the longest thing I’ve written in it is a poem of sorts that some of my players found. Here’s a word-for-word translation, followed by what a native reader would get from it.
Prey:
Across river.
Built bridge.
Across sea.
Built ship.
Across Void.
Built Gate.
Built Gates.
Became.
When the prey was across the river, we built a bridge.
When the prey was across the sea, we built a ship.
When the prey was across the Void, we built a Gate.
When we built the Gates, we became the prey.
The one I’m working on right now is being interesting. I decided there were two groups, with very different lifestyles. They’ve been separated long enough that they have slightly different phonology inventories. And then I realized the name of one of them used a phoneme they didn’t have. There are ways around it, but I decided for simplicity’s sake I’m dealing with the spoken language and not the written one, so I just changed the name.
The main problem I’m dealing with is that I’d like the language to be polysynthetic - which means every word is made up of every word - which gets into a chicken and the egg problem. There’s got to be some starting words and I have no idea what they would be. But I’m not very far into it so I’m sure it’ll come together at some point.
How do you infer “became prey” from “became”? Seems like the syntax of all the other phrases would imply “became prey” was the proper final phrase. Why not “became rich” or “became gods”? I guess you could claim it was an idiom and all “native speakers” would understand it…
Using my bump. Any other conlanging dopers want to jump in?
I’ve got some verbs now. And some etymology of verbs to build from other bits. And numbers up to seven and few after that. Because I can’t make things easy on myself, they use base-18 (they’re cat people, and cats only have four toes on their hind feet…). Five is basically hand, 10 is two hands, 11 is 10+1, 18 is complete. I’m not sure how I’m doing the 10+ part yet so that it doesn’t confuse with ones that are multiples. Stick an ‘and’ in there I suppose.
“Prey:” is the construction that identifies the default object of the passage. If no other object is specified for a phrase or modifier, it’s that object. If it had begun with “Gods:”, then the last line would have had the meaning “We became gods.” You might think of it as a silent pronoun.
The general idea behind this is a sequence of signals in a hunting party. A scout locates a target–say a gnu, for instance–and alerts the rest of the party with that single word. The rest of the signals revolve around the gnu: where it is, which way to go to flank it in, who is chasing it.