Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

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Chengjiang
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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by Chengjiang »

(Most of these resemblances were not planned.)

Janaharian sounds Iranian/Slavic and its grammar is Austronesian/Semitic.

Undreve sounds "Altaic" and has an Afroasiatic/Bantu grammar.

Luworese sounds like some kind of strange Finnic/Nahuan/Austronesian mess and has an as yet ill-defined polysynthetic grammar.

Chavakani sounds Fijian/Japonic and has a somewhat Polynesian/Yoruboid grammar.

Mvithizu sounds Germanic/Bantu and, miraculously, has a somewhat Bantu-like (also somewhat Dyirbal) grammar.
Last edited by Chengjiang on Tue Nov 01, 2016 3:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.
[ʈʂʰɤŋtɕjɑŋ], or whatever you can comfortably pronounce that's close to that

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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by mèþru »

Khásoitoi/Proto-Kkasetean has a morphology somewhat based on English and Spanish and a syntax somewhat based on Spanish. I added Italian phonemes to Risensi and I plan to base the grammar on "bad" written English.
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!
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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by alynnidalar »

The phonology of Tirina was based on Hawaiian and Japanese, although it's less restrictive than either.
I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by Frislander »

OK, this is a big one. I'll only do the ones which have had a sizable amount of work put into them: a lot of my languages are begun and then scrapped (I'm sure many of you are like that).

Frislandian: it started out looking an awful lot like Finnish phonologically, however since the revision it is now a bit more like a Western European language like Icelandic, though there are still some weirdnesses such as prenasalised instead of voiced stops, and phonotactics with extremely tight restrictions on initial and final consonants. Over the course of the revision the language has also shifted from an almost entirely suffixing language to one with a few more prefixes (namely Ergative and Oblique marking), a system of theme-markers bearing a resemblance to the ones in PIE (though marking different things) and one or two of the cases have been dropped.

Kaita: this is phonologically Proto-Arapaho-Atsina with Wichita vowels and some intriguing vowel-glide merging. Grammatically it does more of its own thing, and could be said to be a good deal more Iroquoian than Algonquian.

Proto-Muyan: it's a weird one. I wanted a labialless language (I like those), and I wanted to do retroflexes and palatals and only one liquid /l/. When I revised it it gained aspiration, but didn't change very much otherwise. This gives it a bit of an Indo-Aryan feel. the vowels, on the other hand, are a bit like Big Nambas, only there is a length distinction in the front vowels as well. Grammatically it's a bit of hodgepodge, though it is heavily prefixing (even case is attached to the front of a noun) and uses classifiers for numerals and demonstratives. Actually, thinking about it now it might actually come closest to Munda.

Aikuu: well this is probably even weirder than Proto-Muyan. The phonology looks most like Pirahã minus labials and voiced stops, plus another fricative, plus a nasal and a rhotic, with a high-back-unrounded instead of a mid-back-rounded vowel. The grammar is something else entirely: a hierarchically-based agreement with one SAP; verbs which are maximally bi-valent and cannot take obliques; large numbers of serial verbs to make up for the shortfall; marked nominative, with a nominative noun inside a set of serial verbs marking a change of subject to that noun; and some irregular and suppletive imperatives.

Kokanãi: with this I wanted a phonology that looked a bit like Malagasy, but was different enough and "alien" enough to make it feel more like my own. To this end I removed the plain voiced and voiceless prenasalised stops, the voiced fricatives, the labial fricative /f/, /h/, the voiceless trilled affricate, nasals (as separate from prenasalised stops), /l/, changed the alveolar affricates to palatal ones and added the glides /w/ and /j/ and a glottal stop. I also lowered Malagasy's rounded vowel to /o/, and added a three way distinction between short, long and nasal vowels. Inadvertently, the result looks rather Tupian. The grammar bears some resemblances, with an "Austronesian" style voice system, though I've added a reflexive and each verb is inherently either Agent-trigger or Patient-trigger. The verbs also agree with the trigger and one of the "oblique" arguments (actually usually the agent) and there's verbal compounding and noun-incoporation. However, there is also a large number of particles with meanings varying from grammatical (e.g. negative, polar interrogative) to pragmatic(e.g. a particle which indicates the speaker's lower social status relative to the listener) and the determiner system is really something to behold.

