Conlang Random Thread

[Kuchigakatai]

As I don't think auxlangs work, I would care more about the biases and goals of the characters who make the auxlang than my own ideas anyway.

I feel similarly. I've sometimes flirted with the idea of making an auxlang, but always as part of a fictional community in the present world, basically a subtype of Sal's suggestion b) (a group of mystics). Although, as a language of mystics, it is admittedly not quite an auxlang in terms of its auxiliary function (how useful it is for international communication), but rather its international lexical morphemes (in as much as it is meant to represent human religious experience in general—any lexical ease of learning is collateral really) and its "simple" grammar (the product of linguistic negotiations in a community that's not really interested in linguistic complexity, especially of the morphological kind).

[mèþru]

mine are all done by political groups in-story; Melik sed is for various radical movements (anarcho-syndicalism, communism and feminist anarcho-individualism) while a zonal language in kårroť is done by essentially an early modern type c.

[Whimemsz]

No, it is definitely in Biblical Hebrew. Or at least in Hebrew by the time niqqud started to appear.

Yeah, the collapse of the stressed diphthongs was a northern Canaanite feature (including possibly northern Ancient Hebrew -- IIRC there are spellings like <bt> instead of <byt> in some northern ostraca or something for "house", but I'm too lazy to look it up right now). That (at least southern) Hebrew retained them is partially suggested by spellings with <y> and <w> before matres lectionis were a thing, while other Canaanite varieties were spelled without them (as in <bt> vs <byt>). Hebrew of course did collapse the *unstressed* diphthongs, so you have báyit "house" < *bayt-, but bêtō "his house" < *baytahū.

[Imralu]

Next question: what about having the same word for "to give birth" and "to be born"? That is, one word for the act of participating in a birth as either the mother or the baby?

birth / give birth / be born

[Raphael]

I guess my question is, what features would you use for an auxlang? The main criteria being, in that setting, that it should be relatively easy to pick and as viable as possible an alternative to English for technical discussion.
Myself, I'd go for isolating grammar, and fairly minimalistic phonology.

I'm not entirely serious about what I'm about to write. That said...

People who think about the topic usually believe that an auxlang should be as easy to learn as possible for as many people as possible in as many different parts of the world as possible. But I suspect that might be an impossible goal - think of how different many of the world's languages are from each other in terms of morphology and syntax. Any language that would be easy to learn for some people would probably automatically be difficult to learn for at least some other people.

So perhaps there could be a completely different approach? What about intentionally designing a language to be equally difficult for everyone to learn? Such a language would, for all its flaws, at least have the advantage of putting potential learners around the world on an equal footing.

[Vilike]

So perhaps there could be a completely different approach? What about intentionally designing a language to be equally difficult for everyone to learn? Such a language would, for all its flaws, at least have the advantage of putting potential learners around the world on an equal footing.

That sounds like a job for Kotava! Not only is the vocabulary totally a priori, the grammar showcases many fine distinctions of mood and aspect that are not always morphologically clear. And don't get me started on the numerous pragmatic particles.
(Full disclosure: I translated the grammar into English back in the day).

[Raholeun]

So perhaps there could be a completely different approach? What about intentionally designing a language to be equally difficult for everyone to learn? Such a language would, for all its flaws, at least have the advantage of putting potential learners around the world on an equal footing.

That assumption breaks at the realization that not all people learn an L2 with ease.

[Raholeun]

Also, all phonetic choices are bound to put speakers of some L1 at a disadvantage. A purely algebraic language would appeal more to universalic principles than a language that is situated in some vocal reality.

[Zaarin]

No, it is definitely in Biblical Hebrew. Or at least in Hebrew by the time niqqud started to appear.

Yeah, the collapse of the stressed diphthongs was a northern Canaanite feature (including possibly northern Ancient Hebrew -- IIRC there are spellings like <bt> instead of <byt> in some northern ostraca or something for "house", but I'm too lazy to look it up right now). That (at least southern) Hebrew retained them is partially suggested by spellings with <y> and <w> before matres lectionis were a thing, while other Canaanite varieties were spelled without them (as in <bt> vs <byt>). Hebrew of course did collapse the *unstressed* diphthongs, so you have báyit "house" < *bayt-, but bêtō "his house" < *baytahū.

