The Mantid Language- My First True Conlang and My First Fail
Posted: Fri Feb 24, 2017 8:21 pm
Hello everyone, I'm new to this forum and I would like to share the story of Mantid, my first conlang- and my first failure in conlanging. I suppose I kind of gave away the ending here, but let's face it, I'm a newbie at this entire conlanging business, and Mantid was pretty much a nooblang. However, it was also a valuable learning experience and to this day remains my most extensive constructed language. I'll let you decide how sad that is.
So, what even was Mantid? Well, when I first decided to make my own language, I never really thought of it as a proper project, or something numerous people do for entertainment, or for the sake of experimentation with various possible optimialisations of linguistics. I just did it because I felt like it at the time. Also, I'm a native English speaker, and that's it. I only had that frame of reference at the time. Mantid, or Mantik if written in itself (such creative naming skills I know) was designed to be a language for a mantis like alien species pretty much like the Mantis from FTL: Faster Than Light. Warlike, aggressive, and also apparently like having seven a's in a row because why not (and yes, this actually was built in to Mantid).
As tempting as it is to look through this as a proper conlanger or linguist would, it is probably a better idea to examine Mantid in the order that I created it. So, without further adieu or however you spell that, I present the first part of Mantid I created:
Orthography
Anybody with experience in this subject should immediately see a red flag at the fact the first thing I made was the orthography. It's nothing particularly amazing, essentially just an alphabet. With some very weird decisions in retrospect. You see, I decided that having one character per phoneme was too boring. Instead of creating some clever system, I instead just made some syllables entire characters. Most notably, three were "de" "di" and "da". The worst offender though was the symbol for "vra", because not only was that ridiculous on its in, but Mantid actually had no symbol for "v" alone. So literally the only time the "v" sound ever showed up was in words with "vra". I should mention at this point that I didn't care much for the IPA at this time, with its huge amount of daunting symbols, so I tried to avoid it as much as I could. I did end up using it though. This of course meant I had to look up the symbols every time I used them to make sure I was using the right sound.
I'm just going to link to a probably blurry picture of the alphabet so you can see it in all its atrocity.
https://imgur.com/a/wcabZ
Interestingly I also added symbols for common prefixes, punctuation and even calculation symbols like addition and division. The characters are straight and linear because I'm the world's messiest writer and as such curvy writing would be indecipherable. One unique thing about it was the way extended vowels (read: those long sequences of vowels like "aaaaaa" which I added in this language for some reason) were handled. A little symbol was added above the vowel, and then at the end of the vowel and under the symbol's end a series of dots were written roughly indicating how long to hold the sound.
Now a language is useless without sounds, so let's move on to phonology while I try to ignore my embarrassment at all of my rookie mistakes.
Phonology
I have no idea how to make a table here, so I will try my best to sort of approximate an awful kind of one for all my sounds.
Mantid consonants looked something like this:
Nasal: m n
Plosive: p b t d k g
Fricative: f v θ s z ʃ h
Approximant: ɹ j
Lateral Approximant: l
Ejective: kʼ
And the vowels were something like this:
Vowels: i æ ɑ e ʌ ʊ o
If this were in a proper table, you would immediately be able to tell how all over the place this is. That elective, by the way, is an unusual thing. You see, it's not really a phoneme, but I ended up using without realising in my harsh faux-Manyid accent. It's an example of Mantid's one tiny bit of sandhi that I can actually recognise. When a word ends in "k", it becomes "kʼ" instead. As for other phonotactics...well..I didn't know that was a thing when I made Mantid, so basically there aren't any. Diphthongs weren't really a thing, if two vowels were next to each other you just pronounced one right after the other (possibly making the glottal stop a phoneme? I don't know).
Grammar
This is where Mantid truly falls apart. You see, the word order of Mantid ended up being...OVS? I'm honestly not entirely sure (never a good sign), and I always ended up writing in SVO then having to correct it afterwards. Mantid relied heavily on prefixes which happened to coincide perfectly with the English suffixes of "er", "ing", "ed", etc. with a specific one for plurality, tense, changing nouns into actions and even one for increased modality kind of (which I idiotically just labelled "more" which made me mix it up with plural).
In theory this was fine. In practice, this happened:
Kilik= kill
Raz= equivalent of "er", one who does something
Isk= equivalent of "s", indicates plurality
Iskrazkilik= killers
What made it worse was that I never made any kind of hierarchy as to which prefix comes first, so Raziskkilik would allow have been acceptable.
