Toki pona - the language of good

Toki ike - the language of bad?

Is there a language which has some relations to toki pona, but it takes years to learn and after all of those years you wouldn't even be able to properly talk or write on this language cause it's grammar is confusing and lexicon is a total mess?

Is there even type of conlanging that creates opposites of languages?

u/king_slug3 made https://groverburger.github.io/sapling/ which is extremely useful for making conlang family trees, and syntax trees. Thought I might bring it to light for anyone who doesn't know about it.

I have a feature in my conlang that's been there since the very beginning and I don't know what to call it.

In Eraklish, nearly all adjectives end with ' (schwa sound) and are bound to the copulas when predicating or modifying nouns: Ver' - good Ver'dm - Is good 👍 Ver'jm - Isn't good 👎 Ver'da ke - A good event / case 👍

In writing, the Eraklish analyze this form with two syllables and use two separate symbols, even though the schwa usually gets lost in conversation: Ve - R'

However, when the adjective derives nouns or adverbs, it is analyzed as one syllable where the R' becomes a coda -r: Ver

To derive nouns and adverbs, you suffix another syllable which uses the same onset consonant as the coda: Verra - good, goodness Verre - good, well Sessa - badness Sesse - badly Etc.

This is to mark, especially in old Eraklish, gemination using what I've been calling everything from syllable reduction + consonant reduplication to schwa loss repeat syllable grafting (wtf). I still have no idea what to call this 4 years into this conlang lol.

(also, in modern erkl it mostly results in palatalization)

If any are used at all, what do the diacritics in your conlang indicate of a letter? Tone? Stress? Silence? Something else? Also, are accented letter considered separate letters of the alphabet or just a variant of another letter and not separate?

For example, my conlang Hyaneian uses the acute accent for tone on vowels (á é í ó ú) indicate a high-flat tone on vowels, the tilde is used on the N (ñ) for the /ɲ/ sound, Ç is used for the same sound it represents in the IPA (voiceless palatal fricative), and the breve is used on G (ğ) to represent a "soft" G sound, the sound /dʒ/. All are considered their own letters.

I'm curious on how everyone else uses diacritics in their langs!

As the title says, I'm wondering if it's okay to use word generators to further develop a conlang? I'm relatively new to conlanging as I haven't ever made a completed one and I'm curious to know how you guys feel about this and if you'd be able to give me some insight on the use of generators. One of my biggest struggles in conlanging is that I get strung up on how I want the words to sound and look, so I just give up and move on. However, I'm really trying to make an actual language this time around, but I don't want to get caught on the words again, what do you recommend?

And of course I will make the grammar, syllable structure, phonetics, and etcetera prior, but I will probably also end up making changes to the generated words so it can better fit my desired theme and sound.

P.s. this is my first reddit post, and it's kind of a question/discussion so please let me know if I need to fix anything. Thank you.

I’ve started studying conlang creation very recently and run into a very early road block. Without giving a whole lore dump, my language is used by a species with inhuman biology and telepathy. Because of this, the language itself is entirely ideographic (based heavily on UNLWS). These circumstances have lead to an exclusively written language with no phonetics whatsoever.

Since this is the case, do I skip over phonology, or should I still do it order to create consistency? And if I do decide to make the language in anyway phonetic, how to I describe sounds that can’t be made by the human vocal system?

P.S. I prefer to describe this as a language rather than a Writing System, because it also includes sounds and ideas that can’t be translated in any direct way to English (or any language for that matter)

I've built a very simple web app that allows you to explore and refine the grammar of your language. You can interact with it here: https://readingglosses.pythonanywhere.com/

Write a few rules, paste them in, and there are two functions available:

1. Parsing. You can enter a sentence in your language, and Grambidextrous will tell you if it's grammatical and, if it is, also provide a parse. You can use this as a kind of 'grammar consistency checker'. Enter a sentence you think should be grammatical, and if there's no parse, you may need to tweak your rules.
2. Generating. Enter a number N, and Grambidextrous will use the grammar to randomly generate N sentences in your language. You can use this to test your grammar out, as well as creating new material for yourself, e.g. generate 10 sentences and see if you can gloss and translate them.

