Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

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Astraios
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Astraios »

Shrdlu wrote:lack of low wovels
xD

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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Shrdlu »

Astraios wrote:
Shrdlu wrote:lack of low wovels
xD
Meant Open vowel. :roll:
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Aurora Rossa
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Aurora Rossa »

Shrdlu wrote:When I was younger I had this idea that it would be faster to think in a polysyntetic language. It probably isn't insipired by anything, other then that the lack of nasals, lack of bilabial plosives and lack of low wovels comes from Salishian languages, the Quileute language(Chimakuan language) and the the Arapho language respectively. I've allways strived to stay true to natlangs(with a twist) because I believe that it is more of a challenge than just doing something.
Never heard of a language lacking low vowels. I have heard that Arabic lacks /a/ as an independent phoneme, but even it has the low vowel /æ/ to fill that role.

Edit: Ok your newest post clarifies things a bit. My bad.
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finlay
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by finlay »

open vowel and low vowel mean the same thing you know

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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Shrdlu »

finlay wrote:open vowel and low vowel mean the same thing you know
Oh crap. That explains alot of thing, because I was writing from memory and had forgot that I usually write low vowels.
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Astraios
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Astraios »

Hey, I was xDing at the fact that you wrote "wovels" rather than "vowels", not at lacking low vowels.

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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Shrdlu »

Astraios wrote:Hey, I was xDing at the fact that you wrote "wovels" rather than "vowels", not at lacking low vowels.
I didn't even notice that.
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roninbodhisattva
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by roninbodhisattva »

Bump.

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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by SHiNKiROU »

Kumiko
- Japanese syllable structure
- Chinese and Polish sounds
- words from mainly Chinese, English and Lojban
- Lojban grammar
- writing system based on Korean and Linephon
- Proto-Kumiko's grammar is based on logical, imperative and functional programming languages
and a sketch language:
- phonology away from Arabic, Na'vi and Klingon
- phonology inclined to Slavic languages
- semantics from SQL
- syntax and morphology are not created yet, but it will be Ithkuil-like

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Nortaneous
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Nortaneous »

Proto-Kett is a blatantly European-lookalike lang intended to look like a fantasylang version of Polish. (edit: with a bit of Hungarian thrown in, of course)
Last edited by Nortaneous on Mon Sep 05, 2011 7:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Latinist13 »

Léxorfa was inspired at first by Latin and Greek in terms of the structure of its grammar, (a large number of declensions, masculine/feminine/neuter nouns, large number of cases, fusional morphology), lexicon, and vowel system (I use an acute instead of a macron simply because I learned to type that first, so I find it simply easier- I use a macron in handwritten notes). The romanization was partially inspired by the IPA and Basque (grapheme <x> for /∫/), and partially my own desire to avoid digraphs (using Greek zeta and xi for /dz/ and /ts/ respectively). It uses an abugida boustrophedon script because I thought it looked neat. As I looked up more things, I began to steal some vocabulary from various language families, e.g. abu- "father or father's brother," orso- "house," esurga- "priest or scholar or learned professional," and dreskua- "mind or spirit or reason," which come from from Arabic, Mongolian, and Basque, which are sometimes imported whole (abu) or severely altered to match my aesthetics and grammar (zorkin (meaning witch)-> esurga (priest)) without any concious regard to regular sound changes... I admit that it is a little n00bish and some elements (namely the evidentiality particles, the abundance of moods, the affricates, and the uses of the middle voice) might be a little kitchen sinkish or at least overly ambitious. However, it is my most complete conlang and conculture to date, which isn't saying much. I've got a whole bunch of sketchlangs and culture sketches that I map out from time to time, but none of them have come to fruition as full scale projects.
Last edited by Latinist13 on Tue Sep 06, 2011 1:14 am, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by ---- »

Kinál is heavily influenced by North American native languages; it's got a similar sound set and is highly agglutinative, as well as consonant clusters that can become pretty horrendous.

