zompist bboard

Exactly that, but please state the changes made that defer it from being a specific type of language (if any).

Post the type of language or conlang if you wish.

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I am also Zontas, for those of you wondering.

I drew most my inspiration for Terpish from Japanese and various Native American languages. The polysynthetic grammar borrowed heavily from languages like Inuktitut and Navajo for its basic mechanisms. The phonology also owes a lot to the Athabaskan family (which includes Navajo) with its use of lateral fricatives and affricates, ejective stops, and two-tone prosody. I have also been working on a script for the language inspired by Mayan hieroglyphics and the Hangul featural alphabet. The language also has a fairly elaborate sandhi system inspired by Sanskrit, particularly with the rules governing how vowels at morpheme boundaries merge.

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"There was a particular car I soon came to think of as distinctly St. Louis-ish: a gigantic white S.U.V. with a W. bumper sticker on it for George W. Bush."

Uscaniv is based on Etruscan. Most of the extant lexicon of Etruscan has can be found in the Uscaniv dictionary, some of the suffixes the grammar uses can be found and so forth. It was further influenced by Latin and Ancient Greek which I was studying at the time I started it. It's nom.-acc., has extensive verbal and nominal morphology, no adpositions, co-conjugating adverbs and no copula.

Imuthan is originally based on Bajoran from Star Trek, but has since moved entirely away from it, and now shows vestiges of inspiration from African languages (very generally, no specific ones), Russian, Icelandic and some Australian languages. It's case alignment is all semantic, though showing vestiges of nom.-acc. alignment. It's insanely complicated morphologically and intricate syntactically. It has a strict VSO word order and no subclause conjunctions, relying entirely on verbal forms to mark subservience.

Kiassan turasta is sound-wise inspired by the words spoken by the Axanar and Hoshi Sato in the Enterprise episode "Fight or Flight". It's ergative-absolutive-dative, marks the ergative and absolutive arguments on the verb, has attitude suffixes on nouns and is generally among my more non-Western conlangs. It's agglutinative and morphologically rather regular for a conlang of mine, which tend to be more irregular.

Lomanin is my oldest, probably based on Tolkienic languages originally, but now more Arabesque or Turkic. It's mostly agglutinative. It's more interesting feature is using word order to indicate tense.

Kìn-sang is my youngest. The concept was to do something Asian-sounding with complicated morphology. It's never gotten far; see my next answer below. I like it, but it seems stuck in a rut.

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vec

I've been realising that n general, I have to have some sort of vocabulary ready before starting work on the conlang. Stealing this from old books about Etruscan or Star Trek episodes seems to have been helpful for me. When I start from the phonology, I don't get anywhere. The languages that I started from scratch without an oustide corpus to spark the work never went really far for me.

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vec

All my main conlangs are diachronically derived from other people's conlangs, so the main inspiration in grammar is what the protolang provides and how I could turn it into something different but still plausible. These developments are often based on one or two fairly general morphosyntactic ideas, for instance, Cəssın undergoes a shift from AuxSOV and largely head-initial to SOV and largely head-final, with the original Aux and cliticized S+O pronouns ending up as suffixes on the lexical verb. This is not based on any particular natlang though.

More direct influences can be found in phonology and orthography. is supposed to vaguely resemble African languages (fairly isolating, frequent initial <mp nt nts ŋk mv nz>, mid-open vowels written <ɛ ɔ>...). has a flavor of its own quite unlike anything I've seen in natlangs, based on names that existed in the conworld already. was originally supposed to look a bit like Turkish, with vowel harmony, <ş ç>, and agglutinative verbs, although the similarity is not close. For I had nothing special in mind, but it turned out quite Polynesian-like (CV syllable structure, many vowel sequences, lots of <r> and <g>...). was meant to resemble Northern American languages (none in particular, but mostly Algonquian/Iroquoian; the parent language was vaguely North American already too), with long words, an /i e a o/ vowel system with nasalization contrast, coda /ʔ h/ (with the glottal stop written <ʔ>), and some unusual consonant clusters in other places too. Which worked out quite well IMO. My newest sketch, Munnaaqiú, starts from a (C)V(V)(ʔ) language with a quite minimal phoneme inventory and tries to make it look like Inuktitut.

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Blog:
Conlangs: | | |

Baranxe'i takes some of its earlier roots from German and Latin the current version is phonologically inspired by PIE/Sanskrit (hello there, <kś>), largely.
Lexical influence comes from Hindi and Finnish (both as in "I liked a word so I copied it" (see my sig's kari = karhu = bear), and as in "that's some interesting semantics, let's steal them), and again, German.

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- Another conlanging/conworlding blog.
Latest post:

Pabappa was inspired by the unnamed and undescribed 'simple baby language' in H G Wells' The Time Machine, which I read a kids' version of when I was about 11 years old. It was meant for a planet full of people like the Eloi except that they were braver and actually fought back against the mutants who were trying to control them. Andanese was basically inspired by nothing, because I was trying to be original in every possible way and also be very logical. The rest of my conlangs are based off of mixes of various natlangs (though I never borrow any actual vocabulary).

