conlangcrab

[conlangcrab]

I once chatted with a guy from Hawaii, we started talking about languages. I mentioned that while I've heard very little of it and hardly seen more of it written down, the Hawaiian language seems to have extremely similar balance of vocals and consonants as Finnish does, so it's actually pretty likely that there are some words that exist in both languages, but mean one thing in Hawaiian and a completely differen thing in Finnish - much like in Japanese.

He didn't find it plausible, so we agreed to disagree. Later on he mentioned that his name is [firstname] Kalani Kanaele, and when I told him what that translates to in Finnish, I had to spend like 20 more minutes trying to convince him that I'm actually not fucking with him.

[conlangcrab]

There’s a theory that early Europeans started saying “brown one” or “honey-eater” instead of “bear” to avoid summoning them, and similarly my friend has started calling Alexa “the faceless woman” because saying her true name awakens her from her slumber

English has an avoidance register used in the presence of certain respected animals, which sounds fancy until you realize it’s spelling out w-a-l-k and t-r-e-a-t in front of the dog.

Mx. Leah Velleman on twitter

[conlangcrab]

An interesting lang feature is name formation based on nouns/adjectives best-describing a person, that are then attached with a pronoun in which the person is being referred to.

So, you'd get for example, "I-Happy" when a person is talking about themselves, "You-Happy" when vocative (referring to the other speaker in a conversation), and "He/She/They/It-Happy" when the referred person isn't present.

Doesn't have to be a prefix, just any kinna affix.

[conlangcrab]

Lang with two grammatical genders marked by whether or not the last letter of the word is a consonant (masc) or vowel (fem).

After linguistic clash with other languages nearby, this rule gets challenged by loanwords that end with sound opposite of the gender it implies (a fem word ending with a consonant, or vice versa), which causes for a spelling alteration, as in transliteration, the loanwords gain a silent vowel/consonant letter at the end (think English "e" or French "t" in some cases, I prefer "h" though).

[conlangcrab]

book from the sky (tianshu) xu bing, 1989-91

I was so excited to see a copy of this in real life bc it's something I studied in art history. this is a book that was typeset and printed by hand using wooden blocks but every one of the characters was invented for the sake of the piece and does not correspond to any word in the Chinese language

[conlangcrab]

My thoughts on Cryptolangs

Sometimes, conlanging is too much work or it does not fit what one is going for in a project, whether it be a story or just a worldbuilding thought experiment. Sometimes, one just needs a way to make something strange without completely reinventing it. Sometimes, one just needs to create a cryptolang. But a cryptolang is just a cypher with extra steps, isn't it? Well, there could be more to this concept than meets the eye. A cryptolang's could have it's own interesting features without becoming a fully constructed language; its function can fit the themes of something being transformed into something else and can be applied to more smaller groups than an entire conlang for a larger one.

But what is a "Cryptolang?" According to @cryptolangsguy , "Cryptolangs are the perfect middle between conlangs and ciphers. They are tools which can be used to encode text, hide it's meaning but keep it pronounceable." How does it do that? By replacing phonemes with other ones. In fact, they could even replace all the consonants of a word with vowels and vowels with consonants, but that will be covered later. While the exact mechanisms of Cryptolangs are beyond the scope of this post, It is replacing letters with other letters. But it could be so much more than that.

Cryptolangs could be so much more than just a fancy cypher with extra steps, it could be creating a new language from an already existing one. For example, one could take all the letters of a word in the English language, take "green" for instance, and add the letters of that word to the end of the sentence in reverse order, producing "greenneerg." Now, comparisons are formed through the affixing of "-er" for comparatives and "-est" for superlatives to the end of a word. One could do the same for this theoretical cryptolang and produce the conjugated formes "greenerreneerg" and "greenesttseneerg" and that would be an interesting grammatical feature already because it already created infixes, affixes that go within a word. A strange feature indeed. But why stop there? Could there be another way of marking comparison? What if one were to create a new rule in which removing the first letter creates a comparative and the last one creates a superlative? Thus, we get "reenneerg" for "greener" and "greenneer" for "greenest." Does this count as a constructed language? maybe. But it is for sure that the aesthetic and grammar of the language is based on the already English language and grammar and the letters haven't even been rearranged yet. There is so much potential for using such transformations in a thematic way.

