Natlang terms for conlangs

[Jashan]

Inspired by the discussion of how to say "conlang" properly in French (and if it's even a proper word in English), over in the "LCS Advisory Board" thread.
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"Conlang" might not be in the dictionary, but of course we all use it quite regularly. It's even spawned two (!) productive derivation processes:

Xlang, where the "X" is an abbreviation for whatever type of language it is. E.g. natlang, artlang, auxlang, avrelang, romlang

conY, where the "Y" is a noun for whatever manner of 'thing' has been created/constructed. E.g. conworld, conreligion, conart, conpeople, coneconomy


What about other natural languages, though? What are the words for 'conlang' in French, Japanese, Finnish, Welsh, or Cherokee? Can they participate in similar derivational processes, or be extended in other ways?


Dutch - I'm not a native speaker, and never got the chance to talk to other conlangers in Dutch, but the term kunsttaal (lit: "art-language") seems to fit and be understood. I believe by analogy you could use kunst- as a descriptor similar to con- and talk about kunstvolk, kunstwereld, or kunsteconomie. I don't think, however, the same applies to the -taal part of it. For some reason talking about an romtaal or naattaal just sounds extremely weird. I think you'd have to just say een Romaanse taal or een echte / natuurlijke taal.

Next!

[makvas]

The Chinese (Mandarin I suppose) term for conlang is 人工語言, which means "man-made language".

I'm sure saying something like "man-made world" 人工世界 would make sense, but I doubt "man-made art" or "man-made people" would get the point across. Maybe 虚构人民 "fictional people" would be a better term in that case.

[linguoboy]

Has no one saved the terms from the last couple threads like this? I distinctly remember an exchange with Dewrad sometime in the late Holocene about the lack of vowel affection in his coinages even though I can't remember precisely what they are. And I seem to recall Guitarplayer talking about some of the differences in connotation between German Kunstsprache and English conlang (one of which, it strikes me, would be the lack of distinction between the meanings "conlang" and "artlang").

[Jashan]

I dont' remember seeing a thread like this before, but if it's not in L&L Museum, it's likely been pruned. Perhaps, if this comes up frequently, we could ask this to be moved there?

I thought about the kunsttaal vs. conlang/artlang distinction as well, in Dutch. If kunsttaal is simply conlang, I suppose an artlang would have to be something like aesttaal (from aesthetisch(e)).

[Jipí]

Kunstsprache 'art(ificial) language' is indeed what I'd call it in German (and yes, I vaguely remember something like that). However, if you google for "Kunstsprache" you'll also find references to the terminology of art (Kunst). Since German conflates both artful and artificial in a way, I think it's difficult to tell apart 'conlang', 'artlang', and 'language descriptive of art', unless you'd use künstliche Sprache (like, synthesized in a lab?!) or somesuch. However, Kunstsprache as a way to refer to man-made languages in general seems rather established and well-understood to me.

As for other con-arts (haha), I'd find it kind of weird to speak of Kunstkultur und Kunstwelt ('arts scene'). Künstliche Kultur and künstliche Welt don't cut it either, because that sounds too much like engineering and """Cyberspace""" – although, basically, making things up so as to be reasonably naturalistic is engineering in a way, I guess. Fantasiekultur and Fantasiewelt remind me too much of lunacy, especially the latter. And then, we've got Fantasy-, which to me evokes teenagers dressed up as LotR-movie-esque elves and knights on "mediaeval markets" (our equivalent to Renaissance fairs, I guess) who have a weird romanticized idea about living in the middle ages. (Anyway, why does 'high fantasy' stereotypically involve a romanticized version of the middle ages?)

[Skomakar'n]

In Swedish, I usually just go with something like skapat [tungo]mål ('created language'), lek[tungo]mål ('play language') or something along those lines, or just rephrase it; 'detta är ett [tungo]mål som jag [ha'r] skapat/byggt' ('this is a language that I [have] created/built').

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

In French, I usually go this way :

Idéolangue, idéolinguistique.

Actually, the term for conworld is better established as "diégèse".It's a reference to art studies, and "diégèse" is the background world of a novel or movie. The art itself is "diégétique", which can also be used as an adjective : religion diégétique.

[Ulrike Meinhof]

In Swedish, I usually just go with something like skapat [tungo]mål ('created language'), lek[tungo]mål ('play language') or something along those lines, or just rephrase it; 'detta är ett [tungo]mål som jag [ha'r] skapat/byggt' ('this is a language that I [have] created/built').

And those of us who prefer to speak normal Swedish use språk. Konspråk for conlang seems to be fairly established.

