I'm asking you to take on the mantle of creative linguist.
I made a language once. I can help you.
suggest features
General suggestions:Equivalency of pronunication to spelling. No special cases or exceptions. If you see a word, you know how to pronounce it.
Every character has a unique sound. No vowels with three different pronunciations. No dipthongs. No "special" cases where the pronunication of one letter changes based on the letters near it. If you want a "sh" sound, then have a "sh" character. If "ti" is pronounced "ti" and "on" is pronounced "on" then "tion" is proncouned "ti-on" not "shun.
Related: no redundant characters or sound overlaps. For example, in english c, s, k, q all make only two sounds. So have only two characters.
Non-importance of syllable stress. mooGOOpi, MOOgoopi and moogooPI are all the same word, and equally correct.
Unique roots. Don't draw upon latin.
Allow use of parenthesis as valid punctuation to resolve cases in which direction of meaning is unclear.
Use the logical conventions for negatives. Double/triple negatives are proper, but evaluate mathematically.
No redundant articles. Only articles that convey meaning.
Allow leaving things unspecified to simply be unspecified rather than incorrect.
Be
precise in your definitions of words.
Do not give english synonyms. There's no reason for there to be one to one equivalency, and in fact, it's possible to create very interesting things by deliberately having conceptual mismatches.
A few noteworthy things I did in the language I made, but don't necessarily recommendedSound-based roots rather than syllable-based roots. Specifically, I associated the "ah" sound with "masculine" the "oh" sound with feminine, the "l" sound with higher spiritual phenomenon and the "k" sound with lower phenomenon. However, gender was handled in the sense of "acting" vs "receiving" rather than in the romance language sense. Nouns were not "assigned" an arbitrary gender, but words that contained meanings associated with active or passive principals were given matching sounds. If I were to do it again, I'd consider an alchemical 3 base rather than a gender 2 base.
He/she/it pronouns were handled by allowing the speaker to convey whether a noun was perceived as conscious. Pronouns were altogether optional, gender was conveyed as a modifier rather than a pronoun, and it was grammatically correct to, for example, grammatically imply that a rock was a conscious entity, or a human as a non-conscious entity. The difference was one of meaning and implied relation to the speaker rather than anything fundamental to the language itself.
I did a rather complicated thing that I honestly don't recommend...but I reduced all words to verb, noun and modifier. No other types of words, and no modification of word by suffix. All verbs began and ended in vowels, all nouns began and ended in consonants, and all modifiers began and ended in one of each. Modifiers could be applied to nouns or verbs, but not to modifiers. You could, for example, say "ball blue big" to mean "The ball is big and blue." But there was no grammatical equivalent for how you might say in english "I ran
very fast." instead of merely "I ran fast." because both "very" and "fast" bound to "ran" as opposed to "very" binding to "fast" like it does in english. The system did work, but it required such different thinking to construct sentences of similar meaning that the intended goal of simplification was...sort of questionable whether it was achieved. However, the structure did resolve certain grammatical limitations in english. For example, because of the way time-sense modifiers could be applied, it was possible to casually describe some very complicated time travel phenomenon that would be difficult to explain in english. For example, something like "The me(of the past) ate(in the future) the apple(from your present)." was completely standard grammar.
Left-to-right verb relations. This had implications that I didn't anticipate, but the idea was that A verb B implied a consistent type of relationship between A and B. This is not so in several language. For example, in english, you can say "the teacher taught me" and you can say "I was taught by the teacher." The direction of meaning of the verb can be altered by articles. I eliminated articles and made direction consistent. The result was a sort-of simplification at the expense of having to think more about how to construct sentences because familiar patterns in english sometimes didn't work in my created language.
I used a somewhat formal system of pronouns and implied subject/verb handling, whereby nouns and verbs were both "implied" based on previous usage and pronouns were generally unnecessary. For example, in english, you can say "I bought a ball. It's blue." "It" in the second sentence is understood to be the ball from the previous sentence. In my language, "it" was unnecessary because the subject was understood to be carried over. So, "I bought a ball. Blue." Would have the same meaning. Further, verbs could also be carried over in the same way. For example, "I bought a ball. Towel." would mean in english "I bought a ball. I also bought a towel." Further, the "I" pronoun was always implied when no pronoun was not specified or implied. And as mentioned before, no redundant articles. So, "Bought ball. Towel." would mean "I bought a ball, and also a towel."
Further, in addition to the I pronoun, "exist" and "here" and "now" were implied by default in all sentences unless specified or implied via carry-over. For example, one could simply say "Bear" and the implied meaning would be "There is a bear here right now." One could say "Eating" and that would mean "I am eating here right now." Some of this is similarly understood in english, but not in a way we generally think about. I formalized it, and doing so had some interesting implications. Most amusing for me personally, was that in the absence of speech at all, one could always be assumed to be saying "I exist, here, right now."
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Topic: Collaborative language creation experiment (Read 2860 times)