I also have an unnamed language which looks like an Australian language minus the retroflexes and the laterals and plus the bilabial trill; Sóttem, a language which blends Ainu and Austronesian (e.g. both a pitch-accent and the velar nasal) while having a few other weird features (e.g. word-initial geminates), tripartite alignment, a ridiculous number of moods which includes a few evidentials, some formality distinctions and more incorporation; and a language I might do up some day and post as a collaborative language-family project called Iri-una, which is my take on Ryukyuan, though the phonology is even more reduced than Oogami.
https://frislander.tumblr.com/

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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by mèþru »

Frislander wrote:Kaita: this is phonologically Proto-Arapaho-Atsina with Wichita vowels and some intriguing vowel-glide merging. Grammatically it does more of its own thing, and could be said to be a good deal more Iroquoian than Algonquian.
Is this your Algonquianlang from our collaborative project that we both totally forgot about?
ìtsanso, God In The Mountain, may our names inspire the deepest feelings of fear in urkos and all his ilk, for we have saved another man from his lies! I welcome back to the feast hall kal, who will never gamble again! May the eleven gods bless him!
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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by Frislander »

mèþru wrote:
Frislander wrote:Kaita: this is phonologically Proto-Arapaho-Atsina with Wichita vowels and some intriguing vowel-glide merging. Grammatically it does more of its own thing, and could be said to be a good deal more Iroquoian than Algonquian.
Is this your Algonquianlang from our collaborative project that we both totally forgot about?
No, it's on the CBB. My Algo-lang doesn't really "count" in this thread because it's not "inspired by" Algonquian languages, it is an Algonquian language, and that constrains it somewhat.
https://frislander.tumblr.com/

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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by sanskacharu »

This looks like fun... Though, Ukumusi and Mupuasa don't truly have much in the way of inspiration, because of how I designed and developed them. I'll leave them out for now.

Ayakadiya has a fairly straightforward inspiration in Sumerian (what little we know of it), at least for the sound system and the phonotactics. I didn't include everything, though -- I removed Sumerian's case system, for the most part, though I kept (a version of) the split ergativity and the really long verbs and agglutination. Overall, I'd say the end product is fairly far removed from the original inspiration, at this point.

Ku Ṣili was a strange little attempt to mimic the sounds of Mon-Khmer languages (especially Khmae, also known as Khmer and Cambodian, which I had some experience with) without ever actually going to a reference grammar and looking at a distribution. Otherwise, Ku Ṣili's main inspiration tended to come entirely from whim decisions designed to be typologically unusual. (I was making it in a typology class for a grade. I am now laughing at my past self.) The pace of the class and the fact that much of it was based on a whim means that Ku Ṣili's needed a revision for some time.
My conlang family:
  • Ukumusi & Mupuasa -- Two peas in a pod. Tired of your nonsense.
  • Ku Ṣili -- Lonely Misfit. Can't make up its mind.
  • Ayakadiya -- Standoffish, self-important. Needs More Lexicon.

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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by Frislander »

Yet more inspirations:

Frislandian: The language has changed yet again on revision. The prenasalised stops are now gone, but a couple of new phonemes have been added and there is now strong vowel-reduction. the initial mutations have also been extended to cover alternations in the forms of affixes. The grammar has been slimmed-down a bit: verbs now only conjugate for one argument in a hierarchical fashion, with an old passive serving as a inverse, show stem alternations for aspect, and there are now only four cases. Overall the language if anything is starting to look a bit Saamic.