One of those themes could be the exploration of how an individual's physical transformation is reflected in their speech. For example, taking the above framework that has already been created, the individual who speaks this language could be obsessed with symmetry and balance. Thus, all the words they say become palindromes and the modifications reflect their own biases in choosing one side over another. Of course, this is more reverse engineering a theme from what one already has. A less cumbersome way would be to come up with the character's, well, character and build the features off of those aspects. Granted, this is more artistic than technical so what is considered for features can vary from creator to creator.

However, these features can be applied to individuals, small groups, or even entire nations, in larger number than a fully original constructed language. According to Mark Rosenfelder himself, the author of the Language Construction Kit, Advanced Language Construction, Conlangers' Lexipedia, and Syntax Construction Kit, the bulk of a conlang's work is in coming up with a lexicon, all the words. With a Cryptolang, a lexicon naturally arises from the changes one makes to the letters of each word with each rule laid out. Naturally, these letter changes can lead to mergers and synonyms. Though, theoretically, one can come up with ways to distinguish words from a source language. But that is a thought experiment for another day. What is possible is that one can create all sorts of cryptolangs by setting up rules, changing them, mixing them together, or stacking one set of cryptolang rules on top of another. It is relatively faster to create rules for a cryptolang's phonology and grammar than it is to come up with an entire lexicon in an original constructed language. Thus, one can create more cryptolangs in comparison to a single conlang.

So, in summary, Cryptolangs can have interesting features, they can reflect the lexical aspects of a character's physical transformation, and they can be more productive than conlangs. Hopefully, this badly worded essay will open you cryptolangers' eyes to the potential of these sorts of creations whether you are a veteran with a thousand under their belt or a rookie creating their very first. Thank you all for reading this, and till next time! ;)

[conlangcrab]

: I tell you, "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow," as the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. :

[conlangcrab]

Iman Seth Script

Inspired by some aaancient scripts o'mine, way back when I was dabbling in calligraphic dots and all.

[conlangcrab]

Megascriot Kaa-K'' table done.

Witness my horrible creation.

[conlangcrab]

Needful Magic, Nos. 22, 23, also This could be your name, Nos. 246, 247

Lin Tarczynski

[conlangcrab]

no punctuation we read like romans

[conlangcrab]

Names my Japanese child 可愛い, pronounced as [きゅと].

[conlangcrab]

[conlangcrab]

Six year old, bouncing up and down with glee as desserts are unpacked: "I'm so appointed!"

Took me a moment to realize she had logically assumed "appointed" must be the opposite of "disappointed" and used it as a synonym for "excited."

[conlangcrab]

Glagolitic is certainly one of the alphabets of all time.

This was the alphabet St. Cyril and Co. invented for the Slavs, based loosely on the Greek alphabet. And it was used to write Old Church Slavonic, a South Slavic language that retained elements of a theoretical Proto-Slavic language that was the precursor to all the contemporary ones.

Old Church Slavonic is still an Eastern Orthodox / Slavic national liturgical language, but they write it in Cyrillic now.

And Cyrillic itself is named in honor of Cyril, but is in fact a later Bulgarian alphabet inspired by Glagolitic but based more systematically on the actual Greek alphabet.

Here is Glagolitic to Cyrillic, assuming any of you need that:

You will note how much easier Cyrillic is to write than Glagolitic, which is exactly why the Bulgarians did this.

I mean, I get it. But Glagolitic looks way cooler.

[conlangcrab]

A Frogge

[conlangcrab]

Personal pet peeve is when foreign languages in fiction are so badly trained in pronunciation-

As in like, I can hear the whole vowel inventory of English in there, and vowels - That's the major thing that makes an accent.

Sure, suspension of belief, but it really looks bad to me when a person speaks some "ancient language" which sound literally like some guy from Boston reading foreign words off the back of a bottle of cleaning fluid, having no idea how to really pronounce them. It's even worse when it is put in context of other characters speaking in the language the accent of which is readable through the "foreign" speech.