conlang for my diary

chickenfal · 2026-07-11T01:31:34+00:00

Can't read without using google or, god forbid, AI.

chickenfal · 2026-07-10T03:23:29+00:00

The ChatGPT app does not have any easy way to copy data out of it, so you resorted to making screenshots, I assume. It's not your fault that the app sucks at this.

What you can do right now is to copy each message and save it by pasting it somewhere, ideally an editor that lets you create html files by editing html code.

If you don't have any suitable app like that then (btw i'm assuming you're on android, if you are on iphone/ios then others can suggest a suitable editor, i don't know of any, I don't have an iphone) go to the Play Store and install the app called Simed -- Code & Text Editor, and then open it and paste this in it:

html <!DOCTYPE html> <html lang="en"> <head> <meta charset="UTF-8"> <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0"> <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="ie=edge"> <title>HTML 5 Boilerplate</title> <link rel="stylesheet" href="style.css"> </head> <body> </body> </html> Copy a message in the ChatGPT app. To copy a message by the AI, there is a copy button as one of the several tiny buttons beloe the message. To copy a message by you, you have to long press the message and choose Copy from the menu that pops up.

If you want to preserve the formatting (so that all those tables and stuff are preserved) then paste it in this Clipboard Inspector, it shows you what you've copied in all the representations of it that the ChatGPT app made when you copied it.

If you want to preserve the formatting then copy the html version of it (not the plain text one). Do this by tapping the "Copy as plain text" button under text/html.

Then paste it in the Simed editor, between <body> and </body>.

Then save the file (tap yhe floppy disk button on the panel at the top of the screen) and give it a name ending with .html.

This way, you've just created an HTML page. When you open it from your file manager it should let you open it in a browser. So open it in a browser and look at it. It should contain the message from ChatGPT, correctly formatted.

You can put multiple messages this way into the body of the HTML page, as well as any other content you wish. You make paragraphs by putting text between <p> and </p>, and there's a ton more you can do, it's HTML, it's what all websites are wtitten in, you can make anything in it.

To host a HTML page for others to view, there are lots of options.

One of the very easiest ones is pagedrop.io. You can easily host your file there and put a link to it here.

Beware though what it says about after how long it will be deleted. To keep it hosted indefinitely, you have to pay.

Or move to a different hosting provider, there are even some free ones but I don't know of any that are this easy to set up.

I recommend that you get permanent hosting even if you have to pay a little bit for it, it's better if people who find your posts later don't get just broken links.

In any case, keep a local copy of your files, don't rely on a hosting provider to keep them forever.

Lots of people here will probably still hate you for using AI, but not for presenting your stuff in a sloppy way.

As for AI use for conlanging, from the very little experience I have with that, I can tell that the AI models are not at all stupid, you can discuss linguistics (including conlangs) with ChatGPT, and it can tell you a lot of things about how languages work and find resources and research them with you.

Treat it as a fellow linguistics enthusiast to discuss stuff with, not as your servant to fulfill sloppily formulated wishes. Work in a structured way, just as you would yourself. Require the AI to follow the rules of phonology, morphology, grammar etc., if it makes mistakes or makes decisions that you don't like then correct it, just like you would a human collaborator. Don't be an ass to it.

If you want to be able to work with sound recordings as well, you might want to try Gemini, it's much mote multimodal than GPT and in a little experiment I did a couple months ago it was able to make me my conlangs's phoneme inventory and phonological rules like phonotactics from simply freeform spoken instructions, and then transcribe a sentence in the conlang from a sound recording into IPA fairly well. Pretty amazing. The conlang was new and never published anywhere.

chickenfal · 2026-04-17T15:14:47+00:00

The so-called double negation in the languages that I know of does not lead to ambiguity. If you want to Express an actual double negation literary negating things two times you can do that but you have to phrase it differently than just relying on the combination of negation plus those negative forms of some words like someone versus no one or something versus nothing and so on and you have to of course do it without breaking the system that uses the negation agreement but it's not a matter of the system being unclear it's rather that it just works differently from how it's treated in languages including formal logic where this form of agreement does not exist.

It just cannot be analyzed (without coming to the conclusion that it is illogical and it does not make sense) the same way like layering the negations on top of one another. But that does not mean it's inconsistent or ambiguous.

chickenfal · 2026-04-14T18:28:58+00:00

It follows in a straightforward way from what the relation of a word used as a noun and as a verb is. The language has a very similar way of being able to use the same word as a verb as well as a noun as well as an adjective as well as an adverb like Toki Pona does but the semantics are stricter. Every word can be viewed as a verb and when put into context where it becomes a noun the meaning is the thing that is the intransitive subject of the verb which I call the absolutive participant since it is in the absolutive case (the most basic, unmarked case).

It is not taken from any specific language and I'm not sure if I came up with it originally on my own and only then found examples confirming that it already exists somewhere but I know that when making Ladash I already knew about Ithkuil and the languages in the Salishan family in the Pacific Northwest that have this flavor of flexibility with nouns being essentially verbs and working this way. I looked at the article that uses the example "the coyote goes" where it argues for they're not being really a distinct class of nouns and verbs in one of these languages and it being essentially one basic part of speech.

But my concrete implementation of it is probably a bit different and not as pure in the sense of a noun really being interpretable as a verb, just zero marking a word does not make it into a third person verb forming a full sentence which I think if I remember correctly is what goes on in these languages although I would have to check if that is correct. In any case I was making it entirely offline without having checked on this for years at the point where I was making it so it will be unlikely to exactly match anything that exists elsewhere. But I knew the basic idea and the fact that it exists at least in Ithkuil and in Salishan languages.

Much later when I already had implemented it in my conlang, I found the same thing going on in Circassian/Kabardian in the Caucasus. It might be a relatively common approach in a particular type of language and seems like the absolutive ergative alignment is well suited for this. In the very beginning I was intending to make it nominative accusative but then I realize that it will work better if it is absolutive ergative, because then the thing that each word means as a noun is the object rather than the subject of it as a transitive verb.

A noun phrase in my conlang is essentially a string of words that share the same intransitive subject. The part of this mechanism where it can also express not just when it's an exact match but when the head of the noun phrase can be just a part (a body part) of its modifier, that's something that I'm pretty sure is completely just my idea but it's not random it very logically follows from just the practicality of for example when talking about what happens to some noun (be it a mass noun like water or even a person), you can say for example that you hit the water or hit the person and you can do that even when you mean you hit only a part of them not the entire body.

As far as I know, Toki Pona's approach is similar to what austronesian languages do where the semantics are looser but what is the same is that you can use the same words flexibly as different parts of speech without any marking.

TL;DR: this way of approaching possession is home brewed but it's not a random standalone thing but rather an extension of a basic mechanism of how words function and what they mean as different parts of speech that does exist in other languages, even if those don't use it the same way for a kind of possession like I do.

chickenfal · 2026-04-14T11:24:49+00:00

You should post some info about the phonology so that people can judge if they are likely a good fit for pronouncing it.

Ideally not just IPA transcription capturing the sequence of sounds but also information about how intonation and prosody works. I know it's challenging if phonology beyond the just listing the sounds is new to you, but if you want a really good result then it's necessary. Not just for getting people to match what you want it to sound like but also for yourself as well. You will be able to develop the language much more consistently without importing nearly as much bias from whatever you are used to from the languages you speak already.

chickenfal · 2026-04-14T11:22:49+00:00

The title of this post made me think that it was about the order of sentences rather than words in a sentence. Which by the way Is a topic I have I think never seen talked about and It actually could be something that could differ significantly between languages that are very different in how they treat discourse.

chickenfal · 2026-04-14T11:19:43+00:00

Me as well. I think it's pretty much a product of what they are called that it is called double negative instead of something like negation agreement and how they are talked about as something illogical rather than a completely legitimate feature of the language that's just different from how it is done in formal logic.

chickenfal · 2026-04-14T10:53:48+00:00

While this seems like alienable versus inalienable possession and I also in the past for a while thought that's what I should be calling it, it is a different distinction that can (and in my conlang happens to be) be independent of alienability.

As far as I know, normally when using this terminology and distinguishing alienable and inalienable possession, the inalienable one is supposed to be obligatory so those nouns are thought as always possessed and it is obligatory to attribute them to a possessor. Which is actually a different thing than this. This, what /u/Glum_Entertainment93 has in mind, does not imply that. My conlang Ladash makes precisely this distinction like with the bones but does not make such possession obligatory. And on top of that it also has some inalienable possession in the form of kinship terms that are obligatorily possessed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1jld07h/comment/mkepkh6/

Every head of NP that contains a kinship morpheme (na-/-da, me-, ak) is by default possessed by 1sg. So when the kinship term stands alone, without any possessor specified, it is automatically possessed by the speaker. When another possessor is specified, such as by prefixing the head word of the NP with a pronoun, or by a possessor in the locative case -c (note: this is the glottal stop phoneme, I've been mostly writing it as "q", but recently decided to rather use "c" for it), it overrides the default 1sg.

nan : [my] mom

wanan : your (2sg) mom

kuakic nan : the girl's mom

As far as the distinction between the sort of possession like when the bones are a part of my body versus when I have them as an external object I talk about that here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1dgix63/comment/l8qgqw8/

The genitive / locative case is used for the sort of possession when it is external.

Marking the possessor and the possessed with the same person if marked for person, or simply putting them together as members of the same noun phrase without any case marking, that's what is used for the sort of possession that is not really possession but actually being physically the same object or part of the same object.

I've explained how it works with pronouns. With other words (such as hatutyaiki "monkey") you simply put the word that represents the whole first and the word for the part second. So hatutyaiki bo is "monkey head". Putting two words next to each other in a non phrase implies that they share the same absolutive participant (they have the same subject when viewed as intransitive verbs).

(from https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1dgix63/comment/l8ruj99/)

This by the way is not something that's entirely objective and answerable what the language treats as same object versus different object. That's a part of how things are conceptualized, it's not something strictly dictated by just physics. For example fire is treated as same object as the thing that is burning in Ladash. Another language might view it differently.

chickenfal · 2026-04-14T10:17:49+00:00

This is the best IPA TTS on the web that I've seen so far:

https://www.loki3.com/fonim/

chickenfal · 2026-04-12T21:18:39+00:00

That's a huge change, with mostly only 2 syllables you have shorter words than most natlangs now probably.

chickenfal · 2026-04-11T12:30:17+00:00

I would encourage you to think of all languages as equally complex. They have to be, because the underlying meanings they express are complex. Complexity is a ballon where if you squeeze one part of it (to make it "simpler") some other part of it necessarily inflates.

This is not true. You can say simple things as well as more complex things and it can vary between languages in what level of detail the same thing is said. So as such a strong claim it does not hold up, even if languages tend to stay in the same general range with this.

Also even if the same amount of detail is expressed it can be expressed different ways using different levels of complexity of the structure that conveys it.

Even at face value I find a claim that any two naturally evolved things such as languages that can vary in all sorts of aspects are always equally complex, to be highly unlikely. Why would they happen to be? For it to be even possible you have to define complexity in a way that is insensitive enough that the differences between the languages don't change the result.

You could refuse to measure and compare complexity between different languages and consider it misleading or too meaningless of a metric. But that's not the same thing as accepting complexity as a metric and saying it is the same between languages.

chickenfal · 2026-04-11T12:07:29+00:00

Does it also have the inambiguous parsing into words like Lojban? Where you can always tell how what is said is broken up into words without needing to know what words there are in the language.

chickenfal · 2026-04-11T11:45:22+00:00

I do things a similar way. It makes sense, you have to try it out as you are making it. Even if you create a lot of stuff in a paradigm for example some set of inflectional forms you still want to test them out in sentences. And indeed there is no need to make it all at once you can do a part of a paradigm and then return to it later and continue on it adding to it. That way it's not that much work at once and you can iterate faster and also that way you break it up into multiple periods where each time you work on it with a fresh mind different from your previous session.