[Aszev]

In Swedish, I usually just go with something like skapat [tungo]mål ('created language'), lek[tungo]mål ('play language') or something along those lines, or just rephrase it; 'detta är ett [tungo]mål som jag [ha'r] skapat/byggt' ('this is a language that I [have] created/built').

And those of us who prefer to speak normal Swedish use språk. Konspråk for conlang seems to be fairly established.

o/

[TomHChappell]

In French, I usually go this way :

Idéolangue, idéolinguistique.

Actually, the term for conworld is better established as "diégèse".It's a reference to art studies, and "diégèse" is the background world of a novel or movie. The art itself is "diégétique", which can also be used as an adjective : religion diégétique.

Thanks for that!

I'm reading Charles Yu's novel "How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe", and I couldn't find "chronodiegetic" in my dead-tree dictionary. (I was going to look up "diegesis" on-line, but I read your post first.)

BTW in that novel, logic and language are very much involved in time-travel; his machine has a gear-shift lever by which he can select Tense, Aspect, and Mood.

__________________________________________________________________________________________

OK, back on topic.

Esperanto is by now arguably a natlang.
The Esperanto term is "planlingvo".
Basically "planned" instead of English's "constructed".

[Mecislau]

I've only ever come across конланг kónlang or искусственный язык iskússtvennyj jazýk in Russian, the former obviously being an English loan, the latter meaning "artificial language". I prefer the latter, personally.

For other terms, loanwords sound weird. Here you'd just use normal Russian formations:

искусственный язык iskússtvennyj jazýk "conlang" (="artificial language")
естественный язык jestéstvennyj jazýk "natlang" (="natural language")
etc

искусственная культура iskússtvennaja kul'túra "conculture"
искусственная религия iskússtvennaja relígija "conreligion"
etc

[Jipí]

I don't understand, anyway, why English uses the awkward phrase "constructed language". I assume "established" conlangs like Esperanto are refered to usually as "artificial languages" or "planned languages" in English as well?

Oh, besides, there's also Plansprache in German.

[Ser]

For some reason, there's a tendency to use lengua instead of idioma, perhaps due to the similarity to English -lang (or in the case of ideolengua, maybe euphony too since otherwise it would be ideoidioma.)

Conlang: Ideolengua, lengua construida, lengua artificial, idioma artificial.

Artlang: Lengua artística.
IAL/Auxlang: Lengua auxiliar. (At Spanish Wikipedia they use auxilengua, which actually does not seem to be common at all.)

[TomHChappell]

I assume "established" conlangs like Esperanto are refered to usually as "artificial languages" or "planned languages" in English as well?

No, they're usually referred to as "auxiliary languages"; sometimes as "international auxiliary languages" or as "IALs".

The point being that their creators (and current proponents) are Dead Serious about them being World-Saving Ideas. (That's the stereotypical auxlanger's point of view).

And that they're No Fun At All. (That's the stereotypical conlanger's point of view).

[linguoboy]

I don't understand, anyway, why English uses the awkward phrase "constructed language". I assume "established" conlangs like Esperanto are refered to usually as "artificial languages" or "planned languages" in English as well?

"Artificial" connotes "artificial-sounding", e.g. "[T]here are scholars who argue that, in its transmitted form, [Biblical Hebrew] is a highly artificial language suitable for liturgical use only".

[zompist]

Actually, the term for conworld is better established as "diégèse".It's a reference to art studies, and "diégèse" is the background world of a novel or movie. The art itself is "diégétique", which can also be used as an adjective : religion diégétique.

C'est un terme formidable!

[Jipí]

Cue Gérard Genette ...

[Xonen]

The whole issue of how to properly say "conlang" in Finnish has only been raised twice that I know of. The first was on the ZBB in a thread planning the Finnmeet back in 2005, when someone made the mistake of using the term "conlang" in a message otherwise written in Finnish, and Jar Jar threatened to cut him to pieces for this. The other was a discussion on the CBB on the subject of, surprise, how to translate the term "conlang" into Finnish. I don't think we reached any proper conclusions on either of those occasions, though.

I'm afraid there really isn't that much need for such a term. You rarely get to talk to conlangers in Finnish; conlanging isn't exactly a very common hobby, so its practicioners tend to meet mostly on internet forums such as this one - and these tend to be at least primarily in English. And when talking to non-conlangers - well, you wouldn't say "conlang" in English either, would you? You'd use "constructed language", or some other term that even the uninitiated can be expected to understand immediately. Similarly in Finnish, I'd just say keinotekoinen kieli*, 'artificial language'.