Your grammar rules must follow a particular format (technically it's a CFG) and this is explained in the interface. The format is not hard to learn, and will likely be familiar to anyone with even casual exposure to linguistics. There's also a sample grammar to get you started. You'll have to scroll down a bit to see all this information; the interface ain't pretty but I'm a linguist not a graphic designer.

Happy to hear any questions, feedback, suggestions, bug reports etc.

FAQ

I used the sample grammar, and it outputs nonsense like this "my elephant in I shot an elephant". Why?

Grambidextrous is strictly a syntax parser. It has no sense of semantics at all, it only knows which word categories can follow which other word categories. This can lead to output which is grammatical but nonsensical.

Do I have to use any special linguistic symbols in my grammar? I kinda slept through all my syntax lectures.

Every grammar needs to have a 'starting rule' that begin with S -> but otherwise you can make up any categories and labels that you want. You don't have to follow any conventions from linguistics or know anything about theoretical syntax to use this tool (but it might help in general to know about those things).

I asked it for 1000 sentences but I only see like 37. How come?

This means your grammar can only generate 37 sentences. This is an exhaustive search of all possible trees. It indicates a lack of recursion in the grammar (or you have a Piraha-inspired conlang). If you want to get a large number of sentences, make sure you have recursion, meaning that there's a symbol which appears on both the left and right hand side of a rule, allowing them to go in a 'loop'. Like this mini-grammar from u/trampolinebears

S -> NP
NP -> Adj NP | N
Adj -> 'tall' | 'green'
N -> 'tree'

When the grammar gets to a noun phrase (NP), it can expand into a noun and then stop, or it can expand into an adjective and another noun phrase, putting it right back where it started. That's the recursive step. This comes with the danger of infinitely looping, so in the Grambidextrous interface, there's an option for 'max tree depth'. This determines how far down the tree it will go before it decides to stop looping.

How do I make something optional in the grammar?

If you want to make a rule like "nouns optionally have a determiner" you simply list out both options, like this:

NP -> Det N | N
Det -> 'a' | 'the'
N -> 'cat' | 'dog' | 'owlbear'

How do I implement case? The sample grammar outputs sentences like "my elephant shot I" instead of "my elephant shot me".

You'll need to create a category (a "non-terminal") for each of the grammatical cases, something like this:

S -> NP VP
VP -> V AccusativePhrase
NP -> Det NominativePhrase
AccusativePhrase -> #list out your accusative nouns here
NominativePhrase -> #list out your nominative nouns here

The sentence parses are hard to read with all the brackets. Can you draw a tree instead?

I'm experiencing technical difficulties and I can't get that to work right now. It also turns out the drawing a nice tree is an extremely complicated problem update: There is now a link to another online tool that draws trees, and clicking the link submits your parse to their tool, and opens it in a new tab.

I have a rigidly isolating language because affixation was banned in my conworld after the Morpheme Wars of '86. Can I still use this tool?

Yes, isolating languages are extremely easy to model as context-free grammars so Grambidextrous is perfect.

I have a hyperoligosynthetic language that requires a minimum of 12 affixes on every verb for categories like number, tense, body odour and political affiliation. Can I still use this tool?

Yes, just treat each part of your verb template as a syntactic category. Something like this:

S -> VP
VP -> TensePrefix NumberPrefix V SmellSuffix
TensePrefix -> #list of prefixes
NumberPrefix -> #list of prefixes
V -> #list of verb roots
SmellSuffix -> #list of suffixes

My conlang evolved morphphonemic alternations where the last consonant of non-finite irrealis verbs shifts its place of articulation depending on the height of the next vowel unless there is a glide in between then nothing happens. How can I add that rule?

Unfortunately, you can't. Grambidextrous does not support phonological or morphological changes.

Introduction

Hi y'all,
Recently I've rediscovered the oldest conlang I made for which I still have documentation (Proto-Nasiwa). But as all first clong, it kinda sucks. So a revision is in need as I don't want to give up on it.

However, I don't really know what to do with it. It's boring and heavily inspired by the Examplish language from Biblaridion's tutorial series.

So I want your input! I will try my best to implement all ideas but there are a few things I want to keep which I will add after the summary of Proto-Nasiwa.

