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Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2011 4:39 pm
by bornforwater
My language grew out of a need to have a secret language to write things in. I had nosey parents. :p

It also helped that right around the time of their good-intentioned nosing about, I was a teenager and taking both French and German in high school. Being that my mother speaks German and at one point knew quite a bit of French, I didn't see either as a viable option for privacy. Thus, I made my own language.

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.

Haven't regretted this little rebellion yet. :p

Oh! And thanks to my mother's polyglot-ness, I decided to make the words in my language completely (well, for the most part) from scratch early on. Thus, it looks and sounds (and for the most part works) nothing quite like either of the two 'inspiration' languages.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2011 4:57 pm
by Nortaneous
hoooo boy here we go

Kannow: Georgian, mostly, although I don't think what I have now even remotely resembles Georgian. The inventory is pretty Salishan, the tense system is a heavy modification of the one in Latin, and there are a few bits in there that mirror some of the oddities of Icelandic. Also, obviously, Cornish (I think the VSO thing came from Celtic langs in general, actually.) sure where the noun class system came from.

Tharu: Tsou, Khmer, and Greek. Not much I can say about this, since it mostly came out of me getting pissed at the lack of conlangs out there with extensive allophony.

Enzielu: Basque, although I somehow managed to get the coronals the wrong way around. I think the coronal harmony came from Sanskrit.

Renzell: Practically no natlang influence here, and most of what does exist is from English.

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Gadaye: The general aesthetic is very Australian. I'm still looking for natlangs to steal grammatical bits from, though. Maybe Chinese, since there will probably be a lot of homophones that can only be distinguished by classifiers or something similar.

Hathe: Hawaiian and Turkish. It's also the most grammatically conservative of the Hathic langs, so whatever I get for Gadaye will also hold here.

Tzerei: Massive Enzielu superstrate influence, so.

Kanagy: Hungarian, Maori, and whichever natlang I stole the nasal allophony rules from. (I know it came from something, but I have no idea what.)

Ketas: Rotokas, Piraha, Xavante, etc. And Arabic, I guess. Haven't worked out what I want to do with the grammar, but it's probably going to be as completely absurd as the phonology. (also I'm totally making this VSO with preverbal TAM particles and no grammatical affixes :P )

Kastas: Oh, fuck, what's that one lang? Oogami? That. And Arabic, again. And the Balto-Slavic langs, sort of.

Gallezh: Breton.

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Insular Kett: Considering that it's basically Arrernte with an elflang aesthetic, a halfassed trigger system, and a bilabially trilled affricate, the influences should be obvious.

Continental Kett: Old IE langs. Hittite, Lydian, etc. And the Slavic langs, sort of.

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Arve: Hahahahaha oh god. English, mostly, although there are things in the phonology from Finnish, Estonian, Danish, Nias, and I can't even remember what else, and the whole thing is designed to look like German.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2011 5:53 pm
by Chuma
I've been reworking my first conlang over and over - it was originally inspired by Esperanto, because it was before I knew of any other conlangs. But it has changed shape many times, and now I don't think it has any particular inspiration, but probably feels somewhat Germanic because that's the only family I speak well.

The Choir Conlang is meant to sound good as a ceremonial language; as such, it's probably mainly inspired by Latin, and maybe a little bit of Sanskrit.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2011 10:10 pm
by Foolster41
In a nutshell:
Image
(The Lizard-folk "language" in the game) :D

Also, a bit of Latin (in that the language is very agglutinative. The script is heavily inspired by Arabic and Hindi.

Edit: Darn those pwned.com changing my image on me. :P

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Mon Jun 06, 2011 11:45 pm
by communistplot
Hm, well, this one's easy, for Yagalian, at first I was really inspired by Lithuanian, as you can see from some of the words I still have left, if I haven't borked them into unrecognisability. Then, I left that project for Kayalian, which is basically a Latin clone, it's sister language, Fielian, being a Scots Gaelic clone. Then I returned to Yagalian after a semester of Intro to Ling & Hist Ling, and I found influence from Native langs, especially the Tripartite system of Nez Perce, with the orthographical looking-likeness of a Finno-Ugric lang. For the verbs, I have a sorta Japanese thing going on there, maybe, kinda. But, I'm not done with it yet, so, we'll see how it turns out in the end. =]

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2011 12:05 am
by Risla
Nortaneous wrote:Ketas: Rotokas, Piraha, Xavante, etc. And Arabic, I guess. Haven't worked out what I want to do with the grammar, but it's probably going to be as completely absurd as the phonology. (also I'm totally making this VSO with preverbal TAM particles and no grammatical affixes :P )
South Eresian has grammatical affixes, at least (though only one on the nouns, and that's the plural and semiderivational), but no grammatical adjectives. At least my preverbal TAM particles are largely optional and tend to be inferred from context, especially the tense ones, and actually the small amount of aspect marking in the language is done on the verbs themselves.

