In search of isolating conlangs

[roninbodhisattva]

Tek jbuntrauk de jau dua tui nlooayk gnia euuk ptiah koh nek btiaork ler keuuyia. Jbuntrauk haeyt paiyt paeyk nlooayk bia bgaiy keuu beym dreung tkar joot keuuyia ler ot teuk swa ler ot. Yoan tui aajung keuuyia ler ot bio chai pñork dang bio borm gna lobnih sianghooay

It would be really cool to see a phonetic transcription of this.

[Skomakar'n]

New grammars are posted on here from time to time, but at least judging from what I have saved to my hard drive, they are exclusively of primarily agglutinating or inflecting conlangs. I have never seen a conlang that's isolating to the degree that eg. Mandarin is. Surely they must be out there somewhere?

I'm asking partly out of sheer curiosity, and partly because my next large project will be isolating and I need inspiration.

I've made a simplistic, completely regular and very boring language that's just supposed to be easy to learn. It has no inflection at all but a few auxilaries and constructions. No number, no gender, no case, no tense (but there are past and future auxilaries), no mood, no aspect, adverbs and adjectives are the same and so on. Compound words are formed like in Romance languages and to some extent English.

mia eti; I/we eat
tia eti; you eat
ia eti; [s]he/it eats
eti!; eat!
mia api eti; I/we have eaten
mia ii eti; I/we will eat
mia api kata; I/we have a cat/cats
mia ii; I/we go
no mia api kata; I/we do not have any cat
piaku kata; (a)/the white cat[s]
kata piaku; (a)/the cat[s] is/are white
oka ti kata; cat eye; eye of cat; cat's eye

[clawgrip]

Tek jbuntrauk de jau dua tui nlooayk gnia euuk ptiah koh nek btiaork ler keuuyia. Jbuntrauk haeyt paiyt paeyk nlooayk bia bgaiy keuu beym dreung tkar joot keuuyia ler ot teuk swa ler ot. Yoan tui aajung keuuyia ler ot bio chai pñork dang bio borm gna lobnih sianghooay

It would be really cool to see a phonetic transcription of this.

Here it is:
tɛk̚ ʤbʌn-tɾɔ̰k̚ dɛ jɔ̰ duə̯ tʊɪ̯n-luə̯i̯k̚ ɡniə̯ øœ̯k̚ ptʲiə̯h kɔ̰h nɛk̚ btʲiə̯-ɔ̰˞ːk̚ lɚ̰ː køœ̯-jiə̯. ʤbʌntɾɔ̰k̚ hɛə̯t̚ pæjt̚ pɛə̯k̚ nluə̯i̯k̚ bʲiə̯ bɡæj køœ̯ bejm dɾœŋ tkɑ̰˞ː ʤuːt̚ køœ̯-jiə̯ lɚ̰ː ɔ̰t̚ tœk̚ swa lɚ̰ː ɔ̰t̚. jɔ̯on tʊɪ̯ a̰ːʤʌŋ køœ̯-jiə̯ lɚ̰ː ɔ̰t̚ bʲiɔ̯ ʧa̰ɪ̯ pɲɔ̰˞ːk̚ daŋ bʲiɔ̯ bɔ̰˞ːm gna lɔbnɪç sʲiə̯ŋ-huə̯i̯.

[Bristel]

Tek jbuntrauk de jau dua tui nlooayk gnia euuk ptiah koh nek btiaork ler keuuyia. Jbuntrauk haeyt paiyt paeyk nlooayk bia bgaiy keuu beym dreung tkar joot keuuyia ler ot teuk swa ler ot. Yoan tui aajung keuuyia ler ot bio chai pñork dang bio borm gna lobnih sianghooay

It would be really cool to see a phonetic transcription of this.

Here it is:
tɛk̚ ʤbʌn-tɾɔ̰k̚ dɛ jɔ̰ duə̯ tʊɪ̯n-luə̯i̯k̚ ɡniə̯ øœ̯k̚ ptʲiə̯h kɔ̰h nɛk̚ btʲiə̯-ɔ̰˞ːk̚ lɚ̰ː køœ̯-jiə̯. ʤbʌntɾɔ̰k̚ hɛə̯t̚ pæjt̚ pɛə̯k̚ nluə̯i̯k̚ bʲiə̯ bɡæj køœ̯ bejm dɾœŋ tkɑ̰˞ː ʤuːt̚ køœ̯-jiə̯ lɚ̰ː ɔ̰t̚ tœk̚ swa lɚ̰ː ɔ̰t̚. jɔ̯on tʊɪ̯ a̰ːʤʌŋ køœ̯-jiə̯ lɚ̰ː ɔ̰t̚ bʲiɔ̯ ʧa̰ɪ̯ pɲɔ̰˞ːk̚ daŋ bʲiɔ̯ bɔ̰˞ːm gna lɔbnɪç sʲiə̯ŋ-huə̯i̯.

