zompist bboard

Hello. I am making a conlang for a near-future nation known as Telanesia. However, I am quite new at conlanging. Also, the language would be more naturalistic (i.e. have more quirks and funny idioms) if it was crowd-sourced.
While I had created the sounds for it, I think that if I crowd source it I should start it completely over.

HERE IS A LITTLE BACK STORY THAT MIGHT HELP IN THE DEVELPOPEMENT OF TELANESIAN LANGUAGE:

A large corporation suddenly sprang up out of nowhere, offering services such as firefighting and police work for free to countries around the world. It gained monopoly in everything, and people all starts working for it. However, instead of protesting, as people usually do, they remained calm, because they had a very high level of life and the company made all of their lives better. So it came as no surprise when the corporation suddenly claimed control over the entire planet, and the people forced the governments to agree. In about 2060, the Earth's cities are all demolished and reconstructed, using only the best and newest methods and materials. By 2100, there are healthy and growing colonies and the Moon, Mars, Venus, Mercury, the asteroids, and the Jupiter satellites. The capital is a vast megalopolis spanning the entire Central Valley in current California. As all people united into one country, they wanted one language to further unite them. It must be easy to learn and sound as real as the languages they spoke for generations.

While the language is crowd sourced, I still want to put some restrictions. The language should sound as if it is distantly related to European languages, but not based on any real language. Also, it must be extremely naturalistic, but not too random.

I hope you help me in the quest to create Telanesian, a crowd sourced language for a future nation!

The first comments I am searching for are suggestions on the sounds that should be in the language.

Well, the name of the language includes the sounds /t s n l a e i/ which seems like a good start. All those sounds occur in most of the major languages of the world, so they would fit a universal language pretty well. You would also want to include /p k o u/ for the sake of balance and naturalism. Adding the voiced stops /b d g/ and liquid consonants like /r w j/ would make the language more European in its phonology. You could also add various other sounds although they may make the language harder for a wide variety of people to pronounce.

Might I suggest that you change the name from "Telnesian" to "Telanesia", "Telenesia", "Telonesia", "Telinesia" or "Telunesia"?

Monolingual speakers of a great deal of languages are going to struggle to pronounce the word "Telnesian". The reason being that it contains an /l/ sound which does not occur before a vowel. This combination of sounds is totally alien to a lot of East Asian languages e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese. When they try and pronounce the word, they are going to tend to either insert a vowel between the /l/ and the /n/, or change the /l/ to something else e.g. /n/ or /u/.

Even native speakers of English with "dark-l" vocalisation are going to subconsciously change the /l/ to a /u/ or /w/ sound, saying the "Tel" in "Telnesian" as [teu] or [tew]. This would throw off speakers of a lot of European languages that don't do this.

Vytautas wrote:The first comments I am searching for are suggestions on the sounds that should be in the language.

All of these.

Nortaneous wrote:

Vytautas wrote:The first comments I am searching for are suggestions on the sounds that should be in the language.

All of these.

And these.

Nortaneous wrote:

Vytautas wrote:The first comments I am searching for are suggestions on the sounds that should be in the language.

All of these.

And please, keep the Romanized orthography simple as well.

Vardelm wrote:

Nortaneous wrote:

Vytautas wrote:The first comments I am searching for are suggestions on the sounds that should be in the language.

All of these.

And please, keep the Romanized orthography simple as well.

What do you mean?

Linguist Wannabe wrote:Might I suggest that you change the name from "Telnesian" to "Telanesia", "Telenesia", "Telonesia", "Telinesia" or "Telunesia"?

Monolingual speakers of a great deal of languages are going to struggle to pronounce the word "Telnesian". The reason being that it contains an /l/ sound which does not occur before a vowel. This combination of sounds is totally alien to a lot of East Asian languages e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Burmese. When they try and pronounce the word, they are going to tend to either insert a vowel between the /l/ and the /n/, or change the /l/ to something else e.g. /n/ or /u/.

Even native speakers of English with "dark-l" vocalisation are going to subconsciously change the /l/ to a /u/ or /w/ sound, saying the "Tel" in "Telnesian" as [teu] or [tew]. This would throw off speakers of a lot of European languages that don't do this.

Good idea.

Vytautas wrote:What do you mean?

Don't worry about it. They're just making a dumb joke.

p t k
m n ŋ
w j
s

i a u

ħ (just kidding!)

If you start with the sounds that appear in more than 2/3 of the world's languages as reported by UPSID, you get /m k j p w i a u/. To get a less insane inventory, you have to do some digging.

92% of languages in UPSID have some sort of sibilant.
84% of languages in UPSID have some sort of lateral.
75% of languages in UPSID have some sort of glottal.
There's no good way to find out how many languages in UPSID have some sort of /n/ or /t/, but fuck it, throw them in too.

So: /p t k m n j l w h~? a i u/. As for the syllable structure, CV is obviously optimal.