(Also if you steal my animacy system [which finlay didn't, fortunately for him] I may have to murder you in your sleep. :P)

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2011 5:36 pm
by Rik
Gevey - to try and work out why a language works (I was young, very young, and quite naive)

Akat - because polysynthesis is cool, innit!

O Yis - on account of it not being Dothraki ... no, siree; definitely not a hint of Dothraki to be found in any part of this conlang.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2011 5:47 pm
by pahaase.yenipon
My constructed language, Pahāse Yenipon, is based primarily on Japanese, but with vocabulary influenced by Standard Mandarin and Khmer. The grammar is heavily agglunative, with verbs changing ending based on time but not person, and nouns are marked with suffix particles as in Japanese, and the word order is broadly (topic), subject, (object), verb. In general, I do more things with verbs in the grammar: nouns do not really change based on grammar and all noun morphology is governed by participles, while verbs form compound tenses and shift into participles a lot. At first, noun markers were treated similar to the Latin noun cases, although I moved away from this in favour of a closer representative of the Japanese system. The script evolved over a period of five years from some runes I made up, which I gradually changed and made more cursive until they reached the present letter forms.

In the future I plan on making another language with a grammar not based on any natural language and with features such as noun gender and sound mutation to inflect words that are not present in and very different from Pahāse Yenipon.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2011 8:11 pm
by Nortaneous
Risla wrote:
Nortaneous wrote:Ketas: Rotokas, Piraha, Xavante, etc. And Arabic, I guess. Haven't worked out what I want to do with the grammar, but it's probably going to be as completely absurd as the phonology. (also I'm totally making this VSO with preverbal TAM particles and no grammatical affixes :P )
South Eresian has grammatical affixes, at least (though only one on the nouns, and that's the plural and semiderivational), but no grammatical adjectives. At least my preverbal TAM particles are largely optional and tend to be inferred from context, especially the tense ones, and actually the small amount of aspect marking in the language is done on the verbs themselves.

(Also if you steal my animacy system [which finlay didn't, fortunately for him] I may have to murder you in your sleep. :P)
Damnit, right, I meant adjectives.

And heh, Ketas does have an animacy system (inherited from Gadaye), but I haven't worked out the specifics of it yet.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 3:09 am
by Bristel
- In-world Conlangs -
Athanic: Influence mainly from Finnish and Estonian (morphology, phonology, phonotactics), but morphology and morphophonemics are also inspired by Celtic languages (initial consonant mutations) and probably Sindarin inspired as well (infix -i for plural), which overlaps with Finnish for that small inspiration as well. This conlang was originally called Hafoc and went through an almost complete phonological and influence overhaul.

Teskwan: Latin and Greek are the main influences on morphology and grammar, although the phonology and phonotactics are borrowed with permission from Nortaneous's original Proto-Tharu. (this reminds me that I need to start working on this one again)

Squalipsh: This one is heavily influenced by several languages in the Salishan family. Halkomelem, Nuxálk, Squamish, Lushootseed and Montana Salish were all researched for this conlang. I think that Halkomelem provided the phonology influence.

Doo Dnye: (working name) This one is very recent, and is very heavily inspired by the Yélî Dnye language near Papua New Guinea.

- Non-conworld conlangs -
Tenga Fir: (working name) This one is also very recent, and is supposed to be a daughter language of Old Irish, but may end up being completely different. This conlang is just working out whether or not I want a fully Celtic conlang alongside Athanic which is only Celtic inspired.