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äreo
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by äreo »

Ksso takes after:
-Määda, my first legit (and semi-defunct) conlang, whose spirit sort of lives on in Ksso, in terms of grammar (left-branching, often OSV, complex verbs, lots of cases, etc.) and aesthetics (lots of vowels, sexy consonant clusters, and <eo>, among other things).
-Finnish and Estonian, mainly through Määda.
-Ōgami, a dialect of the Miyako language, grammatically and phonologically.
-Hawai'ian, mostly phonology-wise.

Ascima mresa óscsma sáca psta numar cemea.
Cemea tae neasc ctá ms co ísbas Ascima.
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Christopher Schröder
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Christopher Schröder »

Illyrian (with perhaps painful transparency) is designed to resemble —
Middle Dutch — < gh > as a possible spelling of /g/, merger of masculine and feminine singular definite articles to tha
Dutch — use of < ij >, which can represent either /i:/ or /ɛi/, < sch > for /ʃ/
French, Frisian — circumflex marks long vowels â ê î ô û, also < eu, ou > for /œ: u:/, lots of unpronounced written final consonants, merger of /ai ei/ to /ɛː/
Middle French — use of eû as a variant of û to spell /y:/, cf. Mod. Fr. j'ai eu, nous eûmes, at the end of a word, /i/ is generally written < y >
English — erratic application of sound changes, doublets of the same word having come to mean different things (clocke "bell" and cloche "cloak") and echt (non-gendered third-person emphatic form)); slightly nuanced synonyms (including blesse, fleure, floure, blute, flute, all meaning roughly "flower"); large numbers of loanwords which have become everyday vocabulary — cf. lud, lachert, sorcelleria, littératura, cloche, horologe; final < e >, often descended from /ə ər/ has come to be pronounced /a/; changing a lot of vowels to /ɛ/ because it makes me think of highly affected speech.
Scots — use of syllable-final < ch > for what was once /x/, and what is now either unpronounced or non-syllabic /i/ in certain cases
Italian — lots of words ending in /a/ and /ia/, both of Latinate and non-Latinate origin, loss of neuter gender
Russian and Hungarian — provide vocabulary such as imia, Majarsagh, almos, theve (lit. "given name", "Hungary", "slumber", "tree") and others which appear to come from nowhere
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by vampireshark »

As for the languages I've posted quite a bit on/in:
Telèmor: It's a Romance-based conlang, most heavily based on Portuguese and French, with some vocabulary influenced by Hungarian, Bulgarian, Japanese, and German, and German V2 word order. The orthography comes from Romanian, Portuguese, and Italian.

Ilian: Mostly Hungarian and Finnish in some of the grammar and phonotactics with the nasal vowels coming from French, but the vocabulary is largely either Latinate, Germanic, or self-created. The permission of syllabic [l] and [r] comes from Croatian and Hindi. The orthography was something I came up with to avoid diacritics on the consonants, as a diacritic stew would not have been pretty. (I've done it before... oh, boy. That language was a bonafide mess.)

Oshaháru: The word stem system arises from Hebrew/Arabic/Maltese, with the actual words itself coming from what sounds good to me, the counting system/count words coming partly from Japanese, and the word ordering is somewhat Classical Arabic-based. The script itself is based off of Hebrew and Thai.

Glaagh/Luxa: It's meant to be completely outlandish, but there is some Arabic influence with the emphatic consonants.
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Curlyjimsam »

My conlangs don't tend to be based on anything in particular or, if they are, there's such a blend of influences that the individual inspirations tend not to be strongly apparent. That said, there may be some unconscious inspirations going on. For instance, I tend to liken the Old Viksen culture to the Anglo-Saxons in many respects, and if you squint a bit there are resemblences between the Old Viksen languages and Old English - for instance a preponderance of <þ> (which occurs frequently in Diffian and Common Old Viksen as it is the most frequent case ending). But this may be stretching things a bit far, and perhaps its merely the choice of that particular letter for that sound that leads to the resemblence. Here's an example - it doesn't look that much like OE, I don't think:
Gallaþ kas snóaþ ge, Yitaþ púrida úŕinaks árók ań bogdú. Vaúa lia eþú úŕinaaþ i basaþ ú lia Untúaþ í; várókía lia eþí úŕinaíaþ i mímaþ ú lia Imíaþ.
Certainly by modern Viksen I think any particular resemblence to any real language has been eradicated - I wasn't aiming for an outcome particularly like any other language when I wrote the sound changes. Here's the same couple of sentences again, from two thousand years later:
Źid e puz gónj ázúk á bog dav hin kaz á du. A Ótu, ye edu djig igozu id wu yæ, wu. A Imi, ye ezji méi mim id wu yæ, wu.
Similarly, Atlian culture has developed some similarities to that of Japan - and I think you can see phonological similiarities in the language as well, more strongly this time. Some example sentences:
Ka ikudo pozopu pu musse ukahu.

Ikutassu krü kepu u ssene uhu ayehu.

Yi goomessi owido kyi mu Akitaassessi.
(<ss> = /ʃ/, <p> = /f/, <h> = zero)

But again this is probably accidental - I wasn't aiming for a Japanese flavour when I developed the sound changes, and the proto-language doesn't look anything like Japanese at all (example sentence: *Tí potesum wél, hai kwó kúti is tí lekel.)

Probably the only major language when I'm aware of a definite influence is Imperial Naktic, which is in some ways analogous to Latin in terms of its position within the linguistic history of my world, and has several internal similarities to it as well. The phoneme inventory is very similar to Latin:

/p b t d k g ʔ/
/m n/
/f s x h/
/w j l r/

/a e i o u/ (+ long forms)

IN also has considerable grammatical similarity to Latin (whereas the languages above aren't that similar to the languages they outwardly resemble in morphosyntactic terms): five cases and two numbers, not dissimilar verbal system ... Unfortunately I don't think I have any lengthy examples of the language as yet, but I do think the resemblence is there.

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Nortaneous
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Nortaneous »

One of these days I'd like to see a conlang that "doesn't look like anything" that doesn't look like a conlang. There seem to be a lot of stereotypical conlang features that keep cropping up: the two most notable are one or two stop/fricative series usually distinguished by voice (along with a SAE inventory in general, especially for consonants) and acutes (especially r-acute for some reason).

Maybe once I get around to reworking Gadaye and the Hathic languages I'll get around to doing something that doesn't fall into that trap. (I'd also like to think Renzell doesn't, but Renzell is just insane.)
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by TaylorS »

Nortaneous wrote:One of these days I'd like to see a conlang that "doesn't look like anything" that doesn't look like a conlang. There seem to be a lot of stereotypical conlang features that keep cropping up: the two most notable are one or two stop/fricative series usually distinguished by voice (along with a SAE inventory in general, especially for consonants) and acutes (especially r-acute for some reason).

Maybe once I get around to reworking Gadaye and the Hathic languages I'll get around to doing something that doesn't fall into that trap. (I'd also like to think Renzell doesn't, but Renzell is just insane.)
My conlang Alpic's phonology is pretty much boring SAE. It's morphology has a feel of both an archaic IE lang and a Uralic or Altaic language, which is intentional because Alpic is part of a language family that is a sister family to IE. The only truly un-SAE feature of Alpic is Active-Stative alignment.