I love the phonology and the script! You should post more about this lang here. (preferably in a new thread?)

[roninbodhisattva]

Bump

[roninbodhisattva]

Bump

[Pogostick Man]

Ngade n Tim Ar is supposed to be mainly isolating. That being said, the one major exception to this is the typical formation of plurals, which is usually either some sort of metathesis or "vowel unpacking". Other than that, I generally try to stay pretty isolating with it.

[CatDoom]

My pet a-priori conlang, Yipta, is fairly isolating, but it does have this weird ablaut system for marking the nominative and accusitive cases in nouns, transitivity in verbs, and the relationship between compounded stems. There's also a lot of compounding. Still, there are no bound morphemes, so you might find it interesting. I haven't done anything with it in a while, but here's a sample from a while back:

‘olm kankak li’ ol ‘iyt quwlumos i’ yap’alm ka. Saq psaska i’ ton konkok mat so i’ tyimtas kankak. ‘U’i! Psosno psaska so ‘ut mol’om.
[ʔɔlm kænkæk liʔ ɔl ʔijt qowlumɔs iʔ jæp’ælm kæ sɑq pʃæʃkæ iʔ tɔn kɔnkɔk mæt sɔ iʔ tjimtæs kænkæk ʔuʔi psɔsnɔ pʃæʃkæ sɔ ʔut mɔˀlɔm]

think\TR fox\NOM this thing\OBL across not\ADJ-long\ADJ-time\OBL and agree\INTR he\NOM. climb\INTR scorpion\NOM and receive\TR fox\OBL back\NOM him\OBL and swim\ADV-begin\INTR fox\NOM. however! sting\TR scorpion\NOM him\OBL in river\OBL

“The fox thinks about it for a short time and then agrees. The scorpion climbs onto the fox’s back, and the fox begins to swim. However! The scorpion stings him when he is in the river."

[Dē Graut Bʉr]

Kunesian, one of my conlangs, is isolating.

Pon nora suto. Ti nora tai puni hafi li setai. Son japai rif, hafi kurufai. Nek setai irki? Faina piste tu setai.
There are two sisters. They are each other's mothers. When one dies, the other is born. Who are they? They are day and night.

[----]

My most recently created (well, second most recently, but the newest one has little in the department of grammar and I know is definitely not going to be isolating anyway) Dbe is mostly isolating, although it has like 5 or so clitics or whatever. The only other inflection is reduplication that occurs in a couple different circumstances but it's really not hugely common.

Ipẽ da: dis kem sai poiki ma. E mau e ca ũpã dəp ni pe:m pit ci nonto ma, sadan a umnək sika nər ca ripu ci kũĩ dəp.
N throw arrow thus kill snake AND | 3 take 3 DAT=3.ASSOC bag VEN CONJ carry return DAT village AND | in.which 3.ASSOC family speak strongly DAT=3.ASSOC become DAT male.adult VEN
Ipẽ shot an arrow through the snake and killed it. He put it in his bag and carried it back to the village, where his family congratulated him on becoming a man.

[Novilin]

I think my language is kind of isolating? I'm not really sure what that means...
But there's no real word for "coming," or anything like that. There's just a verb and it can be made past tense via suffix.
But I don't know what isolating means so I may be wrong sorry.

[roninbodhisattva]

Here you go.

[Ketumak]

My Ontari language is mostly isolating. There's no inflection but lot's of derivational morphology. It has a number of East Asian features like noun classifiers, pro-drop and extensive politeness distinctions in pronouns, but I lifted a set of focus particles from Akan (a Wesf African language). Its Big Thing though is valence adjustment. This is achieved via a high number of verbal voices and applicatives. So like Indonesian, but more so.

It's been fun to do, as word order is the part of linguistics that most interests me. It currently lives at the site linked to from my sig below.

[Kilanie]

I began an isolating project recently. So far the only morphological complexity I'm planning on is verbal aspect marking, nominal classifiers, and compounds. Serial verbs will be prominent, along with word order as an expression of grammatical features of the sentence.

Another language I've done is inspired by the programming language Scheme. In some ways it behaves like an extremely isolating VSO language, but I'm not sure if such a project should really count. It certainly doesn't tend to behave very naturalistically.

[Shemtov]

http://linguifex.com/wiki/Fyai_Th%C7%94vn

[Trebor]

I've tried making isolating languages, but they just don't interest me enough to continue with the project. Most of the ones I've attempted have either fallen on the back burner or gotten inflections added here and there until they ended up no less synthetic than my other projects. I never really understood how to make isolation interesting, at least to me. Perhaps that just reflects my lack of skill, or maybe the familiar contempt that English has bred in me.

