zompist bboard

Something that I'm thinking about incorporating into the next conlang I make is a restriction on quantification of external arguments. That is, they couldn't ge qualified directly. So a sentence like 'every boy kicked the dog' would actually have to involve a cleft or something. Who knows.

The thing I love the most about my conlang is how it uses pronouns in a different way than I've seen any natlangs do it. Pronouns consist of a single phoneme. The subject pronoun is prefixed onto the verb, and the object pronoun is suffixed. If subject and object are the same(i.e. "He calls himself Daniel") then of course the word begins and ends with the same phoneme.
Example:
Ru ngario-ma t'aro'z
pl. dog-patient I'walk'them

Agentive/patientive rolls between pronouns are also distinguished by voicing/unvoicing of these phonemes. If the first person singular pronoun had been the object, it would have been d instead of t. If the third person plural pronoun had been subject instead of object, it would have been s instead of z. Since their location in the verb phrase already tells you which is which, the voicing/unvoicing mechanism is redundant. This quirk makes it more naturalistic IMO.

My other favorite thing about my conlang is that transivity is marked by reduplicating the first syllable of the thing in question. An example in English would be "to infinity, and beyond!" realized as "infinfinity, and beyond!"

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I get a big kick out of playing my own language game–it’s a unique thrill only conlangers know.
- J Burke

I kind of do that in Adwan! Except instead of prefixing and suffixing, i use affixed order after the conjugation, so the verb is technically conjugated twice. The endings are the same whether they're subjective or objective, they simply rely on order (and thematic consonants) to tell them apart :p

I just love having something that I can use for personal scribbling. It has a personal meaning to me. It is also a great way to try out all of the funny ideas and get the creative joy of expression into something concrete. Fiddling around with phonologies and their respective orthography has been my most recent pleasure. I like some parts of my current language a lot, but I'm finding the grammar fairly boring in some aspects, so I think I'm going to take what I like from my previous language (some of which I didn't, because I didn't want to copy it all over, but now I feel that some of the ideas were really appealing to me, and I'm going to do a revision to bring those into the new language as well and blend it in with the new features I like of the current one, and then add some even more fresh spices to that.

Sadly, I have to work pretty much 24/7 for the rest of this week, at least, so no more conlanging until some time next week (I've barely had time this entire month, but that's good in one way, because it builds up the will to do it, and it'll be so much fun to get back to it).

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Online dictionary for my conlang Vanga: http://royalrailway.com/tungumaalMiin/Vanga/

#undef FEMALE

I'd love for you to try my game out! Here's the forum thread about it:
http://zbb.spinnwebe.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=36688

Of an Ernst'ian one.

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I get a big kick out of playing my own language game–it’s a unique thrill only conlangers know.
- J Burke

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Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

Nominalisation of conjugated and inflected compounds.
And a crazy case system, too.

Phonologies. For every languiage except Thaoa, anyway. For Thaoa the favorite thing is that I made a language I liked without including any of the features I typically like. I like languages with high levels of fusion and even polysynthesis, but none of my conlangs are great examples of this ... Poswa has a lot of highly fusiional *derivations*, but those are easy because they can happen gradually over 4000+ years and not require speakers to have the patterns memorized. The inflection system of Poswa is fairly mild, just as it is in all my other conlangs.

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Sunàqʷa the Sea Lamprey says:

My favourite thing about Old Albic is its degree of volition marking.

First of all, Old Albic is an active/stative language:

(1a) Transitive
Avarphasa a jana am pil.
AOR-throw-3SG:P-3SG:A the:C.AGT child.AGT the:I.OBJ ball.OBJ
‘The child threw the ball.’

(1b) Instransitve active
Icethsa a jana.
AOR-laugh-3SG:A the:C.AGT child.AGT
‘The child laughed.’

(1c) Intransitive stative
Adraba am pil.
AOR-fall-3SG:P the:I.OBJ ball.OBJ
‘The ball fell.’

The language is fluid-S, with some verbs taking different markings based on agency:

(2a) Agency
Enésa mabrado sandar.
AOR-arrive-3SG:A my-brother.AGT today
‘My brother arrived today.’

(2b) No agency
Enê thagratath sandar.
AOR-arrive-3SG:P your-letter.OBJ today
‘Your letter arrived today.’

The brother actively travels; the letter is just being carried about.