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

My current project is Mekoshan, an English descendant. It's phonology is inspired by various Afro-Asiatic languages. It's verbal morphology is inspired by modern spoken French (thanks Yuiel), various Bantu languages, and by the possibilities of polypersonal agreement more generally.

Alpic is essentially an Active-Stative sister of the IE languages that has developed many SAE features (like articles, grammatical tense, and periphrastic verbal constructions) from being spoken near German, Italian, and Romansch speakers in Switzerland for centuries. It, in addition, has huge numbers of loan words from Celtic (rix > riksa = king), Romance (mercado > merkadu = store), and High German (Burg > burko = town) sources. But it also has its own quirks, like Fluid-S Active-Stative verbal alignment and a set of applicative verb suffixes cognate with PIE adpositions/adverbs.

Phonologically, South Eresian is very much based on languages in the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area, particularly owing influence to Nahuatl. I also wouldn't be surprised at all to hear that there's some Salishan language somewhere with an identical phoneme inventory, too, although SE phonotactics are quite a bit more sane.

Grammatically? It's not really based on anything in particular. I've woggled off with ideas from various languages, but it was largely built from the ground up, and I'd be hard-pressed to think of a language that it really resembles grammatically. It's heavily based on my old, now-scrapped language, Mazdrivonian, which was also very much a priori, but it has quite a few features that were definitely not in that either.

Of my newer languages, the phonology of Nalchast is very heavily based on that of Persian, and grammatically it's just an extremely isolating language with a complex animacy hierarchy. Cwindoià is supposed to sound European-ish, Elvish-ish, although the addition of prenasalized stops seems to have applied some other flavor to it as well; grammatically, I have basically nothing except that it'll be prefixing and polysynthetic, since I've never done a polysynthetic language.

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High Eolic? I don't really know. Hungarian/Finnish for the cases I guess. It was supposed to be something that looks roughly like Latin at the beginning (with a lot of -us and -um at the end of words... but no necessary structural similarities), but has since morphed into something quite different. No other explicit influences I could point out right now, although bits and pieces probably have analogies in other natlangs, or at least examples from them listed in Describing Morphosyntax... Oh, I think I got the general idea for variant suffixes reflecting the relative honorific rank of discourse participants from a grammar of Yukaghir, although I'm not quite sure what it was in there that inspired it.

For Trurian: Latin for the plethora of Declensions, and most glaringly cases - the names are an exact copy: I've kept the name of the Ablative just for laughs, even though it's actually far from an 'ablative' case technically. Slovene for the hard-coded imperfective vs. perfective verb distinction. Tolkienlangs for the phonology, which prefers th n l e i and so on. Latin, check, native language, check, Quenyarin, check... yes, it was the first language I ever created. But it's since gone through 2 remodellings, and now it's better and less of a nooblang.

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The primary inspiration for Tibetan Dwarvish comes from..... wait for it.... Tibetan! There is also a "faux Scandinavian" influence from names found in the Howling Fjord zone of World of Warcraft. Most of the (very small) lexicon so far has been formed by looking up words in and and mixing them together. A few other languages like Nepali, Wolof, etc. provide a small amount of inspiration or influence, mostly for specific features like the pronoun system.

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- My own ergative "dwarf-lang"

- An expansion of J.R.R. Tolkien's Dwarvish language from The Lord of the Rings

OK.... well my conlangs don't generally have a specific inspiration; I tend to pull phonologies straight out of my arse, for one thing. I get ideas for bits of the grammar quite a lot but they don't tend to come from anywhere in particular.

Specific languages:
Panceor has a very simplistic phonology which was called Englishy when I first posted it (a long time ago) – its morphology is more interesting in that it has an extensive system of infixing and separable verbs. The nominal morphology likes reduplication more.

Yaufulti and Sentalian both use a few ideas that I was toying around with after a course in Japanese syntax; they both have an SOV syntax, for example. However, they're not topic-prominent like Japanese. Yaufulti's grammar was a bit of a free-for-all because I was coming up with a workable grammar within 3 hours for a speedlang challenge, while Sentalian is a lot more regular in its use of suffixes rather than prefixes, for example. Yaufulti's phonology was literally pulled out of my arse; I don't know if its style of consonant harmony is feasible in a human language, and I'm not sure of any language with a similar system. I also wanted a language without nasals, although I later added a western dialect with nasals.

Sentalian's phonology was arrived at by slightly a roundabout route, since I started with phonologies for two of the dialects: Kanteian, which has two levels of tones, which were then retroactively derived from Sentalian vowel+voiced obstruent sequences; and Rempocian, which originally had umlaut, but that turned out to be too complicated, so now it's like a saner cousin of Kanteian and part of the northern group that has /r/ instead of /z/. So a lot of the weird looking words in Sentalian come from wanting to have a variety of tones in Kanteian. Sentalian's own phonology started with a set of 8 peripheral vowels and schwa. I'd be lying if I didn't say there was a bit of Dutch influence on the phonology, as well, particularly in the Mybutan dialect, which has /ʏ y:/ for <u uu> and /ɣ/ for <g>, and the diphthong <yy> which is /ɛi/ in most dialects.

