First attempt in many years: Duli

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Alexi
Niš
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Joined: Thu Oct 19, 2017 3:34 pm

First attempt in many years: Duli

Post by Alexi »

Duli is my first serious attempt at building a constructed language in a very long time. I've forgotten most of what I learned about linguistics the last time (which was never much to begin with), so I'm learning or relearning things as I need them.

Duli is what I shall call a "pseudo-Indo-European" language. The structure of the grammatical paradigms is fundamentally Indo-European (nouns decline for five case and two numbers, for example), but the lexicon will be created a priori.

Duli phonology is designed to be simple for monoglot English speakers, and at the same time give the impression of being extremely old, as if it were an Iron Age language. I consider Latin to be the quintessentially old-sounding language, so the phonology I ended up with is a mashup of contemporary General American English, and Classical Latin. Its closer to the English than I would like, especially the vowels. However, I didn't want to simply copy the vowel-set from Latin.

The morphology is fusional and agglutinative, with verbs adjectives, and substantives heavily inflected. I've set up the structure of the inflectional paradigms, but they're only populated with placeholders.

I would appreciate any other advice or constructive criticism you guys have.

The grammar document is in my Google Drive.

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