I feel the same way. I haven't done serious conlanging in a very long time, but worked on a totally new project earlier this year--for a day. The language is supposed to be an isolate spoken in a fictional West African country and former French colony somewhere around Benin, Burkina Faso, and Niger.

The only area of which I can present a meaningful, though brief, description is the phonology. I didn't note down any information on morphology or syntax, and came up with only a small number of lexical items.

Consonants

Stops: /p b t d k kp) g gb)/ <p b t d k kp g gb>
Fricatives: /f v s z K S Z x G W h/ <f v s z hl ch j kh gh hw h>
Affricates: /ts) dz) tS) dZ)/ <ts dz tch dj>
Nasals: /m n J N/ <m n gn ng>
Rhotics: /r/ <r>
Laterals: /l L/ <l ll>
Semivowels: /w j/ <w y>

Total: 32

Vowels

Front: /i i_?\ i~ e e_?\ e~ E E_?\/ <i ix iñ e ex eñ è èx>
Mid: /a a_?\ a~/ <a ax añ>
Back: /o o_?\ o~ O O_?\ u u_?\ u~/ <o ox oñ ò òx u ux uñ>

Total: 19

Diphthongs

Front: /ej e_?\j e~j ew e_?\w e~w Ej E_?\j Ew E_?\w/ <ei eix eiñ eu eux euñ èi èix èu èux>
Mid: /aj a_?\j a~j aw a_?\w a~w/ <ai aix aiñ au aux auñ>
Back: /oj o_?\j o~j ow o_?\w o~w Oj O_?\j Ow O_?\w/ <oi oix oiñ ou oux ouñ òi òix òu òux>

Total: 26

Suprasegmentals

Tone: low unmarked, high with acute (/i e a o u/ etc.) or circumflex (/E O/ etc.)

Total: 45

Phonotactics

(C)V(nasal, liquid)

Total vowel syllables: 45
Total vowel+liquid syllables (45*6): 270
Total consonant+vowel syllables (32*45): 1440
Total consonant+vowel+liquid syllables (32*45*6): 8640

Any feedback on the above, or suggestions on where to go for inspiration to develop this project, would be appreciated.

Edit: The last line actually contains an oversight; it should read,

Total consonant+vowel+nasal, liquid syllables (32*45*6): 8640

[WeepingElf]

I have an isolating conlang on my back burner. It is named Arne and a descendant of Proto-Alpianic. The shift from fusional to isolating morphology happened by a combination of two forces: 1. Synthetic forms were superseded by analytical constructions. 2. Unstressed vowels were reduced, which did in most of the Proto-Alpianic inflections, which differed only in their final vowels.

[vec]

Team 1 on the new Relay has produced several heavily analytic languages.

Cedh: Ronc Tyu and Ree Rɛɛ Kıbyaa
CatDoom: Mhakh Thandim and Rrób Tè Jĕhnò
Some of the other relatives are less isolating like Kanejam's A-Rox Ŋʷoskʷuɣmʲa
My own is coming soon

[CatDoom]

Rrób Tè Jĕhnò is actually pretty agglutinative, FWIW, and they all have a bit of inflectional morphology, but they're mostly about as isolating as modern varieties of English.

[vec]

Right, I actually mixed up Rrób Tè Jĕhnò and A-Rox Ŋʷoskʷuɣmʲa there.

[TaylorS]

My current Future English project has agglutinative verbs but is otherwise isolating. Even the plural is marked by a separate particle sam, derived from "some".

So, for example, the sentence "big red apples are good for snacks" would be:

Sam aahp beg rad dé gèd fur sam hna'g.
PL apple big red 3PL good for PL snack
/sam a̋ːpʰ(ə̥) pɛk ʕat te kət fʌˤ sam n̥ȁ̰k/

[----]

not to go off-topic, but how did adjectives shift to post-noun?

[TaylorS]

not to go off-topic, but how did adjectives shift to post-noun?

Spanish influence and typological reasons.

[Silver89]

Im probably very wrong and fail but Rangyayo?

[Jūnzǐ]

How is that isolating then?

Isolating and compounding aren't exclusive.

Exactly: Fym is itself what I term "polyanalytic": Highly synthetic - though the phrase is the basic unit of speech, not the "word", but it entirely lacks bound morphemes:

Zī ňí p̃ejá xét rà tàs ŝycȳt cēp nsé hwā ([t͡sʰi˧ ɲɪ˥ k͡pʰeˑja˥ ħet˥ ɹä˩ tʰas˩ ʂəˑʈ͡ʂʰəʈ ʈ͡ʂʰep˧ nze˥ hwɑ˧])
face.eyes.A EXCL color flax.linen arm.hand.fingers.P good garb.clothing speech.word.phrase.SECUNDATIVE MIDDLE.SPEECH.LEVEL cloth.fabric.textile
“S/he weaves my colorful linen into good clothing.”