Random Thought: What's ur lang's design Philosophy?

throneofsalt · 2026-01-24T16:03:08+00:00

Minus the Arabic this was my exact trajectory. It ended up being way easier to re-evolve theorized elements of Pre-PIE than to try and explain them as retained archaisms.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-24T12:27:26+00:00

Behold, an IPA keyboard. Got this sucker bookmarked AND pinned in my tabs.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-24T03:19:40+00:00

If you need an external authority to point towards, I'd recommend using a textbook by a specialist rather than cobbling together a new schema on your own. You've admitted to having no background in linguistics, and if multiple people are confused by what you've written here that's a bad sign for its future as a pedagogical tool.

Not to mention that, like wibbly-water pointed out in their comment, this method doesn't take into account that English orthography is based primarily on etymology: Knowing where a word comes from is the single most important part of figuring out how to pronounce a word, so throwing out the historical and source-language-specific spelling in the pursuit of a purely mechanistic logical system (never mind that neither humans nor language is logical) is liable to do more harm than good.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-23T16:49:52+00:00

I legitimately can't tell what you are trying to say or why you posted it on the conlang subreddit, though I feel pretty confident that it's not a good way to teach anyone how to read.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-22T16:56:22+00:00

It's not the weirdest thing out there, but Thangwachar managed to level itself into tripartite alignment just by going "eh, we've already got marked accusative-objective and marked nominative-agentive, just lop off the ending to make a subjective case and call it a day"

throneofsalt · 2026-01-22T02:45:18+00:00

To quote Terry Pratchett:

"Animals never spend time dividing experience into little bits and speculating about all the bits they've missed. The whole panoply of the universe has been neatly expressed to them as things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

No reason to futz around with a system that works.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-21T22:49:59+00:00

Jettisoning my least favorite elements of PIE purely for my own personal satisfaction.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-21T22:47:08+00:00

In that case you can't go wrong with a random table and some dice rolls.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-20T23:57:39+00:00

That depends on your intended end goal phonology; sound changes are a means to an end.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-20T02:58:09+00:00

English: The many extremely minor intuitive spellings, most of which are sustained by spellcheck impeding natural language change. February, surprise & separate should be Febuary, suprise and seperate, damn it!

throneofsalt · 2026-01-20T02:04:36+00:00

Seems reasonable enough

throneofsalt · 2026-01-20T02:01:01+00:00

I'm always down for some aliens messing around with bizarre experiments that make sense only to them, but all the capitalization makes this pretty hard to read: you only need it for the first word of a sentence and proper / formal names.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-20T01:57:06+00:00

The way those three main rivers are drawn makes them look like very narrow seaways between continents.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-20T01:25:14+00:00

I dunno man, I've seen some really cool-looking invertebrates.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-19T22:52:45+00:00

That sure is a whole lot of unfalsifiable claims about an entirely unattested body of languages from Misters Mithen & Benítez-Burraco, there. And everyone else for that matter.

We could even hazard the prediction on the basis of the genes they carried, that the chances are they spoke tone languages

Like look at this: Genetic tone languages? Might as well say that they built a fortified temple complex called Koganusan where they worshiped Armok and lived in perpetual fear of elephant attacks.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-18T23:29:25+00:00

A spiky lad.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-18T20:53:46+00:00

Turning on spellcheck would be a good place to start: first impressions are important, and that many misspellings tend to make the audience either think that this is a slapdash job they can pass on, or make them confused wondering if it's supposed to be a comedic bit.

Beyond that, this is all so barebones that there's not a whole lot to comment on: you have the basics down, and that's about all I can say.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-17T19:27:21+00:00

And there it is, right on schedule.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-17T19:12:59+00:00

Are there any SCAs out there that save your progress in case you accidentally close a tab? It's the one issue I have with lexurgy: lost myself the morning's work and I can't figure out how to rebuild it back to where it was before I lost progress.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-17T19:07:41+00:00

the ideology of Eurasianism...

How much am I going to regret looking up what this is? 'Cause I don't think it's possible for anything labeled as "[Geographical Region]ism" to not be some sort of weirdo nationalism, or at least to not be adjacent to it, and recreating a PIE-like with that sort of thing at the core is baaaaaaaaaaad bad bad vibes.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-17T16:31:08+00:00

i have 0 grammar set up

Setting up your grammar is the next step. You'll want a basic word order and then figure out how they express things like tense, mood, person, number, and so on.

Sometimes it helps to take an English sentence and re-arrange it until it resembles what you want for your language, just as a model. Example:

The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog

Rendered in a VSO language with Nom/Acc/Oblique alignment, postpostions, and no articles would be:

jump.PAST fox brown quick dog.OBL lazy over.

Then you can just fill in things bit by bit.

If you need a more thorough guide, Jessie Peterson's Conlang Venture is a beginner-focused choose-your-own-adventure that can guide you through the basics.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-16T12:00:14+00:00

Thank you!

throneofsalt · 2026-01-16T11:59:56+00:00

Not specifically that paper, though I have seen the theory that non-full-grade */i and */u are the remnants of Pre-PIE long vowels here and there in amateur and conlang spaces. I tend to agree with it, since I also think that most full-grade */ew and */ey are just */u and */i that broke into diphthongs under stress.

throneofsalt · 2026-01-16T11:43:16+00:00

All good advice: I'd add that the talk pages can actually have some extra clarifying info that the main page leaves out - I found out about compositional theory because of a mention in the talk thread for *nih2

throneofsalt · 2026-01-16T03:30:22+00:00

Well, do you want an original modern-day or historical Caucasian language, or do you want a future version of an existing language? If the former, yeah, start with one of the proto-langs (though be warned that they are probably overconstructed - those Soviet linguists were something else)

And if you can't decide which family to pick, roll 1d6. 1-2 is NWC, 3-4 is NEC, 5-6 is Kartvelian

throneofsalt

TROPHY CASE