Umpát uses a minimal phonological inventory that roninbodhisattva provided for another speedlang challenge. I daresay most others discarded their attempts at it. I wanted a language with lexical stress, so it got that too. The grammar is VSO and has no grammatical adjectives, because again, I hadn't done a language with either of those features. Its verbal system is based on a set of preverbal TAM particles, which is an idea I got after that game where we derived a linguistic gloss out of a nonsense sentence.

The others, well Flingot was my "first" language and was a cypher of English until I learnt Latin grammar and gave it cases; Tempikimon or Telpikinof was a language of the same period (pre-zompist; 2001-2 if my notebooks are anything to go by) which I tried to give an unfamiliar grammar – I reckon I was aiming at some sort of polysynthesis but didn't know how to accomplish it well; Fhirstöyem was the first language I made post-LCK (2004), with all the standard kitchen sink/nooblang errors. I never got as far as translating anything into it because I found it too confusing. One grammarless phonology I once invented (I think around the same time as Panceor, so late 2004 or 2005) was something called Twhtxra, which used <x> for /ə/, <w> for /o/ and <y> for /e/ and liked preaspirated consonants (so it's pronounced /toʰtəɾa/ i think). My current grammarless phonology is Eltagri, which again basically came from nowhere – this time I wanted a language without sibilants.

Nahuatl + Arabic + Japanese + my personal tastes.

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Which one of us are you quoting? Sheesh.

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I'm just weirded the hell out because that seriously sounds exactly like my own conlang. Considering that not too much information is available about it on the internet (although all of that could certainly be inferred from glosses I've provided, I suppose...), I am forced to assume that finlay can read minds and brain-plagiarized me.

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As my very first conlang shakes out slowly, it's clear that I'm accidentally making a crappy cypher of Latin with double the case endings, more periphrastic constructions and a LOT more syllables. Gotta start somewhere, I guess.

Falgwian is without any real concrete inspiration. The language itself shows heavy German and Russian influence, and bits of Polish and Lithuanian influence, but that is to be historically accurate with the history of Falgwia. I also steal constructions from Latvian. I suppose the only inspiration I can think of might have been Lithuanian but that's not saying much. I basically created Falgwian as an experiment in creating irregular and unplanned languages. For example, while creating the inflectional paradigms, I added endings as I felt like it, paying no attention to the structure of the language. I omitted endings where I decided I didn't want them, like omitting an entire plural paradigm. My goal was to create a realistic language and nation that could be mistaken as real.

Falgwia was inspired by Baltic SSRs and of course their current independent nations. I was also inspired by East Prussia and East Prussian culture as well as current Russian culture, especially interactions similar to those in Russian-Latvian culture.

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Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.

As I said last time: Rawàng Ata is not directly based on anything (and originated in several different conlangs that got merged together into one project), but it's frequently inspired by Austronesian (particularly Oceanic) language traits, with occasional nudges from south america and japan. Actually, some features in Rawàng Ata appear to be directly lifted from Oceanic but aren't - it turns out that when you really think about it, certain tendencies lead to others, so that I've managed to independently re-create features of the languages that I only found out about later.

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Blog:

But the river tripped on her by and by, lapping
as though her heart was brook: Why, why, why! Weh, O weh
I'se so silly to be flowing but I no canna stay!

Old Albic is inspired by ancient IE languages such as Sanskrit, Greek and Latin; Georgian and other Caucasian languages; Insular Celtic; certain theories about the structure of early stages of PIE (Gamkrelidze/Ivanov, mainly); and yes, also to some degrees by Quenya and Sindarin, though these no longer play the great role they played when the project began.

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...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

Rosmwr from Proto-Celtic more cloesly related to the Byrthonic branch but with a few sound changes that make it seem on the surface close to Goidelic.

Majiusgaru was influenced by the Meso-american sprachbund, Polynesian, and to a lesser extent Mayan and Miskito.

Hervil was based on ecclesiastic latin with some influence by Welsh, Cornish, and English.

Proto-Haziam is a sister language of Gathic Avestan. Its daughter languages will be influenced by various states of Persian, Tocharian, Turkic languages, Arabic, and eventually Russian. I would like some Scythian influence but I don't have much on that.

Shenilar was cobbled together as a combination of bits from different languages. Its case structure was latin-like. Its verbs were influenced by a few American languages. The evidentialty came from various languages but Khazak is one I remember. And the gender system was my own creation, inspired by Bats and some african languages (I can't even remember which family).

I had an OE based language as well that I had been excited about but that was put on a back burner as well. It was originally suposed to be a ME based language but I am a sucker for inflection.