zompist bboard

Do you try to avoid having the name of your conlang sound like other things? I ask because I belatedly Googled Chavakani and while my conlang is the top result, it also appears to be at least a few people’s name. I’m considering renaming the language, although most of the new names I come up with seem to be the name of something else. “Yavakani” appears safe, although I’m not sure I like it.

How important is it to you that your conlang’s name not coincide with the names of real people or places?

Generally I don't care. Coincidences will happen anyway, and I've named some of my conlangs after people.

I have a conlang named Palli, which is actually now one of my least favorite conlangs, as my tastes were quite different 20 years ago. It has no resemlance to the natlang called Pāli whatsoever, although the climates are fairly similar.

I have a minor, backburner conlang called Lamu, which is also the name of another artist's conlang, and so out of respect I plan to refer to my Lamu as proto-Lamu or perhaps something entirely different whenever I write about it (which will not be often).

I tend to resist changing the names of my conlangs as I work on and reshape the languages themselves. I created an earlu language called Thaoa that didnt even have an /o/; i just liked the digraph "ao". Soon, it didnt have /tʰ/ either.

A lot of my names are no longer meaningful in their source language and therefore I have to consider them exonyms. Poswa should probably be "Puswa", and Khulls, originally intended as a faithful transliteration of the native name, would now at best be "Ḳūlṡ". But, again, exonyms are the magic wand I wave to make all of the names legitimate.

Another thing I do is give names that arent from the source language at all. For example, Moonshine. These are basically code names, but I exlain them as being translations ofg the political parties associated with each language. This works because political party basically equas tribe on this planet. Its not entirely unlike our own designations of tribes such as "White Tai" and "Short Skirt Miao" in southeast Asia.

I have a conlang whose name is Aqadian; does that answer your question? :p To make this more awkward, the Eastern word that gives Aqadian aqad "wetland, swamp," also has a cognate harad "open land, plain, expanse," in a (rather distantly) related language.

Others: a tonal language called Zhong, and before I played The Banner Saga I had a race called the varl, which I have since changed to quarl.

Lulani is an Hawai'ian name. My name for the goddess Sa'imi is Caemi, which was an acronym for a particular Brazillian mining company, which makes reading that Wikipedia article quite odd.

So, no, I don't rename languages. Unless someone actually complained, I guess. Could I get away with having a conlang called 'Apple iPad' if I had in-universe etymological justification?

I fit most of my (non-Akana) conlangs into the planet of Edomor. It owes a great deal of inspiration to our Boardlord's work. I'm embarrassed to admit that I got carried away at one point and Edomor became er a little too inspired. Thankfully, I went to college and studied the Middle East and linguistics in general. Now, the entire project contains new influences (Arabic, Turkish, Islamic history) that give it a whole new dimension while respecting Zomp's original works

Pabappa wrote:I have a conlang named Palli

Do you want to know what that happens to mean in Finnish?

In my variety of Malayalam, it means 'gecko'.

i have a conlang named forish, which happens to be the name of a district in uzbekistan. coincidentally, uzbek's phonology is quite similar to forish.


bbb

I named one of my conlangs Ga. Built it a website and everything for it. Turned out that Ga is a real language. So I nixed the website and used ideas from the conlang as the basis for other things.

Varta Avina is the closest to being anything problematic. Well, except for its exonym, which I never use anyway.

Imagine what Arka had to go through.

Frisland looks and sounds very similar to Friesland, which is why I called my conlang "Frislandian" and not "Frisian", though I like the idea of "Frislandic" as an alternative name. I'm not gonna change it though because the name has already existed for some 4 centuries now, so I'm happy with it as it is.

You could take the route I did for the Texan Austrian language and call it Frislanderish (Oehsteraijix coming from Oehsteraij "Austrian person" and -ix, which is a cognate of German -isch).

mèþru wrote:You could take the route I did for the Texan Austrian language and call it Frislanderish (Oehsteraijix coming from Oehsteraij "Austrian person" and -ix, which is a cognate of German -isch).

Somehow that just seems clunky to me (I'd even say Frislandish sounds better), I prefer the ideas I've got. Also Frislandian isn't Germanic or even Indo-European so I don't think it really matters which I go for.

Wait, I made mistake. Oehsteraij is just Austria. So Frislandish is actually the equivalent anyway. What I said would be Oehsteraijerix, which sounds awful.

I noticed an additional reason to change Chavakani’s name: It’s uncomfortably close to the name of an actual language, Chavacano.

I’m going to change it to Twakani, which doesn’t appear to be the name of anything notable. Two additional syllables is far enough from Twa that I’m not terribly concerned.

Rik wrote:I named one of my conlangs Ga. Built it a website and everything for it. Turned out that Ga is a real language. So I nixed the website and used ideas from the conlang as the basis for other things.

Hey! Rik was here!

Salmoneus wrote:

Rik wrote:I named one of my conlangs Ga. Built it a website and everything for it. Turned out that Ga is a real language. So I nixed the website and used ideas from the conlang as the basis for other things.

Hey! Rik was here!

Waaay! Which leads me to ask why there hasn't been an update to the website in ages, or a update to the Gevey grammar when there is an entire thread on the board about rewriting it to make it consistent with current linguistic description?