*) Well, actually, I'd say keinotekonen instead of keinotekoinen (unless I for some weird reason had to discuss this subject in some highly formal situation), but I guess this isn't the place for a lecture on the differences between Standard and colloquial Finnish.

[Xephyr]

I don't understand, anyway, why English uses the awkward phrase "constructed language". I assume "established" conlangs like Esperanto are refered to usually as "artificial languages" or "planned languages" in English as well?

Oh, besides, there's also Plansprache in German.

I was kind of under the impression that "constructed language" was almost a backformation from "conlang" once the latter had been established. And then that title got picked up as the title of the wikircle because Oh dear we can't use a colloquial-sounding word as the title of a Wikipedia article!

[Yiuel Raumbesrairc]

Actually, the term for conworld is better established as "diégèse".It's a reference to art studies, and "diégèse" is the background world of a novel or movie. The art itself is "diégétique", which can also be used as an adjective : religion diégétique.

C'est un terme formidable!

Dans mon cas, je l'utilise sur proposition d'un ami en études cinématographiques, et j'en ai poussé l'usage sur le forum francophone d'idéolinguistique et de diégétique. Il a l'air bien établi, mais c'est encore mieux que conworld puisque c'est un terme dérivé d'un usage proche. Et ça distingue fortement la création linguistique et la création diégétique.

[Izambri]

The Catalanspeaker community is not very large, at least on the net, but we can say that the generic and anodyne term is llengua construïda "constructed language". Personally I prefer Nikura's proposal: forjallengua (from forjar "to forge" + llengua "language"), much more imaginative and fancy.

The other langs can be inferred easily: artillengua "artlang" (from artístic), auxillengua "auxlang" (from auxiliar), naturllengua "natlang" (from natural), etc.

[Niedokonany]

The usual term in Polish is język sztuczny "language artificial", and there's the English loan conlang (or as some prefer to write, konlang) but I think at the moment it's very much a jargon term used inside the conlanging community. People have tried to come up with a single-word native equivalent of conlang but it's proven difficult and nothing has caught on, no consensus has been reached. Similarly, for 'auxlang', 'artlang', 'romlang' you could employ the single English word or a native two-word (multi-word) expression such as język pomocniczy, język artystyczny, which is also probably more widely understood (outside the conlanging community) since it's more descriptive.

OTOH a native term for 'conlanger' (conlanger, konlanger): językotwórca 'language-creator' sounds fine and has turned out succesfull.

As for 'con culture', 'con religion', 'con people' , inside the conlanging community you could sometimes find things like konkultura, conortografia (though perhaps less popular than in English, and somehow I can't imagine "kon-ludzie"/"kon-naród") but often it's clear enough from context or you just phrase things differently to make it so. Conworld, annoying to pronounce as it is ([kOnwErlt]? ), is popular, too.

Kultura sztuczna, sztuczna religia sound rather bad to me, here (apparently having a subtle technological/Petri dish/social-engineering/zombie/1984 flavour), I don't know, maybe wymyślona (made-up) kultura etc.? But this doesn't sound very serious...

[hwhatting]

Those of my friends and family who know about my hobby call them erfundene Sprachen ("invented languages"). Kunstsprache or künstliche Spache would evoke not so much conlanging as a hobby, but more something like an auxlang or something done for robots or computers.

[din]

I dont' remember seeing a thread like this before, but if it's not in L&L Museum, it's likely been pruned. Perhaps, if this comes up frequently, we could ask this to be moved there?

I thought about the kunsttaal vs. conlang/artlang distinction as well, in Dutch. If kunsttaal is simply conlang, I suppose an artlang would have to be something like aesttaal (from aesthetisch(e)).

The Dutch might like portmanteaux, but that doesn't quite work. 'Aestheti-taal' if anything, but I doubt it would catch on.

I think most comments about German made in this thread also apply to Dutch, although 'fantasietaal' doesn't necessarily sound like I'm babbling away somewhere in a dark corner.

hwhatting's suggestion in Dutch; 'uitgevonden talen,' doesn't quite work in Dutch, because it sounds like I'm mixing coloured fluids in a lab.

Kunsttaal sounds like the best suggestion, although it does sound a little more artsy fartsy than conlang does.

[Skomakar'n]

In Swedish, I usually just go with something like skapat [tungo]mål ('created language'), lek[tungo]mål ('play language') or something along those lines, or just rephrase it; 'detta är ett [tungo]mål som jag [ha'r] skapat/byggt' ('this is a language that I [have] created/built').

And those of us who prefer to speak normal Swedish use språk. Konspråk for conlang seems to be fairly established.

o/

I haven't heard of it, but on the other hand, Rickard is the only one with whom I've ever discussed the topic fairly extensively in Swedish.