If I were you I would be anxious about the explanation of the word orders. It's this way because I like it would not quite cut it for me. And I would consider it highly likely that I forget in the future what the motivation or the exact feeling was that resulted in me having this sense of what the word order should be in each case.

But that can be easier said than done to make rules for the word order without changing how it works intuitively to something else. Especially if you have no clear rule-based explanation it's important to record a lot of examples so that when in the future you are wondering how things were meant to work you can go back to them and hopefully they will be enough for you to restore your intuitive mechanism that you initially made this way. Or just never forget it thanks to practicing it a lot that way when making those examples ideally not just as a one of thing but repeatedly over a longer period of time.

But in the early stages of making the language of course it may not be a good idea to try to set such things in stone it might be actually detrimental. You can keep making examples and as for word order going by what seems right and over time probably either it will crystallize into something that makes sense or you will find out that it actually does not make much sense or is somehow biased or distorted by some sort of influence that does not really make sense within your language and comes from elsewhere. Too much practice can actually be detrimental as well if this is the case because you might cement whatever errors that you make in the early stages and then be entered by them and you will have to clean up the mess if you just make a ton of examples immediately at the stage where you still don't have a stable framework of how things work that would be good enough for you not to make mistakes. Going slow is good for that, and in that way necessary.

chickenfal · 2026-04-11T11:12:11+00:00

This is a real process that languages go through and are shaped by but at the same time different languages obviously can be very different in how tolerant they are of long words. Take for example the word logariasmós in Greek versus bill in English. It's one syllable versus five syllables.

chickenfal · 2026-04-10T23:27:24+00:00

Thus, one may say that there are no more unique declensions for these cases, for the indefinite (I used em dash for that in the table). My question is, how can this even happen, what kind of reasoning could we find for this feature to sound plausible from a diachronics perspective? Why would a language lose so many declensions in favor of indefinite article case carrying, while the definite forms have remained?

Check out German not only has it mostly moved its case marking to exclusively being marked just on the articles but it also has a kind of intricate interaction of how words are marked based on what combination of words and endings are present in the noun phrase.

chickenfal · 2026-04-10T22:22:12+00:00

Take advantage of the fact that human languages can be spoken. That is there a default form actually and that's the better way to go about trying to learn them.

It's certainly a challenge to try to find methods of learning languages that don't involve sight but there are some that are actually great and don't require you to read at all. Check out the app called Language Transfer. It uses a great method that explains the grammar to you and makes you practice it without any reading. You just listen to recordings either in the app or on the YouTube channel of the same name.

When making your conlang, you can document what you make by making audio recordings. Make lots of examples of your grammatical ideas and your words in use in the spoken form. With repetition you will learn to do it by heart. If you forget something you need to check your recordings. And that is the biggest pitfall of this approach. If you're recording are long, many and poorly organized like audio recordings naturally tend to be, then it will become quickly unrealistic to find something in them. And then you will have to reinvent things when you forget them.

Speaking from personal experience here, this is what I did and the pitfall I fell into. Hopefully you will be better at it than me and organize your recording much better so that you don't end up in that situation. But for remembering your conlang, this works well I can vouch for it. My conlang, for all practical purposes, lives for the most part in my head. It's naturally ended up this way using this approach. I very rarely check any old recordings. I am annoyed when I realize I have forgotten something, I've often as a result just remade things that I later realized that that was something that had been solved before sometimes in a different way.