Ätara: Papuan, particularly Sepik in inspiration. The phonology is very small with 9 consonants with no fricatives, while there are six vowels in an imbalanced system: /i e ə a aː u/. Nouns take PNW-style prenominal clitics when they act as arguments except when they are focused. The language is pretty strongly polysynthetic, with verbs having hierarchical poly-personal marking and markers for a range of categories such as voice (which includes three applicatives), tense, aspect, modality and direction. There are also clitics for evidentiality and negation. However, unlike most Papuan languages the inflection is mostly prefixed and the syntax left-headed.
https://frislander.tumblr.com/

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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by Akangka »

My first (unnamed) conlang is based on a message which answers the question "How to design a language without noun" Which the answer looks like translating "I eat a burger" to "I eat it, it is big and it is burger". I forget the exact sentence used and the translation. When usually such conlang is done via non-finite verbs (Thus raising a objection whether if that word is actually noun with verb root), in this conlang, the only non-finite verb form is a converb, and thus the noun is grammatically expressed as finite verb. A example: "John reads a big newspaper" -> "read-3SG.SBJ-4SG.OBJ John-3SG.SBJ newspaper-4SG.SBJ big-4SG.SBJ". Note that the word order is very free. The same sentence can be reordered with the only change of meaning is focus. "big-4SG.SBJ read-3SG.SBJ-4SG.OBJ John-3SG.SBJ newspaper-4SG.SBJ" (translation: big is the newspaper that John read)

My second conlang, Asent'o is based on a wikipedia article that says both mass noun and atelic verbs can be described via cumulative reference.

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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by xxx »

I think the change for the "Whole language method of reading" for the next generation, just after my learning of reading, is at the source of my juvenile inspiration for ideograms...
then to passigraphy...
Which brought me to a priori (philosophical) languages...

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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by Swagcat »

Kpalte is a mix of west-african (especially in the verbal morphology and the syntax) and mayan in inspiration but I'm still working out noun classes and so far I'm thinking I might do something with only two or three genders, I've gotta do more research tho. For Kaimchaóng the inspiration was originally 'what if Irish and Mandarin had a baby' but it's evolved so much since then that it doesn't really look like either, and I ended up mixing in some stuff from Yoruba.... Huáltec is mainly Mayan in origin, but there's clicks too and some stuff from Xhosa. I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with Bukkya yet, it's got a ton of pre-nasalized consonants and ejective stops so I'm thinking Swahili and maybe some Quechua or Nahuatl. Not sure yet

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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by Raholeun »

Since people are reviving this old-ass thread anyway, I might just as well give my cent+cent.

My one and only conlang Sataw is not really an a posteriori conlang in the sense that it is mechanically derived from a proto-language. I'd rather call it an Austronesian-informed conlang. More specifically the indigenous aboriginal languages of Taiwan have been a great inspiration to me, although it must be said that the internal variety amongst these languages is big, big enough for me not to feel too limited by diachronic-realistic constraints.

Many before me have probably made the analogy between a conlang and a house. The foundations, the structure, walls, roof, etc. of my conlang-house are Formosan-esque. Tsou especially, has inspired me in the way it uses auxiliary verbs to handle most of the heavy lifting with regards to voice-marking. Now let's say the furniture and the decoration of the house are analogous to the morphology and the lexemes of a language. These parts are mostly of my own design, but again informed by Formosan languages.

Then there's a twist; the place is permanently inhabited by a Germanic fringe philosopher, who can't help but to stomp around, laughing manically, questioning everything there is to the house and, from the upper bedroom window, throws in some sieg heils when the neighbors walk by. But even this guy can't camouflage the fact that the house is actually a half-way house for all kinds of exotic travelers, who mostly come and go overnight and only rarely leave a mark. At the moment, this house is filled with a small army of Georgians, who are gambling, drinking heavily, intimidating the other occupants and knocking over antique Formosan vases in the process.
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Re: Post Your Conlang's Inspiration

Post by Raholeun »

By the way, Frislander, I'd be interested in having a closer look at Sóttem. The combination of word-initial geminates and tripartite marking sounds quite appealing.
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