On the other hand, my current project, Kanussetian, has only one a single stop series and a single fricative series and a Finnish-like syllable structure. Oh, and definiteness is marked on verbs. :mrgreen:

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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Culden »

Xokal is meant to be Mesoamerican Linguistic Area like (ignore what's in my sig, I've updated since). The new thing I'm toying around with is going to be somewhere between Arabic and sort of generic Slavic in terms of phonology. Sadly, I get working on phonology and don't ever stop, so I've never gotten more than a couple of words and a tiny, tiny bit of grammar done (then again, whatever I do, I'm doing for an Honors thesis, so it has to be really polished).
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Ulan »

Eddy wrote: Never heard of a language lacking low vowels. I have heard that Arabic lacks /a/ as an independent phoneme, but even it has the low vowel /æ/ to fill that role..


iirc arapaho lacks any low vowel

edit--
Also
pataari: Numic/Arapaho mash, navajo words peppered in
chuj: bits and pieces of various turkic and semetic langs, bits of tibetan, some borrowings from chinook jargon, some reused bits from pataari, others that I have forgotten by now
Last edited by Ulan on Tue Sep 06, 2011 11:42 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by 8Deer »

I decided to start my first real foray into conlanging with a language family. This might seem ambitious, but I don't think I'm going to into detail with any of the grammar. It's more to just get an idea of how to come up with realistic sound changes and derivation. Plus, I'm really interested in historical linguistics.

Proto-Qamic: An Eskimo rip off with voiced stops. And dental fricatives. I guess it has a bit of Quechua influence as well, especially in it's vocabullary. All three other langs are derived from this one.

Hamih: Supposed to be reminiscent of Algonquian.

Amie: This one actually didn't really turn out like any particular language or language family but still feels vaguely Native American. Maybe a bit like French too, I dunno. I can't quite put my finger on it.

Unnamed: Exact same consonant inventory as Hawaiian. More of an experiment than a serious project. It's also an opportunity for me to test out a conlang with extensive allophony.

Of all my experiments, I'd say Hamih is the one I'm most pleased with and most likely to develop further.

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roninbodhisattva
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by roninbodhisattva »

bump.

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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Nannalu »

I've just clambered my way through a conlang called Umík:
• Kannow
• Nuxálk
• Ithkuil (so much inspirationnnn)
• Koasati
• Georgian
• Ts'ez
I've trying an attempt at a germlang of Scandinavia called Gothlandic (Götlåndska):
• Swedish
• Norwegian
• Old Swedish
• Small little parts of Danish
• Scottish Gaelic
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masako
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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by masako »

sano wrote:Nahuatl + Arabic + Japanese + my personal tastes.
I should add that I have recently realized that Kala is what I wanted when I began to fumble about with Qatama. It wasn't until after a few years on this board and all of the valuable information that breezes across these pages that I came to understand what I needed to do to make Kala.

[read: Thanks everyone...you inspired me.]

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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Post by Kereb »

well, this was an oldass post, and the poster is still an iseleaku so there probably is little chance they're still active to see this ...

bornforwater wrote:My language grew out of a need to have a secret language to write things in. I had nosey parents. :p
[snip]
At first it was a chaotic mess of nonsense. The language was very useful to me, but only because of the fact that early on I had a 'native' writing system for it. I used this to encode English notes and such. I had no idea what phonetics was, or how grammar worked, so the language itself was useless. I can't even read most of the stuff I tried to write in the language early on.

After the language was about two years old, though, I went through the dictionary and standardised spelling and made conjugations standard for verbs. Now, a few years later, it's still kicking and doing fine.
[snip]
This is like ... the SAME story of how I got started. I needed a way to hide my writing from a dad who couldn't quite grasp These Hu-Mon Concepts You Call Pri-Va-Cy and Per-So-Nal-Space, in the days when we had no computer (GET THE FUCK OFF MY LAWN) and I was making up stories and worlds and all kinds of projects that were none of the old man's goddammittin business.
But I got started with conscripts. Alphabets first and then some more 'foreign' types like abugidas and one honest-to-jegus syllabary. Scripts bled into my interest in natural languages, which led to making up constructed languages of my own, tied to my fiction projects etc etc etc.
But yeah the origin of it all was in secrecy, and it's left me with a couple of language-less con-scripts that I still use as "shorthand" for english.
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