But UPSID still sucks in other ways. Let's be reasonable and add /e/, /o/, /d/, /t͡ʃʼ/, /ʙ/, /ŋʘ↑ʼ/, /k͡ʟ̝̊ːʷ/, /gǂ͡˞χˀ/, /ᶣɞ̂ˑ/ and /ʬ^ᴙ!!/. All obviously common sounds.

As for the orthography, let's keep it simple and assign sounds to letters in alphabetical order: /p t k m n j l w h a i u e o d t͡ʃʼ ʙ ŋʘ↑ʼ k͡ʟ̝̊ːʷ gǂ͡˞χˀ ᶣɞ̂ˑ ʬ^ᴙ!!/ <a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v>. So a hypothetical example sentence /ŋʘ↑ʼuk͡ʟ̝̊ːʷaʙi gǂ͡˞χˀaʬ^ᴙ!!o pi t͡ʃʼehiŋʘ↑ʼu/ would be written rlsjqk tjvd ak pmikrl. Simple!

Unfortunately, "Telanesian" doesn't work as the name of the language: /gǂ͡˞χˀnuponk͡ʟ̝̊ːʷhpo/ isn't a possible word. There are too many consonant clusters. So the language will have to be renamed. I recommend /jᶣɞ̂ˑki/.

Nortaneous wrote:k͡ʟ̝̊ːʷ gǂ͡˞χˀ ᶣɞ̂ˑ ʬ^ᴙ!

Is that IPA or bindary code opened in Notepad?

Vardelm wrote:

Nortaneous wrote:k͡ʟ̝̊ːʷ gǂ͡˞χˀ ᶣɞ̂ˑ ʬ^ᴙ!

Is that IPA or bindary code opened in Notepad?

If it were binary code, there would almost certainly be a Hanzi character, so no.

Vardelm wrote:

Nortaneous wrote:k͡ʟ̝̊ːʷ gǂ͡˞χˀ ᶣɞ̂ˑ ʬ^ᴙ!

Is that IPA or bindary code opened in Notepad?

IPA.

Long rounded velar lateral affricate, voiced rhotacized palatal click with ejective uvular release, half-long strident prelabiopalatalized open-mid central rounded vowel with falling tone, harsh-voiced epiglottalized bilabial percussive.

All common and simple sounds, really.

You forgot voiceless prenasalised ejective fricatives and mixed-voicing egressive clicks.

Monster raving looney case alignment. There should be no pre-/post-postions, only cases. All cases should be either infixes or circumfixes. There should also be topic-focus syntax.

Verbs should have particles/auxiliary verbs to show evidentiality, polarity, transitivity, valence, causativity, tense, aspect, mood, and aktionsart. All of those particles/auxiliary verb, as well as the verb itself, should inflect for polypersonal agreement. That agreement should include person, number, noun case, animacy, gender, and noun class for the subject, direct object, indirect object, and all other oblique arguments as well.

Also, inflections for taste of last meal and waist diameter of mother-in-law.

All this talk of over-inflection reminded me of an excellent piece of linguistic satire, such as I enjoin all to read:
http://specgram.com/CLXIV.l/02.perverbum.princes.html

Especially this part:

he saw the [redacted]-word could go anywhere and stand anywhere and live anywhere, even if it did not have the Small Part that Tells about Time, even if it did not have the Small Part that Tells about Duties, even if it did not have the Small Part that Tells about How Much the Telling can be Relied Upon, even if it did not have the Small Part that Tells about Shape, even if it did not have the Small Part that Tells about Livestock-Distance, even if it did not have the Small Part that Tells about Unusual Wafts, even if it did not have the Small Part that Marks Words from The One Who is Similar to a Variety of Lavender, even if [second half of tablet broken]

OK, I now have a lot of interesting suggestions for letters, which I will consider.

Just for now, can somebody help me come up with the letter scripts?
I don't want the letters to look at all related to Latin script. Maybe they could be similar to the Star Wars Aurebesh symbols.

However, they must be able to be written without raising a pencil/pen (for example, m would be ok, but no I).
Because this is a futuristic conlang, I will try to make it seem at least a little futuristic.

okay whose sockpuppet are you

Vytautas wrote:OK, I now have a lot of interesting suggestions for letters, which I will consider.

Just for now, can somebody help me come up with the letter scripts?
I don't want the letters to look at all related to Latin script. Maybe they could be similar to the Star Wars Aurebesh symbols.

However, they must be able to be written without raising a pencil/pen (for example, m would be ok, but no I).
Because this is a futuristic conlang, I will try to make it seem at least a little futuristic.

If you like it, here is something I made roughly ten years ago which you are welcome to use for inspiration. It's probably "futuristic" but it might be too alien depending on what you really want.

link removed, see: viewtopic.php?f=4&t=41690&start=25#p1026736

Gere is one leter, tghat you can use .

Hee is an oter lettere;.

FOr rest of tehe letor's; i refomend that you use the Omlaut.s.

No need to leech bandwidth Nort

It should have no verbs and no nouns. In the name of political correctness, everything should be described in terms of adjectival qualities. Also, you should have to say 'dot' after each sentence. You know, to make it more naturalistic.