The language also distinguishes degrees of volition of the agent by marking it with different cases:

(3a) Full volition
Ibretasa Senantho am bul.
AOR-break-3SG:P-3SG:A Senantho-AGT the bowl
‘Senantho broke the bowl (on purpose).’

(3b) Accidental action
Ibretasa Senanthon am bul.
AOR-break-3SG:P-3SG:A Senantho-DAT the bowl
‘Senantho broke the bowl (accidentally).’

(3c) Action under external force
Ibreta Senanthømi am bul.
AOR-break-3SG:P Senantho-INS the bowl
‘Senantho broke the bowl (under external force).’

The last degree, external force, is the only degree of volition available to inanimate nouns:

(4)
Ibreta cheri am bul.
AOR-break-3SG:P stone-INS the bowl
‘A stone broke the bowl.’

With negated verbs, the agentive expresses deliberate non-action, and the dative expresses failure despite intention to act. With verbs of perception, the agentive expresses deliberate observation and the dative expresses cursory perception.

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...brought to you by the Weeping Elf
Tha cvastam émi cvastam santham amal phelsa. -- Friedrich Schiller
ESTAR-3SG:P human-OBJ only human-OBJ true-OBJ REL-LOC play-3SG:A

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My most recent quiz:

Favorite thing... hmmm.

Squalipsh: the phonology and morphology is so Salishan that it makes me cry joyful tears.
Athanic: the initial consonant mutations, consonant gradation, vowel harmony and Estonianesque phonology. I like that it is a fusion of Celtic and Finnic areal features.
Teskwan: the phonology, although it was borrowed from Nort, making my favorite feature the agglutinative morphology. The allophonic processes are really cool too, although it was Nort's idea completely.
Kūc Modyo: its too much of a relex of English to be proud of, but I like the isolating morphology and VSO word order. (I'm really obsessed with VSO)
Goidhilge: I'm not too far with this, but I like that it is going to be a daughter conlang of Old Irish. The phonology and morphology really intrigues me.

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[bɹ̠ˤʷɪs.təɫ]
Nōn quālibet inīquā cupiditāte illectus hoc agō
Yo te pongo en tu lugar...
Taisc mach Daró

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Ascima mresa óscsma sáca psta numar cemea.
Cemea tae neasc ctá ms co ísbas Ascima.
Carho. Carho. Carho. Carho. Carho. Carho. Carho.

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Un llapis mai dibuixa sense una mà.

I guess one of my favourite things in Rammy is "bicase", where you use a kind of second case inflection to tell the relationship between a noun and the verb which the noun can be seen as a nominal form of. So from "learn", with absolutive bicase you get "lesson" (as in "that which you learn"), with dative you get "student", with ergative you get "teacher", with locative you get "school", with lative you get "the path to learning" or something, with temporal you get "lesson" as in "time spent in school studying a particular thing"...

One of my favourite things in the Choir Conlang is how you can express certain otherwise confusing references without even using pronouns. Like so:

Actually that's not a good example. Let's take another one:
"The dog with the hat sees the cat. It chases it and drops it." (i.e. the dog chases the cat, and the dog drops the hat)
dog.ERG hat.POSS see.ACT-ACT cat.ABS . chase.ACT-ACT and drop.OBL-ACT

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My favourite thing in Baranxe'i is probably the infixing of case markers in consonant stems; at least in part because it introduces a marginal [u] - [ɯ] contrast:
tazum /tazum/ [ˈtɑːzɯm] = tazum silk
tazum /tazuum/ [ˈtɑːzum / tɑ:zuɯ̯m] = tazu<u>m silk<adpos>

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- Another conlanging/conworlding blog.
Latest post:

My favourite thing in Hellesan is its complexity and natural flavour that is only perceptible in small things, as in the slightly archaic pronominal system, vowel harmony only in Low Morençan dialect, or the duality in the verbal system with simple and periphrastical verbs to distinguish aspect.

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Un llapis mai dibuixa sense una mà.

I don't really like anything about Kett right now, but the revision should make the vowel system interesting. As for Proto-Kett, fuck yeah construct state.

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Siöö jandeng raiglin zåbei tandiüłåd;
nää džunnfin kukuch vklaivei sivei tåd.
Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei. Chei.

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Modality and Applicative voice structure =)

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My most recent quiz: