current consonant inventory June 21, 2012

(Consonants circled in pink are part of my lang’s phoneme inventory)

Despite phonetics and phonology being my favoured subjects in linguistics, I don’t really enjoy making fancy phoneme inventories and phonotactic constraints in conlanging when it’s just meant to be pretty rather than unique. There’s nothing too interesting about my inventory, a couple phonemes not in English, and a few big ones that are missing (p, b, g). In addition to those above I have unvoiced affricates at the dental, post-alveolar, and velar positions (‘ts’ , ‘ch’ , and ‘ks’/’x’ for the uninitiated). I’m planning on a palatalized and labialized  consonant series as well, but one might just be an allophonic variation. Haven’t decided yet.

basics of sentence structure June 19, 2012

Unmarked word order is (essentially) VSO (verb-subject-object)–so a sentence like “the girl kissed the frog” is “kissed (verb) the girl (subject) the frog (object)”.

Sentences are coordinated rather than subordinated–so that “I saw her kiss the frog” is rendered somewhat like “I saw her and she kissed the frog” (or with VSO order: Saw I her and kissed she the frog).

While I say VSO, I don’t actually have a case system in my conlang that declines nouns as subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, etc. Given my strong belief that language is about expressing the relations between entities (see, just a pinch of philosophy. It might be an engelang in some ways, but I view languages as organisms not computers), I prefer to use semantic rather than syntactic roles to organize my sentences. So rather than having a subject and object marked in “She kissed the frog”, they are actually marked as agent “she” and recipient “the frog” for their respective roles in the kissing. Depending on the verb, nouns will be marked differently according to what they are doing/receiving/experiencing/undergoing/etc. In a sentence like “Eleanor loves tea” Eleanor is still the subject syntactically, but is an  experiencer rather than agent; tea is usually classified as a  theme in this case.

Language “essence” March 16, 2012

It is an artlang first and foremost, but it’s also an experimental language where I can play with concepts I’m interested in, and possibly a bit of a philosophical lang too. It’s not intended to be in the least bit naturalistic, and I feel free to flout whatever rules natlangs are bound to that I don’t like. I like things that are straight-forward and simple, so introducing irregularities and the like just to make it seem “natural” will probably not happen . . . unless I feel like the phonoaesthetics are off due to excessive repetition. I also dislike conlangs that are over-complicated for the purpose of being over-complicated. It won’t be Toki Pona, but I don’t make split-ergative languages with 111 phonemes, 20 noun classes, 10 verb tenses,  18 levels of evidentiality, etc. etc. all of which are different depending on where you are, who you are talking to, and what colour of hat you and they are wearing . . . just cause you can.  I love pretty things, so yes my language *is* meant to be pretty–but I hope that my tastes are such that I am not creating yet another Quenya clone. This is (currently at least) my light, sunshine and rainbows language–lacking for example the “heavy” sounds like [b], [g], the “juh” sound [dʒ], “zh” sound [ʒ] etc. I love weighty languages like Russian, but that’s not the soundscape this lang is meant to create.

*First note on linguistic conventions used here, stuff between square brackets [ ] or between slashes (e.g. /b/) is written in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) which is used to represent all possible speech sounds. [r] is technically the “rolled r” of Russian or Spanish, but North American linguists will often use it for the unrolled r when transcribing NA English dialects because it’s easier to type and everyone knows what you mean–in class I usually use the official symbol cause I can write it just as easily, but here I’ll go with NA convention cause it’s easier to type.

For more info: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ipa.htm
(^ Omniglot is the best, you should check it out anyways! It was one of the sites that got me interested in linguistics, and I’m even mentioned on a page! 😀 )
To hear each symbol spoken: http://www.yorku.ca/earmstro/ipa/