Zompist Bboard Again

For constructed languages, I could say that the human imagination knows no bounds. Namely, this is how they can differ from each other. In all the possible ways that man can imagine and create. There are no restrictions here, just free human thinking. This is very good and useful in my collection and research. So I can get information in a lot of ways and always and always learn something new and interesting.

You're right about conlanging in general - but specifically here on the ZBB, there traditionally seems to be a focus on "naturalistic" conlangs, that is, conlangs that might plausibly be spoken by humans from Earth, or a fantasy or science fiction species very similar to humans from Earth. So I'd say there are some more limits here.

The proliferation of "weird" conlangs in the early days of the internet may have been a product of the lack of material on natural languages. It used to be, if you wanted to know how Venda dealt with comparative adjectives, you had to get to a college campus, and not a shitty one. No wonder everyone was making languages with no verbs or languages entirely hummed. You get a lot less of that now that you can teach yourself Navajo in your underwear.

I'm trying to figure out how cat spirits might speak a variation of Middle Chinese. Which has the issue that MC is not so much a reconstruction of previous versions of the Chinese languages as it is a compromise between how various Chinese languages that already existed at the time read various characters. And also that I'm not sure how cat-like I'm making the spirits at this stage so I'm leaning to the side of "basically human speech abilities but different point of view and sound preferences."

But I'm not planning to go very far with that anyway, except to use it as a base for how cat spirits would speak a variant of Old Japanese! Because that's the actual language I want to work on in depth. But I also figure the cat spirits came over from China, likely with their own pronunciations of things. Why not tie that into how they speak Japanese once they get there?

I'm not sure what type of language this would qualify as, but feel free to add it to the pile.

*D > *N and *T/TH to *D/T would probably be in line with a catlike pronounciation of middle chinese possibly with *D (previous T) to *ND upon entering Japan.

rather than a combination of elements found in such knowledge,
as a generative artificial intelligence could do,
personally to build I flee from naturalism and linguistics...

but the truth is, even if you look hard enough,
you find that you always end up back on the path
marked out by natural languages...

the anadew effect is the consequence of our humanity,
which is inscribed in language that links us...

by conlanging while distancing ourselves from our fellow human beings,
we can deepen this link...

it's as paradoxical as it is exhilarating...

linguistcat wrote: ↑Wed Apr 24, 2024 11:20 pm I'm trying to figure out how cat spirits might speak a variation of Middle Chinese.

How could cat-like spirits speak any language but Miao?