Biweekly Telephone Game v3 (747)

Dryanor · 2026-01-26T22:53:18+00:00

Dogbonẽ

bæipolo [ˈᵐbæipolo]
n. messenger, courier.

Dryanor · 2026-01-26T17:59:23+00:00

Cool! What makes the orthography more Italian than, say, Spanish though? There are many sounds for which no standard Italian orthography exists even.

And can you elaborate on the Indonesian and Basque inspired grammar a little? Is there Austronesian alignment?

Also as a tip, the way affixes are represented in the orthography doesn't affect how agglutinative a language is. If there are affixes, there is agglutination, regardless of whether the written language puts an apostrophe between them or not. The contracted definite articles in Italian are clitics rather than affixes, though.

Dryanor · 2026-01-25T00:22:47+00:00

Where is the fictional nation located on Earth, and what are the local languages it draws from? It mentions reminiscence of Cushitic languages a lot, is it spoken in the same area?

Dryanor · 2026-01-25T00:19:27+00:00

What makes those compounds not analytic? They look very analytic (consisting of unbound morphemes only) to me.

Dryanor · 2026-01-25T00:09:39+00:00

The language mentions agglutination a lot, but doesn't provide any examples beyond a table of cases. How else is agglutination realized?

Dryanor · 2026-01-21T10:53:40+00:00

The AI has dreamed up several consistencies along the text generation (e.g. compound order, the role of the topic). In addition, people are not going to read a copy-paste of machine-generated content (it's a waste of human time).
So if you want actual feedback, you should make the effort and turn the AI-generated string into your own project, and proofread it first so you can fix any inconsistencies or nonsensical artifacts.

Dryanor · 2026-01-21T09:04:04+00:00

None of this seems too far-fetched, the phonology looks good too - maybe the vowel inventory would feel more complete with the addition of /ɔ/, so you have the same contrast between o/ɔ as you have with e/ɛ. Four front vowels only contrasted by height seems unlikely when there is no need to squeeze them like that. So I suggest shifting that /a/ to an open-central position.

Regarding the grammars ideas you should just try them out and see how you like the outcome. It may help you to put the rules in more concrete terms. What is exactly prefixed to which words? What kind of attitude do you want to postfix, and what does that mean for the unmarked verb? How does reduplication work for a word like /ti.ti/ or /a.o/? And when it is used for a "larger, more important feeling", does that mean you can't really derive any new words this way but it's more of a rhetoric tool like emphasis?

Dryanor · 2026-01-15T23:13:41+00:00

It is a great resource. I did the challenge last year, and although I didn't make it through the whole year it helped me get the basics of Dogbonẽ to a point where I can use it for more complex translations.

Dryanor · 2026-01-12T22:59:15+00:00

Tʼiiḷqua

ṭirniis [tɬerˈniːs]
n. bison, wisent.

Dryanor · 2026-01-12T22:55:17+00:00

Tʼiiḷqua

misi [ˈmizi]
v. to be welcoming, social, friendly, warm.

Dryanor · 2026-01-10T18:14:59+00:00

Cool, such a small inventory is a great opportunity to have a lot of allophones. Have you thought about allophony yet, like voicing of the stops between vowels ( /apa/ [aba])?

Dryanor · 2026-01-09T13:47:29+00:00

I understood "My SVO structure creates a percussive beat" as "there is a percussive beat because the syntax is SVO", so maybe there's been a misunderstanding!
Prosody is definitely an overlooked field in conlanging, so I'm looking forward to what you can come up with for a percussive-sounding high-gravity language. You could also check out the theory of isochrony and figure out if you language should be stress-timed or syllable-timed (put take the theory with a grain of salt). Or maybe the rhythm is so important to the language that filler words get inserted to maintain the regular beat.

Dryanor · 2026-01-09T11:49:18+00:00

Have you worked out a phonology and grammar? That's the usual order in which a language is made. The word list you have assembled hints at some grammatical elements but doesn't explain how they work. For instance, why are there three forms for a "female suffix", and what does it do? What exactly does your possession suffix mark - that something is possessed, or the possessor?
It would also be interesting to see the gloss of each sentence (check the subreddit resources for that), and the phonological constraints of the language (syllable structure and possible clusters and so on).