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I'm making a distinction between "in-world" conlangs and "non-conworld" conlangs because as of right now, only the first four will be used in my unnamed conworld and the last will just be an exercise of linguistics and diachronics while I'm learning Old Irish.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 3:58 am
by Nortaneous
Proto-Tharu = very early version of Kannow

also, Tenga Fir? :P

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 6:56 am
by Dewrad
By and large, most of my a posteriori conlangs are aesthetically inspired by natlangs I like the look of. Frequently, however, this inspiration is fairly superficial, extending only to phonetics and orthography: Classical Tailancan's look and "feel" is heavily inspired by Classical Greek, but grammatically the inspiration is much more Old Irish. Sχaskari is supposed to look like an Iranic language, but I've taken a lot of grammatical inspiration from Old Norse, German and Hindi.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 7:43 am
by Bristel
Nortaneous wrote:Proto-Tharu = very early version of Kannow

also, Tenga Fir? :P
I was wondering what Proto-Tharu ended up being.

No, nothing to do with Doom. Tenga = language in Proto/Old Irish.

Tenga Fir = language of man in Old Irish, which after some daughterlang creation will probably collapse into Tengfir or Tengfer or even Temfir.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 9:47 am
by äreo
Pralma: Pretty much ripped off Yélî Dnye for the consonants (minus its laminal/apical distinction) and the vowels as well. Phonotactics are more Finnically influenced, as is the grammar.

Määda: Takes a more Estonian-like turn with the vowels. Consonants influenced a bit by Belgian French. Grammar rather unique, not really any natlang influence.

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Aapileska: Took a few ideas from various IE langs for sounds.

Ápilêque: Français 8)

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Vosǫ: Lithuanian and Latvian (orthography, vowels) Estonian (consonant gradation), Polish (diphthongized nasal vowels). Grammar is also slightly Finnic.

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Qwaa: Athabaskan, especially Navajo.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Wed Jun 08, 2011 12:50 pm
by cromulant
Gac phonology came from glossolalia, before I knew a thing about linguistics. I was going for a Hindi-esque aesthetic without having ever heard Hindi. It's evolved quite a bit since then. It has a smallish, rather vanilla phoneme set with a plethora of consonant clusters. I try not to make it look/sound like any natlang, but influences of English, Spanish, Chinese, some sort of generic Austronesian thing (particularly Malagasy), and the Australian sprachbund, among others, leak in.

Its syntax began with a single idea: an isolating, postpositional SVOp language with alternate OpSV order where p is a dual-use particle marking aspect and object. Then there was a critical, watershed reinterpretation of that idea: it became direct-inverse, the V and p no longer acting as case markers, but encoding direct and inverse voices through their relative position, allowing OVSp and SpOV order as well. So now, Gac is an isolating, direct-inverse language and all the grammatical features I've developed are extensions or implications of this typology, or are at least chosen to integrate well with it.

There's very little natlang borrowing going on; it is for the most part my """brainchild.""" One exception is that I adopted a more complicated version of the Maori system of possessive classifications, because it seemed like a natural fit. The determiners are vaguely inspired by Hawai'ian articles; the verbal morphology is inspired by Spanish adjectives. I've also used CALS and WALS to help me fill many gaps in the grammar, and some of the ideas I've used, I've learned from WALS. For example, formal identity between interrogative and indeterminate pronouns--this integrated well into Gac grammar--the two functions of these pronouns are disambiguated through more of the word order trickery I can't seem to get enough of.

EDIT: have changed named of conlang.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 2:39 pm
by Izambri
Hellesan (Hel·lesà) Inspired by my native tongue, Catalan. The sound, orthography and dialectal system of the language is very Catalanesque (with a little from Italian, Cretan Greek and Occitan), and the morphology and syntax is basically SAE-like. The lexicon is almost completely unrelated to any of our languages (almost because some roots are stolen from Aegean-Tyrsenian languages and PIE). It's not a Romlang.

Sarden (Sardenos) Inspired by Archaic and Classic Greek and Latin. And to a lesser degree, Sanskrit.

Madinesian (Madyanthili) Inspired by Hittite.

Peran (nBeranu) Inspired by Iberian and Mycenaean, with some help from Ancient Basque.

Sate Inspired by Minoan and Myceanean, with a Aegean base.

Elnian (Eleniadh) Inspired by Celtic languages with a Sindarin base for the phonology. Little worked and largely redone by now, it has some Romance-Germanic taste, but it retains the Celtic flavour.