(Nearly 1-1 copy from the original sheet)

Phonology

* I'm pretty sure, that /dʲ/ was supposed to be there due to some vocabulary but it just isn't in the chart, so idk

Phonotactics

Syllable structure

(C)(C)V(D)

Stress
Mora-based. Coda = +1 Mora, Diphthong = +1 Mora

Stress falls on the syllable with the most morae from the left of the word

Syntax

VSO

Nom-Adj

Possessee-Possessor

Verbs

Valency-Verb-Tense

|| || |Valency|Active|Passive|Causative| ||/|hami+Verb|jenmi+Verb| |Tense|Present|Past|Futur| ||/|Verb+elai|Verb+njita|

Nouns

Case-Noun-Number

Plurality is marked by reduplicating the last syllable: (fai) isaha - fish , (fai) isahaha - fishes

Why are the "cases" in brackets? Absolutely no clue. What even are this "case markers"? I don't know. In the dictionary the seem to be "prepostions" but fai is called "the", only God knows why

Attempted short text

I tried to translate a short text after the fact and it was a mess because I don't know how any of this is supposed to work but I tried. Words or constructions that didn't exist in the original corpus but where I could kinda derive are marked with * and words I where I couldn't are just ???.

Enojani elai fai-???, hes ka hami elai (fai-)??? (fai-)???~?.

see past nom-sheep <which not have past (art-?)wool> (art-?)horse~redup.

A sheep, which didn't have wool, saw horses.

Gjegi elai sawu ana-saisai *hji-kokwa, hes gjegi, ???.

go past one gen-this~redup. *instr-tree <which go> heavy

One of them dragged a heavy wagon.

Gjegi elai sawu ana-saisai *hji-??? hes-wanni.

go past one gen-this~redup. *instr-load big

One of them carried a big load.

Gjegi elai sawu ana-saisai *hji-henwa.

go past one gen-this~redup. *instr-person

One of them carried a person.

Addendum

So that's it, Proto-Nasiwa. Some things a kinda wanna keep is this "case-system" as it is quite destinctive but it would need some revamping. Maybe as Japanese-like case particles but as prepositions. And I maybe want to change the head directionality since this is pretty head-initial but I just did one of those.
But like I said, I want your ideas to bring this thing back to life

Thanks for your time.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kpbZ-uJKvtnIz1Ia8kq4bbZ3P8qBwPg-RykFB7MMTA0/edit#gid=0

Here's the link to the document, but be warned. It's in German

Hello! like said in the Title, does your Clong have related Languages? Like Lithuanian has Latvian or is it isolated like Basque (sad basque Sounds)?

I'll begin:

Vokhetian has 2 closely related Langs, Bielaprusian & Vilamovan, tho they're both even more related to eachother. the 3 Langs belong to the East-Niemanic Languages.

There also the West- & South-Niemanic Languages, which are also closely related to Vokhetian, but obviously not as much as Bielaprusian & Vilamovan.

Now is your turn and i'm looking forward to your comments!

View Poll

Will you look up at the stars some nights and think of me?

—Josh/Ayreth in Dragons Dreams by C.B. Morgan

Notes:

1. The significance of looking up at the stars is described earlier in the book. The idea is that people who are separated can still see some of the same stars; a character describes it as a gift people can share even when apart.
2. The ‘you’ is singular.

Sorry I didn't post one Thursday, I had no time.

You've all heard of Cards Against Humanity, but if you haven't, it's a game where somebody reads a card, and you have to fill in the blank or answer the question with one of the cards in your deck.

If it works in English, why can't it work in conlangs?