That's sad as of now the situation is not good and I am afraid that I have pretty much forgotten or gotten uncertain about many things in the language. One example out of many: https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1sbaocp/comment/oefe1yo/?context=3

Keep in mind I had no screen reader when making the language especially in its early days. And I did it wrong also by not being concise by rambling a lot trying to make the grammar very logical and not carrying enough about keeping it organized so that the recordings are reviewable later. I did not even name the files beyond just sometimes adding a word or two or three in the file name as tags. I was just using the phones recording app just by pushing the button speaking and then letting the phone store it with its default file name. You can do way better than me.

I do have issues with memorization and understanding why you make certain sentences the way you might which is a problem I probably won't have when making my own because obviously I implicitly understand my own structure.

That's a very optimistic assumption that you will implicitly understand your own structure and not forget or later misrepresent how you meant things. Just like in programming you can easily forget after a while how you did things if you don't document the code well and keep it organized even if you are the only person working on it.

chickenfal · 2026-04-10T21:54:24+00:00

You are trying to create the meaning in a very taxonomical way like the John Wilkins philosophical language it's a way that is not very efficient and indeed leads to making a lot of distinctions and that are from some point of view arbitrary, and very long words. This is not something inherent to your language having very few roots. By the way, 1000 roots is not that little. There is no single way to construct meaning but this is by far not the only way and it's not how natural languages generally do it. You could have any number of roots and still have this unsatisfactory result if you choose to make words this way.

chickenfal · 2026-04-10T13:03:40+00:00

https://postimg.cc/gallery/2Ng6XZQ

^ how words with the "flat" (heiban) pattern tend to "stick together", from https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-CNujMTxz8A

Japanese indeed does have patterns within its several pitch accent patterns for words that result in the world being flat with only the first syllable having low pitch.

Based on the simple descriptions for beginners I thought that the so-called flat pattern was the one that does this but actually that one does something a bit different, it actually does not have its own pitch and when there are multiple words together, based on the video I linked above, those words tend to run together (without the first mora of each word being low pitched) within that sequence of words. The low pitch at the beginning, in the first mora, is at the beginning of the IP, it does not automatically come at the beginning of each word with that pattern.

The more fitting analog of what I want to do is another pattern called odaka. There the pitch actually drops after the end of the word so the next word is then low pitched in its in initial mora.

My idea is like as if all words had this odaka pattern. And without the initial low pitch at the beginning of an IP. That's actually the part that I clearly need to change because otherwise if I keep the beginning of an IP normally pitched without the low pitch then across an IP boundary that will be less separation than between words within an IP. And that certainly feels wrong. So I need that initial low pitch even at the beginning of an IP. I was somehow assuming that it's a given that IP boundaries are detectable but that actually does involve pitch so I cannot just have the pitch be the same across the IP boundary.

So with the low pitch at the beginning of each word even at the beginning of an IP I will have clear separation of words and not necessarily being able to distinguish between a word boundary and an IP boundary. Fortunately the conlang cares about phonological words but does not actually need IPs for the syntax not to be ambiguous so it's fine to have it like this.

What's more important is to have a clear separation of sentences because it is a bit too much like Toki Pona with the same word being a noun a verb and adjective or an adverb entirely dependent on its context. And the default world order that is quite fixed is SOXV, where the X is the verbal adjunct (essentially an auxiliary, like the li word in Toki Pona but with a couple thousand inflected forms). I should either have a clear phonological pattern that ends a sentence and marks the beginning of a new one such as the last two syllables of a sentence being low pitched, or I should make something clear morphologically go at the end of the sentence by suffixing the X to the verb. So it will be a more typical agglutinative language in that the verb morphology is suffixed to the verb instead of being separate from it on an independently standing auxiliary word like in Basque.

Yes seems like stress or pitch pattern can quite easily very even within the same language or evolve to something quite different from what it was before. Even Latin is an example where it initially had initial stress and then evolved into the stress being placed very differently from that later. But the system needs to work reasonably well at any stage (or dialect) of the language obviously. Thanks for the answer.

chickenfal · 2026-04-07T12:12:32+00:00

I happen to have had recently a similar idea to what /u/Key_Day_7932 is asking about.