That's helpful and explains a lot: working on a Punic-derived conlang, I'm actually more familiar with Phoenician/Punic (hence northern Canaanite) than I am Hebrew.

[Salmoneus]

So perhaps there could be a completely different approach? What about intentionally designing a language to be equally difficult for everyone to learn? Such a language would, for all its flaws, at least have the advantage of putting potential learners around the world on an equal footing.

That sounds like a job for Kotava! Not only is the vocabulary totally a priori, the grammar showcases many fine distinctions of mood and aspect that are not always morphologically clear. And don't get me started on the numerous pragmatic particles.
(Full disclosure: I translated the grammar into English back in the day).

Can't decide whether the awful English of that website discredits the Kotava community (why trust them about languages when they can't understand basic syntactic rules in English?) or proves their point (look, even English is impossible to use! We need an IAL!).

I'm glad to have encountered a real life Kotavian, however, as it's a language I've been curious about ever since hearing about it - it's not something you see mentioned much on the english-speaking internet (although admittedly I don't frequent IAL communities). How successful do you think it is, in terms of number of speakers? And how many of them don't speak French?

---

On the general principle, I'd distinguish two IAL theories. One is that of an IAL that's intentionally difficult - a puzzle, motivating learners precisely because it's a difficult endeavour (look, i'm smart enough to speak Ithkuil!). The other is that of an IAL that is simply willfully difficult, because it doesn't priotise easiness.

I think the former could work surprisingly well - but could never be a 'universal' IAL. The latter approach I think is very valuable indeed. The entire assumption that an auxlang should be as 'easy' as possible seems to me to miss the point. The people who need an 'easy' language are those who are either bad at, or uninterested in, language-learning. A language geared for simplicity is a language that's aiming at that demographic. But the demographic of people who can't or don't want to learn a language has a big inherent problem: that demographic don't generally learn languages. It's a big demograpic, sure, but it's not a demographic who learn languages, let alone become language advocates. Maybe, one day, when learning a particular auxlang is hugely advantageous, greater 'simplicity' can help it be adopted by the last 5%... but how do you get the first 95%? Because languages that are so 'easy' are also boring and uninspiring (unless they're in other ways weird and quirky, like Toki Pona).

An auxlang that aims not at universality but at a substantial international userbase needs to target people who are enthusiastic about language-learning. To do that, it probably has to be linguistically interesting, which probably means not being maximally 'easy'.

[JT the Ninja]

A while back, I found a cache of confonts I made for several ZBB users lo these many years ago...and now I'm wondering how many of those users are still around...

...do these conlangs sound familiar to you? Ajan, Bryatesle, Kîn-Hedenào, moj, Ooqatao keygao, qatama, xadim?

I also did a couple fonts for JarJarBinks, to be used with Finnish...

[Salmoneus]

Bryatesle is miekko's. qatama... is that masako's?

[Raphael]

Would it be plausible to have a language that has some kind of affixes marking gender and number, but aside from that, is mostly isolating?

[mèþru]

Yes, but it would be pretty unlikely

[akam chinjir]

You can mark number using a separate word, fwiw.

It's also not hard to imagine noun classifiers of the sort you get in Chinese evolving into a gender system. Again, it wouldn't be necessary to have them turn into affixes.

[Raphael]

Thank you!

[linguistcat]

Dunno if this would go better in linguistics since it deals with realism based on natlangs, but it is for a conlang so:

How realistic would it be for a language to go from SOV to VSO, possibly by fronting the verb for some kind of emphasis? What other parts of grammar would be likely to change early on?

[JT the Ninja]

Bryatesle is miekko's. qatama... is that masako's?

It's been so long I don't even know if most of the people are still here... but I do remember the name miekko. []

[Salmoneus]

Dunno if this would go better in linguistics since it deals with realism based on natlangs, but it is for a conlang so:

How realistic would it be for a language to go from SOV to VSO, possibly by fronting the verb for some kind of emphasis?

PIE is generally thought to at least have been generally SOV, whereas the Celtic languages are VSO.

[Xwtek]

As inverse of Linguistcat, how does a language switch from VSO to a SOV word order. Probably it starts from VSO to SVO first (topicalization by fronting it before verb is common). But then how a language switch from NOUN-ADJ to ADJ-NOUN?