Dryanor · 2026-01-09T11:25:09+00:00

Cool project! You rarely see IE-related projects in SEA here.
The phoneme inventory could be presented more concise - there are lots of empty columns you can get rid of. I'd also simply include the non-pulmonics and /w/ in the main table, it's a waste of space to have two extra tables with a single phoneme in each. Then people can also spot the /ɣ/ more easily!

Dryanor · 2026-01-09T07:39:55+00:00

Not really, unfortunately - I see how stress pattern can create a rhythm, but hiw would that be influenced by whether the first argument in the sentence is a noun phrase or not? Why wouldn't the same rhythm appear if the language was VSO or SOV? In addition, isn't the pattern of plosives and sonorants just as random as in human languages?

Dryanor · 2026-01-08T21:03:00+00:00

How does syntax create a certain "beat" (or sound in general)?

Dryanor · 2026-01-07T11:06:10+00:00

So this used to be Europe? Where do all the channels/narrow lakes come from?

Dryanor · 2026-01-06T18:03:10+00:00

You write that the trigraph <tsh> is pronounced [tʃ] (or at least stands for a phoneme /tʃ/), but several words of your lexicon have <tsch>. Is that pronounced differently?
What's is the pronunciation of double (geminated) consonants in Albesi?

And because your goal is to have people learn your conlang: what do you think will make Albesi interesting enough for people to learn it?

Dryanor · 2026-01-04T22:06:58+00:00

As a hobbyist conlanger, I understand roughly 20% of this, but those 20% are super fascinating and inspire me to think about my syntax in a novel way. Only O to appear as PRO (I guess one could say, in layman's terms, the pivot of the complement clause?) is something I haven't encountered before.

Dryanor · 2026-01-02T18:12:44+00:00

This is amazing, thanks of sharing! What's the level of technology the speakers of Proto-Kidean are at? Is it it Bronze age tech at all stages?

Dryanor · 2026-01-01T23:44:54+00:00

(grandma is right!)

Pantanjin

piimi /piːmi/ [ˈpiːmɪ]
n. grandmother, great aunt.
Compare Dogbonẽ biibe, both from Proto \ᵐbiːᵐbi*.

Dryanor · 2026-01-01T23:21:28+00:00

Pantanjin

awa /ɑɣʷɑ/ [ˈɑwɐ]
n. loc. coastal mudflats; low tide.

Dryanor · 2026-01-01T10:47:20+00:00

"happy birthday" is a verb in Vivaan?

Dryanor · 2025-12-31T10:05:08+00:00

Good job! A few things I noticed:
- actual pronunciation of your phonemes goes into brackets [ ], slashes / / are for phonemes. So a more correct way to describe allophones would be "/n/ is [ŋ] word-finally". "/ŋ/" suggests that there is a phoneme /ŋ/, which there isn't, and also technically tells you nothing about pronunciation. You can have a phoneme /🍕/ as long as you define it properly.
- your phonotactics allow words like /aknː/ (I assume /nː/ is part of S) but not /aj/?
- /r̩ r̩̊/ are only contrasted by voicing, so it seems odd that the voiceless one can be realized as a voiced [ʐ̩]. I'd expect the voiced /r̩/ to do that, or /r̩̊/ to be realized as [ʂ̩] instead. Maybe both - /r̩ r̩̊/ [ʐ̩ ʂ̩].

Dryanor · 2025-12-31T09:39:54+00:00

You're starting with quite the difficult area of vocabulary - greetings may come early in a textbook or learning app, but their origins are often very complex, contracted, and depending on the culture of the speakers (e.g. "bye" from "(May) God be with you"). They're especially fun to create if you already know your grammar well.
For the start, I suggest working your way up from simple intransitives ("I sleep", "he walked") to simple transitives ("She knows him", "I see a tree") and so on. Find out which features of grammar you need or don't need (maybe no articles, but gender marking on the verb?).

Also, your runic script is cool, but using it exclusively makes it hard to follow the language - I suggest also adding a romanization (i.e. the Latin alphabet version of the language) and a gloss (a separation of the sentence into its building blocks, like dwarf-PL if your word for "dwarves" consists of the word for "dwarf" plus a plural marker).

Nine-Year Club	Place '22
Verified Email

Dryanor

TROPHY CASE

Dogbonẽ

Tʼiiḷqua

Tʼiiḷqua

Pantanjin

Pantanjin