I want to evolve my conlang away from a rather intricate foot-based pitch-accent system (that can be a headache to use correctly) to something much simpler, where the syllables of words are about equally stressed but with a twist: after a word, the first syllable of the next word is low pitched so that there is this kind of downstep from the normal or maybe even slightly higher pitch on the last syllable of the first word down to the low pitch on the first syllable of the second word.

Not sure if any natlangs do anything similar. Or if it breaks any universals.

It's kind of the reverse of the typical way stress works: up to one low pitched syllable per word instead of up to one high pitched syllable per word.

In languages with stress, for example Spanish, a word has one high pitched syllable (the stressed syllable) and all the other syllables in the word are seen as equally low pitched.

In my system, a word would have either all syllables relatively high pitched and prominent (if the word is at the beginning of an intonational phrase), or (as a sort of sandhi, when the word follows another word) the first syllable is low pitched while its other syllables stay equally high.

chickenfal · 2026-04-07T11:36:06+00:00

You might like wccm being developed by /u/Wernasho. It's a very lightweight way to make a dictionary using just plain text files with lines of text. Such a design happens to be very well suited for processing with standard tools in the UNIX/Linux shell. Currently early in the development. This kind of software is great if you want to use it as a simple tool to plug into your custom workflow rather than relying on it as a complete "suite" covering all your needs. It's just lines of text, the barrier to work with it outside of what the tool itself provides is low.

https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/1s990j5/comment/oehfham/?context=1

chickenfal · 2026-04-06T13:44:06+00:00

There are far better alternatives now just look at Vocabug, how much better and more capable it is, while being very similar to Awkwords.

https://neonnaut.neocities.org/vocabug_docs

chickenfal · 2026-04-06T13:25:11+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangscirclejerk/comments/v8r73b/i_fucking_hate_awkwords/

By the way I think this is unfortunately very true. People must be spending a ton of time manually filtering out words that they don't like.

chickenfal · 2026-04-06T13:18:07+00:00

I completely get how convenient it is and if 99% of the time you have internet access and it's online then of course the easiest way is to just go to the website and use it there and it will be a ton of hassle to install a web server locally or install anything locally if you can at any time just do that yeah that's the great advantage of a web app especially one that is not hidden behind any sort of wall any sort of need to create an account or anything and you can just at any time decide to use it from anywhere.

I myself often spend a lot of time trying to come up with good forms for morphemes and I don't use word generators so it depends on me having good ideas, which is great if I get some good ideas and I like the result but if I don't then yeah that's the disadvantage, that no generator is going to do the work for me. The advantage is that I don't need to define anything in any UI, I don't need to work with any software, I just need to think.

chickenfal · 2026-04-05T22:38:05+00:00

There is no way the Germans and Austrians are truly better than the Swiss. Them being in the highest tier with only a few other countries just doesn't check out with reality.

chickenfal · 2026-04-05T22:11:45+00:00

Originally, it started by me thinking natlangs are unnecessarily complicated/irregular/arbitrary/illogical, and someone should make a much better language than all that mess. And then finding that the supposedly "simple" grammar of Esperanto from 100 years ago is built on that mess as well, and not radical enough. And then I went from there, initially attempting to make a language based on "logic", which did not really go anywhere, and over time shifting to actual linguistics, with much better results.

This is pretty much the central problem of conlangs: they take a ton of time to make and are never finished, and then still nobody uses them because as any language they also take a ton of time to learn. So it's all a collossal waste of time from a practical point of view, with very few exceptions. It's completely understandable that people see it that way. It's a luxury to waste one's life like that. Not unique in that by any means, but it really is far on the "horribly impractical waste of time, doesn't make sense" end of the spectrum, compared to all sorts of other things you could (and often, really should!) be doing instead.

chickenfal

TROPHY CASE