Cassardian A loosely Babylonian/Akkadian flavour.

Nkûd Bantu morphology with Basque syntax and a Romance-Celtic-Germanic flavour; with Khuzdul as a starting point.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 6:39 pm
by Grimalkin
Fuoshi - Chinese phonology, Vietnamese orthography (now not so much because I've added <q> for /?/), with a grammar heavily influenced by East Asian languages.

Maica - Japanese phonology and overall look, with a Uralic-esque system of vowel harmony and agglutination. Maica and Fuoshi have strongly influenced each other but are unrelated.

Irosemos - it's an a priori IE-lang so it's not 'based' on a particular language (other than PIE, obv). It has ended up with a Baltic flavour due to its use of macrons, :sh and lots of final -s.

Xarsa - I don't know. This beast probably shouldn't have been allowed to live. It's probably slightly reminiscent of various Amerindian languages, but isn't based on any one language in particular.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 9:11 pm
by Zaris
Şanus was inspired by the proto-Germanic sound changes from PIE.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 9:27 pm
by roninbodhisattva
Xarsa - I don't know. This beast probably shouldn't have been allowed to live. It's probably slightly reminiscent of various Amerindian languages, but isn't based on any one language in particular.
I'd like to hear more about this.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 10:12 pm
by Bedelato
Bengedian was strongly influenced by Old English in terms of phonology and syntax. Lexical sources include various Germanic and Romance sources mixed in with a priori bits. It wasn't consciously based on anything though.

As far as changes, here's what I can recall right now:

Originally, Bengedian had only a genitive-nongenitive contrast in nouns, and there was a concrete-abstract gender distinction. I got rid of the genders very quickly, and expanded to a Germanic-style NOM-ACC-DAT-GEN case system.
The basic inflectional system was already established by this time, apart from some minor changes in the form of the endings. It's actually been pretty stable.

This was all before I joined the board; I was a lot more of a n00b then, and there's still some relics of that early stage floating around.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 10:15 pm
by cybrxkhan
My list (many of these are heavily incomplete conlangs, though):

Aidisese - Greek + Latin + Japanese phonology and aesthetic; Bantu noun classes; throw in Japanese style particles; grammar is a mesh of all the previous languages
Merthic - Irish with Semitic triconsonantal roots and a tendency towards analytical grammar structures like Chinese, and Japanese honorific system
Proto-Yuh - Aztec/Mayan + Polynesian
Itholian - Italian
Keintapan - German + Russian aesethic; insane agglutination, ala Uralic
Athlian - Arabic
Pokotan - generic Native American with triconsonantal roots
Chan - vaguely SE Asian phonology and orthography; largely isolating ala East Asian
Proto-Atosanic/Djakhetian - Ancient Egyptian aesethic; Bantu noun classes; some Japanese-esque particles

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Thu Jun 09, 2011 10:55 pm
by ná'oolkiłí
Phonologically, Náles started out like a generic fantasy language but with a bunch of lateral fricatives, but I've retooled it several times to be more realistic and to make the orthography deeper. In its current version, it's kind of like Finnish with prenasalized stops and pharyngeals. I'm always playing around with allophony ideas and so can't ever get it completely pinned down. Morphologically, I've adopted a lot of features from Georgian, Abkhaz, and Navajo and have a fairly complex gradation/mutation system inspired by Celtic and Finnic languages.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 3:59 pm
by Dauyn
Taalen was inspired by Old Irish, Cherokee, and Lakhota grammatically, and by Cherokee, Finnish, and Qenya phonetically.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 7:12 pm
by Lyhoko Leaci
Zukish: It started out as just a language I felt like making one day, initially I took some stuff from Spanish, and then German more recently, and occasionally random stuff that I happened to think of at the time. The writing system is based off of Hebrew, at least in the general shape of the characters, if not the design and the writing system.

Myonian: A sister language of English, but also an attempt to change as much as i can get away with so that it looks similar to English, but with differences to confuse people. (Mainly false friends)

Ancaron: Based on East Asian langs mainly, but without tone, both for the words and the writing system. The grammar is more a bunch of stuff that was thrown together and then blended.

Re: Post your conlang's inspiration

Posted: Sun Jun 12, 2011 2:04 pm
by Shrdlu
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 open vowel 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.