One interesting thing relates to some crazy symbols from before. Remember "vra"? Well, it actually had a certain meaning- any word with "vra" in it was related to mass death. For example the word for "massacre" was "vrakaak". Yes, I made a language with a two syllable word for massacre and a four syllable word for killers. It only gets worse.
The way I wrote all this down in my book was that each word had its pronunciation written, then it's meaning, then underneath that was how it was written in Mantid characters. The language was read left to right, up to down. Such creativity I know.
Here is a sample sentence that proves just how ridiculous this language was.
Resakek serenek razkakaan
My female onewhomdoes child
My mother
Note that one whom does child thing is because a parent is one who has a child, so that is referring to the action of having a child. If this is confusing, well, so is why I made it in such a way. This kind of massive term for a simple concept is a trend in Mantid.
One more example:
Resakek garinek mek roselik, resekak dekrakek iskmek iskselik
My red is friend, my dead plural-is plural-foes
My friend is red, my foes are dead
The /k/ phoneme was very common in Mantid. As you can see, this simple sentence takes quite a while to say or write. In Mantid script, it took over two lines in my book to write all that down. Very inefficient, very bloated.
Finally, I might as well show off a couple of random words with a bit of a story or something interesting behind them:
plop= rain
Because that's kind of the sound rain makes.
darek= exterminate
I think you can guess where this one comes from.
aaaaaaaak= defeat
I wish I were making that up. It's the sound you make when you're defeated and frustrated that you lost.
yorek= boredom
Literally the only Mantid word to use that "yor" character at all.
Oh, and a taste of the numbering system:
rak= 1
rakek= 2
rakekak= 3
derak= 4
derakek= 5
derkakekak= 6
zatek= 7
zatekek= 8
zatekekak= 9
nezak= 10
rakekzak= 20
derakzak= 40
derakekakzak= 50
hirak= 100
Conclusion
So, what did I learn from all this? Firstly, that planning this stuff out is important, unless you want a very bloated language. Secondly, don't do orthography first. Finally, don't make huge terms for simple concepts.
Perhaps one day I'll try to revise Mantid, and make it less awful, atrocious, abysmal, and other synonyms for horrendously bad that start with the letter "a". Until then, though, I will just learn from my errors, and try to make better languages of different kinds.
I hope you enjoyed reading through that and laughing at my failures. I would be happy to accept any advice on improving my conlangng skills, my forum posting abilities, and just plain not failing. If you found this post boring, stupid, a waste, etc, feel free to say that as well. I appreciate any feedback whatsoever.
So, what even was Mantid? Well, when I first decided to make my own language, I never really thought of it as a proper project, or something numerous people do for entertainment, or for the sake of experimentation with various possible optimialisations of linguistics. I just did it because I felt like it at the time. Also, I'm a native English speaker, and that's it. I only had that frame of reference at the time. Mantid, or Mantik if written in itself (such creative naming skills I know) was designed to be a language for a mantis like alien species pretty much like the Mantis from FTL: Faster Than Light. Warlike, aggressive, and also apparently like having seven a's in a row because why not (and yes, this actually was built in to Mantid).
As tempting as it is to look through this as a proper conlanger or linguist would, it is probably a better idea to examine Mantid in the order that I created it. So, without further adieu or however you spell that, I present the first part of Mantid I created:
Orthography
Anybody with experience in this subject should immediately see a red flag at the fact the first thing I made was the orthography. It's nothing particularly amazing, essentially just an alphabet. With some very weird decisions in retrospect. You see, I decided that having one character per phoneme was too boring. Instead of creating some clever system, I instead just made some syllables entire characters. Most notably, three were "de" "di" and "da". The worst offender though was the symbol for "vra", because not only was that ridiculous on its in, but Mantid actually had no symbol for "v" alone. So literally the only time the "v" sound ever showed up was in words with "vra". I should mention at this point that I didn't care much for the IPA at this time, with its huge amount of daunting symbols, so I tried to avoid it as much as I could. I did end up using it though. This of course meant I had to look up the symbols every time I used them to make sure I was using the right sound.
I'm just going to link to a probably blurry picture of the alphabet so you can see it in all its atrocity.
https://imgur.com/a/wcabZ
Interestingly I also added symbols for common prefixes, punctuation and even calculation symbols like addition and division. The characters are straight and linear because I'm the world's messiest writer and as such curvy writing would be indecipherable. One unique thing about it was the way extended vowels (read: those long sequences of vowels like "aaaaaa" which I added in this language for some reason) were handled. A little symbol was added above the vowel, and then at the end of the vowel and under the symbol's end a series of dots were written roughly indicating how long to hold the sound.
