Bullshitconlanging
So I stumbled across this and I shall cite out the relevant parts before ‘anybody’ edits them out, that means this post is licenced under the GNU Free Documentation Licence, oohhh.
Nostalgia for communism aside, I was reading that, my interest was dropping before the end of the former paragraph, but when I hit the bottom it turned to disgust for the ignorance of man:
Teonaht, winner of the 2007 Smiley Award, is a highly elaborated language, and many consider it one of the finest examples of an artistic language since the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is often cited, like Verdurian, as an example of the genre in articles on the world of Internet-hosted amateur conlanging.
It even has ‘reliable sources’ that claim that. These very reliable sources are:
- A dead link (reliable, a dead link tells no tales)
- Los Angeles Times
- A blog (less reliable than this one, still reliable)
- Some site from a ’smily award’ which seems to be webmastered and maintained by one person, very badly. Either knows how to work with .htaccess files and does it the wrong way, or lives in a conworld where they haven’t invented PHP yet, I’d go for the latter if you see the structural garbage in the source. Also, this one person doesn’t really know a lot about linguistics.
All right kids, who ever has been telling you that Tolkiens languages were brilliant was either trying to fool you, or lying. It happens every-where with journalism. Stephen Hawking said it right when journalists compared him to Einstein, he said that they didn’t understand his work, or Einstein’s, same case, people who don’t know crap but ‘report’ think Einsten is the greatest physicist ever because they have to. You have to say it, Tolkien’s languages, like this ‘Teonaht’ are an amateuristic attempt at conlanging, child’s attempt. The typical ‘I have constructed yet another member of the Indo-European language family’ effort. The five biggest languages in the world per terms of native speakers are Mandarin Chinese, Arabic, English, Spanish, and Khari Boli (I’m not going to call those four different languages), the first two aren’t Indo-European (IE), but in the west you never get to know them. The last three are but the last one has a grammar which will sound to most ignorant English speakers as coming from another universe compared to Teonaht, and that’s still the same language family. Imagine a completely different language family, and that’s the point Caves surely couldn’t. It’s trite and inspirationless how kids make languages, I agree with that smily award person that in art, rules are best ignored, not broken per se, just ignored, however he’s so blind that he picks about small things which indeed stem of ignorance of linguistics, not of rules, and fails to notice that Caves wasn’t ignorant of the ‘rules’ enough to make yet another language which is almost perfectly an IE language. If people found some scriptures in that language today and had no idea where it came from. Linguists would shout IE at first glance and later on realize there are some complications with that idea.
The seed for Teonaht was planted when Caves received her first kitten at the age of five. The gift soon inspired her to imagine a race of winged cats which she called “the Feleonim”. She began to create the Teonaht language for these cats at the age of nine, while she was beginning to learn Spanish. She was delighted to learn that adjectives follow nouns in Spanish, unlike in English, and made this the first rule of grammar in her language. Caves was further inspired when she read about Tolkien and his “secret vice” in her teens. The language developed further as Caves grew to adulthood and learned more languages. In the late 1980s she subjected her language to much clinical grammatical analysis, and developed such features as the “Law of Detachment” and the use of the zero-copula. The Teonim developed into their present human form, but maintained their feline deities.
Caves continued to keep her language a secret as she grew up, even after she began writing science fiction and teaching. In the 1990s, however, with the advent of the Internet, she hosted a webpage on the language and joined the CONLANG message group. The language took off there and has year by year held the interest of online conlangers and conlang aficionados.
Aside from Spanish, Teonaht has been influenced by the other languages Caves has studied-French, German, Old English, Old Norse, Old French, Latin, Middle Welsh, and Old Irish.
This is not how you design a language okay. This is how one seriously makes languages step by step:
1: I design the concept in my head without writing things down still, deciding first the syntax I will use to convey meaning, yeah, that’s right.. the majority of the languages I have made don’t work with ’subjects’, ‘objects’ or and ‘verbs’, don’t have ‘adjectives’, I don’t pick my ‘morphosyntactic alignment’ from a list of documented cases, I come up with a system which replaces the function of a morphosyntatic alignment, it couldn’t be evolved on earth, but hey, I break the rules. The most important part of this process is how it’s going to convey semantics, via what system I’m going to express meaning, I’m currently actually making a conlang which’ description has a ten page part by which it starts which trains the mind of people to use the semantical vesses the language has in an idiomatic way. I don’t give tables which translate pronouns and præpositions, I don’t have them in this language, if you ever want to learn it when it’s finished, you first go through ten pages which explain to you without even using an alien word, just English how the language should be best viewed. Some details about this grammatical structure where it differs from IE languages:
- It doesn’t have what I call construction to ‘identify’ concepts, it cannot assign a fixed name to entities, concepts like ‘car’, ‘tree’ et cetera do not exist, it has a very refined structure to ‘describe’ concepts. The language is thus completely fullproof against the common fallacy that people don’t realize that they talk in different definitions which they identify with the same word, happens more often than you think.