I will read a real card from Cards Against Humanity (Family Edition to keep it safe) and you will fill in the blank with a word or short sentence of your choice in your conlang. (Your answer does not have to be a Cards Against Humanity card)

The winner last time was u/very-original-user with their response of:

"«Ѣк лєзем мѣм ьıзкут лоувилир-пѣлзѣр вицилıъ»

«Äk ljezem mäm yzkut louvilir-pälzär viciljü»

/æk ˈʎeɕem mæm ˈɨɕkɯt ˈluvilir ˈpæʎɕær ˈvitsiʎy/

[ˈʔæk ˈʎe̞ˑɕɛm‿mæˈm‿ɨˑɕcωt̪ ˈɫ̪uˑʋɪˌl̪ɪɾ̥ ˈpæˑʎˌɕɛɾ̥ ˈʋiˑs̪ɪˌʎʏ]

Äk       ljez - em          mäm      yzku - t     louvil - ir    pälzä - r     viciľ    - ü
1.ꜱɢ.ɴᴏᴍ lose - 1.ꜱɢ.ᴘꜱᴛ.ɪɴᴅ 1.ꜱɢ.ɢᴇɴ arm  - ꜱɢ.ꜱᴇᴘ child  - ꜱɢ.ɢᴇɴ care - ꜱɢ.ɢᴇɴ accident - ꜱɢ.ʟᴏᴄ

"I lost my arm in a babysitting accident""

Please provide a translation and IPA transcription.

The card is:

What's pretty much the stupidest thing in the world?

Good luck, and have fun!

Why do some conlangs die at the point of birth whilst others live for over 100 years? My view is that the conlangs which have made a historical impact will continue, even if they are only left with a few dozen speakers. These languages will never be erased from history. Here’s my list of 10 Conlangs which are here to stay. Do you agree? Are there any I have missed?

* Blissymbols

* Esperanto

* High Valyrian

* Ithkuil

* Klingon

* Laadan

* Lojban

* Solresol

* Toki Pona

* Volapuk

"No. I am your father."

• Darth Vader, Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

Xobax /ʃəˈbɑʃ/

Dek. Ko boq vuvo.
/dɛk kə bəʒ ˈvuvə/
No. I your dad.

How do you say this in your conlangs?

Link to the language grammar reference and dictionary: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18swEmu6XRWpvJMZDNJAxbUXxfCuNAVEF/view?usp=drivesdk

Link to the Ana Toki discord server https://discord.com/invite/w8T8CCUP

(I'm sorry for mistakes, English is not my first language, I might make a few errors)

There is an explanation for such a decision and it does not come out of the blue. Its being created for imahined species of mine who are quite based off of birds and evolved in a place where they had to mimic souns all around them to survive. Over time clicks almost died out in the language, but only three stayed as a throwback to the past and culture they have. But while watching various of videos about clicks and, for example, Xhosa and Zulu languages lessons on YouTube I saw comments like 'it's disrespectful towards the African countries that use these' under one person's comment about using these clicks in their conlang.

I find clicks beautiful and interesting, the sound of languages that have these are like songs. And as far as i know there's no problem in using these unless you make fun of it somehow. Clicks make SO MUCH sense in the conlang I am creating even if it's rather not as good as it can be, but im trying to improve it as much as possible and learn the way clicks are used in a spoken language.

Anyway, thank you for your input if you reply!

Phonology: https://gleb.000024.org/?r=4096951909

The goal this time is to romanize it such that an English speaker will pronounce 90% of the words 90% correctly. Forget the internal view of the language, forget making words transparent as to their morphemes; the goal is to have them pronounced correctly by an untrained English-native person (from a region of your choice).

Rules:

• Must use these and only these phonemes.
• Allophony is forbidden - only these sounds occur. That makes it easier to compare solutions to the given task.
• The syllable structure given is required.
• Post a sentence in your romanization as part of your response.

Consider that while <e> reads as /ɛ/ in <bet>, it would read as /i:/ in the beginning of <bete>, and /bɛtɛ/ might have to be spelt <behteh> or <betteh> or <bettay>. Or you could rely on the audience using their 'foreign pronunciation system' - but are there clues that this is a foreign word?

My favourite so far from the last time, besides my own (which looks good on Desktop but not on mobile) was: https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1c11y9h/comment/kz59wzn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button, but https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1c11y9h/comment/kz1l3e6/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button also had a lot of effort (w/ the tones especially).

Hey y'all! To preface, I'm not talking about words lacking vowels in their orthography (ie: rhythm). I'm interested in words lacking vowels on the phonological level. And yes, I'm already familiar with the popular Czech/Slovak tongue twister.

For context, I'm collecting inspiration for making a conlang without any vowel sounds. So far, I've built its lexicon from 3 sources.

