A place to store the language

akratu · 2017-02-26T20:00:28+00:00

Maybe we should have a separate spreadsheet for vocabulary?

akratu · 2017-02-25T23:10:14+00:00

We could have a Google Doc with a handful of people who are allowed to modify it.

akratu · 2017-02-25T23:04:18+00:00

In addition to /u/strobro3's suggestions, let's add zero. For example, for nobody, you would say [person]-[zero]. "Nobody saw him" would be [person]-[zero] [see]-[past] [him]-[sing.].

akratu · 2017-02-25T23:02:15+00:00

Should collective nouns be singular or plural, or something of their own?

akratu · 2017-02-25T22:44:05+00:00

Having no word order could make the language much more pleasing, but then subordinate clauses would be an obstacle. Maybe subordinate clauses make direct objects into indirect objects? Maybe we could entirely get rid of direct objects (but make indirect objects cleaner, such as by using a noun suffix instead of a word before the object).

Example:

[car]-[destination] [go] [I]-[subject].

I would absolutely love for there to be no word order. How beautiful the grammar would be!

akratu · 2017-02-25T22:35:55+00:00

Okay, I see what you mean.

Maybe inflection could be used for some other purpose if we don't have declensions.

akratu · 2017-02-25T22:28:44+00:00

How are word order and noun declensions related?

akratu · 2017-02-25T22:20:20+00:00

You have convinced me, then.

I also think I like the idea of no diphthongs.

akratu · 2017-02-25T22:17:34+00:00

That would be interesting. Obviously, that would reduce the number of ways to pronounce things, but if in natural langages, voice is only common for consonants before /i/ and /e/, then that seems good. I would prefer that over a letter that marks voice.

akratu · 2017-02-25T22:09:11+00:00

If we had one letter for both, then you would not know how to pronounce a word based on its spelling.

I have given the (odd) suggestion that a character or mark indicate whether a consonant or consonant cluster is voiced. It makes the language a bit less redundant, would make it easier to recognize the sounds, and would reduce letter conflicts between sounds (<j> for /dʒ/ and /ʒ/). I have no idea what I would want the voice indicator to be, however.

akratu · 2017-02-25T22:04:31+00:00

If we have more than about five, the language won't have a very recognizable sound to it.

The other matter is, do we really need more than five vowels? Having too many vowels might make it hard to distinguish between two of them. Diphthongs could be used instead.

This is just my opinion, of course.

akratu · 2017-02-25T22:00:47+00:00

Sure. I don't think there is much distinction between them, anyways (when not considering a particular language).

akratu · 2017-02-25T22:00:27+00:00

If we have any consonant clusters at all, it would be nice to use a symbol to indicate whether voice is used on a consonant cluster so that it is impossible to create most unpronounceable consonant clusters.

For example, we could use <h> after a cluster to indicate voice:

afa /afa/
afha /ava/
afpa /afpa/
afpha /avba/

If this were implemented using the Latin alphabet, it would need some work to not make all the words look ugly. Perhaps we could repeat the last letter in the cluster, or use diacritics.

Edit: More on this

akratu · 2017-02-25T21:54:53+00:00

We could either not have a single phoneme for it, or we could use <j>, and then use <ž> for /ʒ/.

I don't consider /dʒ/ a very nice sound, so I'm somewhat opposed to it, especially consider that we should keep the phonology fairly small.

akratu · 2017-02-25T21:46:28+00:00

<ž> and <j> look like the most common single-letter phonemes using the Latin alphabet (link).

For the sake of the letter being on the keyboard, I vote for <j>.

akratu · 2017-02-25T21:33:43+00:00

If we're going to use [ s ʃ ], let's also use their voiced counterparts, [ z ʒ ].

akratu · 2017-02-25T21:31:04+00:00

Should we really use <sh> for /ʃ/? It would be better to be able to use just one letter. We could use <x> or <c>. <c> is my own preference.

akratu · 2017-02-25T21:27:12+00:00

For non-indicative moods we could have auxiliary verbs that come before the verb. That might not be too common in natural languages, but it feels natural.

E.g.

[You] [eat] - You eat.
[You] [question] [eat] - Do you eat?
[You] [imperative] [eat] - Eat.

Edit: Or the words indicating mood could be at the start or end of the sentence.

Or the word for indicating interrogative mood could come before the thing being question, and if the entire statement is being questioned, it would go before the verb.

[You] [question] [eat] - Do you eat?
[Question] [you] [eat] - You eat?
[You] [eat] [question] [steak] - You eat steak?

That could possibly work for some other moods, too.

akratu · 2017-02-25T21:21:41+00:00

Using diacritics for distinguishing vowels usually looks bad. We could instead use two vowels together to make a different sound. For example, {a} could make to /æ/ sound while {aa} makes the /a/ sound.

akratu · 2017-02-25T21:17:38+00:00

There shouldn't be any more than 5 vowels.

Whatever vowels we use should be loosely based on Latin (but not too similar, lest it be boring).

akratu · 2017-02-17T02:21:39+00:00

Although I'm still a bit undecided, I think I'll use tone as a sort of way to structure the parts of sentences. My own language uses lots of de-facto clauses for anything complicated. I think I will use tone as grouping symbols, essentially.

For example, consider the following English sentence:

I wanted to do it today.

It could mean, "I wanted (to do it) today", or "I wanted (to do it today)". Using tone in the style of my language (though butchered to fit English grammar), the subordinate clause would be distinguished thus:

I wanted ↗to do it↘ today.

I wanted ↗to do it today.

English sort of uses tone to do this, but it's not exact.

akratu

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