Now a language is useless without sounds, so let's move on to phonology while I try to ignore my embarrassment at all of my rookie mistakes.
Phonology
I have no idea how to make a table here, so I will try my best to sort of approximate an awful kind of one for all my sounds.
Mantid consonants looked something like this:
Nasal: m n
Plosive: p b t d k g
Fricative: f v θ s z ʃ h
Approximant: ɹ j
Lateral Approximant: l
Ejective: kʼ
And the vowels were something like this:
Vowels: i æ ɑ e ʌ ʊ o
If this were in a proper table, you would immediately be able to tell how all over the place this is. That elective, by the way, is an unusual thing. You see, it's not really a phoneme, but I ended up using without realising in my harsh faux-Manyid accent. It's an example of Mantid's one tiny bit of sandhi that I can actually recognise. When a word ends in "k", it becomes "kʼ" instead. As for other phonotactics...well..I didn't know that was a thing when I made Mantid, so basically there aren't any. Diphthongs weren't really a thing, if two vowels were next to each other you just pronounced one right after the other (possibly making the glottal stop a phoneme? I don't know).
Grammar
This is where Mantid truly falls apart. You see, the word order of Mantid ended up being...OVS? I'm honestly not entirely sure (never a good sign), and I always ended up writing in SVO then having to correct it afterwards. Mantid relied heavily on prefixes which happened to coincide perfectly with the English suffixes of "er", "ing", "ed", etc. with a specific one for plurality, tense, changing nouns into actions and even one for increased modality kind of (which I idiotically just labelled "more" which made me mix it up with plural).
In theory this was fine. In practice, this happened:
Kilik= kill
Raz= equivalent of "er", one who does something
Isk= equivalent of "s", indicates plurality
Iskrazkilik= killers
What made it worse was that I never made any kind of hierarchy as to which prefix comes first, so Raziskkilik would allow have been acceptable.
One interesting thing relates to some crazy symbols from before. Remember "vra"? Well, it actually had a certain meaning- any word with "vra" in it was related to mass death. For example the word for "massacre" was "vrakaak". Yes, I made a language with a two syllable word for massacre and a four syllable word for killers. It only gets worse.
The way I wrote all this down in my book was that each word had its pronunciation written, then it's meaning, then underneath that was how it was written in Mantid characters. The language was read left to right, up to down. Such creativity I know.
Here is a sample sentence that proves just how ridiculous this language was.
Resakek serenek razkakaan
My female onewhomdoes child
My mother
Note that one whom does child thing is because a parent is one who has a child, so that is referring to the action of having a child. If this is confusing, well, so is why I made it in such a way. This kind of massive term for a simple concept is a trend in Mantid.
One more example:
Resakek garinek mek roselik, resekak dekrakek iskmek iskselik
My red is friend, my dead plural-is plural-foes
My friend is red, my foes are dead
The /k/ phoneme was very common in Mantid. As you can see, this simple sentence takes quite a while to say or write. In Mantid script, it took over two lines in my book to write all that down. Very inefficient, very bloated.
Finally, I might as well show off a couple of random words with a bit of a story or something interesting behind them:
plop= rain
Because that's kind of the sound rain makes.
darek= exterminate
I think you can guess where this one comes from.
aaaaaaaak= defeat
I wish I were making that up. It's the sound you make when you're defeated and frustrated that you lost.
yorek= boredom
Literally the only Mantid word to use that "yor" character at all.
Oh, and a taste of the numbering system:
rak= 1
rakek= 2
rakekak= 3
derak= 4
derakek= 5
derkakekak= 6
zatek= 7
zatekek= 8
zatekekak= 9
nezak= 10
rakekzak= 20
derakzak= 40
derakekakzak= 50
hirak= 100
Conclusion
So, what did I learn from all this? Firstly, that planning this stuff out is important, unless you want a very bloated language. Secondly, don't do orthography first. Finally, don't make huge terms for simple concepts.
Perhaps one day I'll try to revise Mantid, and make it less awful, atrocious, abysmal, and other synonyms for horrendously bad that start with the letter "a". Until then, though, I will just learn from my errors, and try to make better languages of different kinds.
I hope you enjoyed reading through that and laughing at my failures. I would be happy to accept any advice on improving my conlangng skills, my forum posting abilities, and just plain not failing. If you found this post boring, stupid, a waste, etc, feel free to say that as well. I appreciate any feedback whatsoever.