1. Loanwords from Czech/Slovak, Minnan, Nuxalk, Miyako/Irabu, Tashlhiyt/Kabyle, & Russian.
2. Onomatopoeia (ex: Sh - /ʃ/ = quiet/silence, Pst - /pst/ = hello)
3. Abbreviations/acronyms (ex: Nft - /nft/ = money, Ffs - /f:s/ = goddammit, Blvd - /blvd/ = road).

What words do you know of which don't feature any vowel sound, & what language does it originate from? I'm happy to hear any example you bring up, but let me briefly go over what sounds my conlang is working with to help narrow the field.

Phonology

• Plosives (/p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, /g/)
• Fricatives (/f/, /v/, /s/, /z/, /ʃ/, /ʒ/)
• Nasals (/m/, /n/, /ŋ/) & Liquid /l/

Phonotactics

• Only fricatives, nasals, & liquids can serve as syllable nuclei

• No consecutive plosives

• No consecutive nasals

• Plosive onset & coda must match voicing of fricative nucleus

  • Forbidden: (/bsg/, /tʒ/, /vk/)

Again, I'd really love to find some new loanwords to incorporate into its lexicon, but I'm open to whatever onomatopoeia, abbreviation/acronym, or any cool word you may know of. Thank you!

#"It is not the case that when s/he is doing something, s/he is able to multi-task."

—Postverbal gwai in Cantonese: A syntactic approach to rhetorical questions (pg. 15; submitted by miacomet)

Please provide at minimum a gloss of your sentence.

Sentence submission form!

Feel free to comment on other people's langs!

I have posted about Kno through the comments, but I wanted to show its current state! And to show off my new conlang project.

Kno is a fictional language that I created for the Knower people. They live in the Caucasus mountains along side the Angposh people, their languages are unrelated, however, because of close contact, the Knowers and the Angposh make a Sprachbund. And, Kno is heavily inspired by Kurdish and its people.

As for Angposh, it’s a more recent conlang and heavily inspired by the Roma people and Polish/Czech

Kno

Here’s a simple sentence in Kno:

ستمنا سگەران لەسەیام حاغیش

/ˈstɪm.na sɨ.ˈɡɛ.ɾan lɛ.ˈsɛ.jam ˈħaː.ʁiːʃ/

Gloss: PL-Owl-F PL-mouse-ACC.M like-3P.PL.PRS eat-INF

Translation: “Owls like to eat mice”

As you can tell somewhat, Kno has SOV order. Unlike Arabic but similarly to Kurdish, Kno has an alphabet rather than an abjad. It also has grammatical gender: masculine and feminine

Owl - feminine

Mouse - masculine

Angposh

Here’s the same sentence in Angposh:

Křogum tuga čha jęgerd aval

/'kɽo.χum tu.’χa ʈ͡ʂʰa jẽ.ˌχeː.ɖː‿a.ˈʋaːɭ/

Gloss: like-3P.PL.PRS *owls ACC *mice eat-INF

Angposh has a VSOV2 order, indicates their grammatical cases through pre-particles, and have plural infixes.

Let me elaborate on the particles:

«čha jęgerd», čha is indicating that jęgerd is accusative rather than indicating that tuga is accusative. I know Persian puts their particles after the noun, so I wanted to clarify.

As for the plural infixes, this sentence isn’t the best to reveal it because those words specifically are irregular

Tumme /'tum.mə/ - owl (singular)

Jęrd /jeːɳɖ/ - mouse (singular)

The regular plural form is -n- or sometimes -ę/ą-, so here’s a more regular example of the infix plurals:

Raja /ˈʁa.ja/ = tree (singular)

Rania /'ʁa.ɲa/ = trees (plural)

Side note: I plan on giving Angposh grammatical gender but it’s still too new to know and who knows if I commit to that

Final Thoughts:

I’ve been working on Kno for almost 2 years, it initially started as a Navajo-inspired conlang, before becoming a Kazakh-inspired conlang, to its current Perso-Kurdish-inspired conlang. I only started Angposh a couple months ago as to try to expand this pseudo-Earth concept and expand Kno’s culture

Its 1AM im tired, but if a language had only one noun, meaning "thing", could it work?

"The light" would be " thing which illuminates" or "thing which enlightens"

It might not work with more complex nouns like "Love" or "anger"

https://youtu.be/Y5QqTKAO-jk

I have started a series on making conlangs based on Minecraft mobs! The first part is the start of it, tell me if you like it and everything sounds/looks good!

Thank you for reading this post and watching the video if you do!!

I have been a world builder for nearly ten years. I always tried to avoid creating a new language, usually creating alternate historical fantasy worlds just to avoid dealing with the effort. I thought since most of the fiction is inspired by real world, why don’t I just create my own alternate world filled with magic. This was nice but then… it felt too safe. I realized I did not have the freedom to do whatever I want as while creating alt history you have to be careful about… well history, obviously, but also how something’s might be a bit controversial and you probably shouldn’t touch them.

So I decided to walk the walk and completely reinvent my fantasy setting. It is still inspired by real world to an extent but with something unique.

For Example, right now I am thinking about a language for kingdom.

This kingdom is borne after a great Eldritch catastrophe that destroyed most of the mankind. Seeing their desperation, the gods of order come and create a new land/continent for people to inhabit. They send an avatar/champion called Phoenix King to lead them and teach them their own way in order to form a new religion called the luminism. (Or something equivalent in their native tongues, I don’t know)

Luminism’s holy book called the golden bible, (from my previous alt history setting), and people begin to learn the language written in this book to form a greater understanding. There are other tongues in this kingdom but it is expected from the royalty, clergy and every high borne to speak this language fluently,

For inspiration I first thought about Latin or Psudo-Latin/Dog-Latin. However, I did not want to just copy paste Vatican and Christian Churches. I wanted to create something different. Something that sounds angelic, harmonious and gentle to hear.

Do you have any advice for me to where to start?

I am starting to implement diacritics to a variant of my conlang (primordial Ancient Runic, AKA “PAR”), and I am using them for a verity of things, for example: one of them is for person or place based words, followed by a verb, and it essentially means “[person/place] is [who/where] [did,is doing [action]/[action] happened,happens]” I idk if this is a good use of them or not?

My conlang is Krotsho and I have been working on it for the past three months and it is a Dravidian-Bangla conlang. It has Dravidian grammar and words but the Bangla script, orthography, and phonology . I want to see where my weak spots are and where I can improve them. I am really proud of this conlang and I once hope I can finish it. This is a WIP.

​

​

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x0QtTD-QS0EiP20UmzkjcjuovSDwcMwa3O_bZDZyCGQ/edit?usp=sharing

In Sarkaj one would say "Yutașas söstapik, kas halarisasömis sutti"

/ju.ˈtaʃ.as sø.ˈsta.pik kas ha.la.ri.sa.sø.ˈmis ˈsut.ti/

yutaș-as     sö-stapi-k     kas    halari-sa-sö-mis sutti
worm.CL3-ACC be-NFUT.CON-2S 2S.ACC love-1S-NFUT-SUB remaining.CL5

In Sarkaj the conditional mood marks the condition while the subjunctive mood marks what's linked to it, so the two could be separated by another verb that's in a different mood, say latisát;

yutașas söstapik, latisát, kas halarisasömis sutti

"If you were a worm, let me tell you, I would still love you"

I'm kind of burning out on actually making conlangs: I think when my Kihiser book gets published in summer/fall 2024, I will take a break from actually creating languages. One thing I'm considering doing instead is starting a conlanging YouTube channel in which I share tips and tricks on how to conlang. It could potentially be a nice way to give back to the community, given how much free help I've received here and on YouTube.

My basic idea for the channel is that it would be about conlanging advice, especially shortcuts. So videos might highlight things that make conlanging easier: for example, using data about natural languages to make decisions for you (if most natlangs that do x and y also do z, that's one less decision you need to make about what your conlang does) or using a real-world setting to take advantage of areal features and borrowings that could let you have to do less work to flesh out your conlang. Another idea I really want to run with is doing a series of "what to steal from x" videos, where I spotlight a natural language and share what features of it I think you should steal for your conlangs. Weirdly, I am thinking of doing Spanish and Hittite as the first two videos.