- It does not have a concept of ‘person’, though it’s best to see all simple sentences as third person, it’s vastly more complicated than that in the end.
- Naturally it doesn’t have such classes as nouns and verbs as they identify objects and actions respectively.
- The only closed classes are derivations in fact, what defines a derivation in this language in that the class it belongs to is closed.
- It of course doesn’t have a morphosyntactic alignment in the strictest sense, the notion of ’subject’ and ‘verb’ is very vague.
- Japanese has a distinction between topic and subject, well, this has a distinction between topic and perspective, I have no such as ’subject’
- No grammatical number, it doesn’t mean that words don’t change form with ‘plural’, it means there is no such and that if you speak the language you’re not going to notice, nor care about it as it’s irrelevant in the grammar.
What do languages do? They convey meaning, how do they tend to do that? With nominals and verbals? Pretty trite no? to keep conveying meaning with ‘object x performs action y on object z’, there is a postulation of the ‘inhærent’ genetic property of man to utilize these means if languages evolve on their own from dust. But it doesn’t take a brain to see it can also be another way, take a the languages by which you tell your computer what you want, you describe the layout of a page in HTML, doesn’t have nouns and verbs now does it? Could you describe a meaning with a similar syntax? My language has nothing to do with HTML by the way and neither is it that strict, sentences are actually quite ambiguous in my language, but just to give you an insight into the options.
2: All right, once I’ve made that, I will be making the phonology. That doesn’t mean I’m going to make any words, that’s means I’m going to set out the rules on how syllables may be formed in a language and how they behave next to each other. What many people don’t realize is that there is a difference between phonetic and phonemic, the former being how the sound strictly sounds, the latter how it mentally sounds in your mind. Point is that ‘phonemes’ in a language tend to have a very different ‘phonetic realization’ in different contexts, and this differs per language. I’m sure you’ve seen those nice ‘kh’ things appear in Indian transcripts, to most westerners, it just looks fashionable, to Indians it’s an essential part because they differentiate between ‘k’ and ‘kh’, these two sounds properly called the voiceless velar plosive and the aspirated voiceless velar plosive are actually in the same phoneme in English, skirt uses the former, king the latter, if you listen closely you notice. This is more systematic than you might think, in English aspiration isn’t phonemic in all plosives and it all behaves like that, steer is not aspirated, torn is. Also, why in plosives voicing is phonemic in English, (t/d are a different phoneme), voicing isn’t phonemic in fricatives (f,z,s,v,th), most English speakers fail to realize for instance that the ’s’ in ‘was’ is a ‘z’ in disguise, and that the difference between the noun ‘house’ and the verb ‘house’ is actually that like in most English verbs the fricative at the end is suddenly voiced, it’s written often with f/v, but not s/z. Funilly enough, Koreans do distinguish aspiration, but never voicing. So English people who aspirate the ‘k’ in ‘king’ aren’t understood in Korean, but just saying ‘gim’ there solves the problem as they don’t notice you voice it, and the ‘g’ isn’t realized as an aspirate in that context. Semetic languages often don’t distinguish between stops and fricatives to make matters worse, b/v, are the same phoneme there, and p/f is different. This sounds absurd to most English speakers, but you hear it in the conlang that they haven’t given it a single though, because the phonetics of those conlangs are always identical to English.
The art of making phonetics isn’t even to just go all mathy and technical about it, you design it in your head, and then you write it down in technical language so other people who want to get an idea can read it. There are few languages which have no allophony as this is called, and it only works if the phonetic nature of the language allows it which must be very simple. A language simply doesn’t work if you don’t have this fixed, of course you can just borrow the allophony of English and it’s going to be okay? And you can’t just randomly make sounds allophonic with each other, it’ll never work, you have to know what you are doing.
3: If you’ve done that, then you can go making your grammar hard, the reason that you first have to do phonemics is that you have to know if when you actually work out the details of your grammar like word order if it’s all going to be feasible with your phonemics. Word order is a detail, it’s the only real thing in which English and French differ grammatically, the same langauge family remember? Indo-European? Flipping adjectives and nouns around isn’t that much a concern, and that you have to see another language that does it before coming up with some-thing like that? Don’t care how young she was, I did it better than she does now when I was five. This is the part when you also give phonetic—or by now phonemic as the rest solves itself if you’ve done step 2 correctly—form to the closed classes of your language. The inflexions, the reason that you do this only now is that you don’t know what closed classes you’re going to have up until this point exactly.
4: The last part is to fill in the open classes, the classes of which it’s impossible to count how many words there are in and easily gain new ones. Like verbs and nouns in English, articles, pronouns and præpositions are closed.
Complete idiots like Tolkien tend to do this the wrong way around, first make the words because they’re noob and have AIDS, then think about what futile little shit they will invent on grammar like ‘Ohhh, my verbs can be conjugated to show the person of the object’. As for a grammatical on a sentence in my language:
opaque{internal | affected} gruesome{classifier | affected} {perspective} black{affected} rubbish{proximal | affecting } {topic} absurd{affecting} {towards} {affected copula} disgusting{internal | affected}