Starting a new conlang for a story my partner and I are working on.
To keep things easy, I started with the English language phonology and removed sounds, rather than coming up with a phonology from scratch. My final phonology had 19 sounds, which is a bit on the small side but not ridiculously so:
b
f
h
k
m
p
s
v
z
tʃ
θ
ŋ
æ
i:
ɒ
ʌ
aʊ
ɑ:
ɪəʳ
And set up rules for word building (can never have two vowels next to each other, words always start with a consonant, ɪəʳ only shows up at the end of a word).
And I decided I wanted an isolating language with some fusional elements. Because why not?
Next up:
Building the grammar!
(Hope this is a good spot for this post, didn't see anywhere else it seemed to fit)
Oh, that looks interesting! I made up a language too, starting when I was about 14 I think? And it developed into its final form over the course of a decade or so. (It was intended for a fictional world of mine, but I never wrote that story, actually.) So I'm curious to see what you will share here :)
This has reminded me of my long-standing ambition to get round to learning the phonetic alphabet... I also learned what an isolating language is from searching the concepts in this post, that wasn't a concept I had the actual word for before!
The last time I did much conlanging was for the S'ruba (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=2486.msg59537#msg59537), one of the main alien species in my Cepheida setting: that was more focused on working out unusual ways of structuring data in a language that could be logical but with pathways that we don't really use as humans.
Quote from: The Seamstress on January 05, 2025, 03:03:30 PMOh, that looks interesting! I made up a language too, starting when I was about 14 I think? And it developed into its final form over the course of a decade or so. (It was intended for a fictional world of mine, but I never wrote that story, actually.) So I'm curious to see what you will share here :)
Thanks! I got deep into conlanging about 8 years ago for another project. This was meant to be 'just' a naming language, but it's turning into a full conlang bc I can't stop myself (and don't really want to).
Quote from: Jubal on January 07, 2025, 12:13:50 PMThis has reminded me of my long-standing ambition to get round to learning the phonetic alphabet... I also learned what an isolating language is from searching the concepts in this post, that wasn't a concept I had the actual word for before!
The last time I did much conlanging was for the S'ruba (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=2486.msg59537#msg59537), one of the main alien species in my Cepheida setting: that was more focused on working out unusual ways of structuring data in a language that could be logical but with pathways that we don't really use as humans.
Alien languages open up so many fascinating possibilities!
Nouns are the exception to the general isolating nature of the language, being fusional.
Fusional means that a single change in the base word conveys multiple pieces of information. Spanish verbs are fusional -- estar -> estoy, oy indicating person (first), plurality (singlular), and time (present).
For nouns in fahngow, there are three pieces of information that need to be conveyed:
*Gender/noun class -- fahngow doesn't have 'gender' in the sense of 'male or female', but all nouns are associated with either mountain or river.
*Plurality -- where english has singluar or plural, fahngow has singular, dual, or plural
*case -- I'm not sure how to explain case w/o writing an essay. It mostly doesn't exist in English, except for pronouns. I vs me and She vs her are examples of case. fahngow uses ergative/absolutive case, where English uses (I think) indicative/objective case.
Nouns are declined by adding a prefix to the root word.
So bau is river, abau is a singular river in the ergative case and a river-class noun, howbbau is two rivers in the absolutive case and a river-class noun.
River
erg. absolutive
plural a sa
dual u howb
single ah zee
Mountain
erg. absolutive
plural ee sow
dual ha hah
single ow zau
*sigh* yeah, I didn't think the charts would com through right...
Quote from: JessMahler on January 12, 2025, 06:46:25 PMThanks! I got deep into conlanging about 8 years ago for another project. This was meant to be 'just' a naming language, but it's turning into a full conlang bc I can't stop myself (and don't really want to).
It always starts as "just"... :) Mine started as some kind of secret script, I had the letters of an alphabet and then came the grammar, which was heavily influenced by German (my native language) at first but I later abandoned that because German grammar is unnecessarily complicated, lol. So now it has simpler grammar rules and consists of about 600 words. I still hope I can use it for something in the future, but we'll see. I don't have much talent for epic novel writing, everything ends up as a short story at best (or I get stuck in the plot phase)...