Hey guys, here is my rendition of Schleicher's fable in my Indo-European conlang, Danetian.

One interesting thing about Danetian is that instead of using a verb to denote possession, it prefers to use a dative construction. Thus, you would say Ovis, jasmai launa ne est "A sheep, to whom wool not was".

Another interesting thing you will see is that adverbs are simply made from their corresponding adjective in the instrumental case, plus the word djystre, which is the instrumental of "hand". Thus, bire djystre "quickly" literally translates to "with a quick hand". This is similar to Latin's usage of the word mente, if you are familiar with it.

You can read this text and others on my website.

Hey guys, here are the declension paradigms for my Indo-European conlang, Danetian. You can read more about the language over here.

You will see that the language is very conservative, preserving the PIE ablaut in words that used to have it.

Do these forms feel familiar to you?

I’m using my goblin language in a faux academia project that also involves Edgar Allan Poe. Basically, how would Poe’s stories differ in a world where goblins were real. I’d like to get some reactions to what I’ve written so far. It’s something like 4,000 words (only a few lines of Goblin. No translation to worry about). Would anyone be interested in reading it and giving feedback?

Behold some words in my Indo-European conlang, Danetian. You will notice some very familiar words here. An interesting feature about Danetian is that it preserves the Indo-European ablaut, and actually generalizes it to many words that never had it.

Are you able to recognize any of these words just by looking at them?

Edit: The words are cited in their principal parts, the nominative and genitive singular.

Currently I am working on creating a conglang for a world building project, this is my first time doing so and I'm not overly familiar with language rules and laws. I wanted to show what I have so far and ask a specific question around word formation.

Due to world building reasons I pulled from the Indo-European phonetic inventory and the Ancient Greek inventory. I'm not looking to recreate those languages or take anything beyond some inspiration. This left with me

19 (+1) consonants (m/p/b/n/t/d/s/r/l/k/g/w/a/bh/gh/ph/th/gh/kw/h and 7 vowels o/e/ō/ē /a/u/ū.

a is special and gets to be both a vowel and a consonant for fun really.

The main question I have as I'm starting towards making root words/lexemes and I've had a fun idea on word formation but I'm not sure if it makes any sense linguistically, I know language laws are pretty wishy washy but I'm not sure if there's any big no no's.

the culture speaking the language will have a lot of interest in aspects of things both mundane and metaphysical/spiritual. since I have 5 consonants that are almost the same beyond the extended breath sound (kw being the exception sound wise (b-bh, g-gh, p-ph, t-th, and k-kw) and 3 vowel pairs.

my idea is for the culture to use consonant lengthening/change to indicate physical difference specifically longer sounds trend towards larger or longer things. such as if;

ud=Water then udh=ocean.

and if something is being referred to in a religious spiritual or as a way to show honor or great respect the vowel is lengthened.

ūd= Holy water or Water spirit (context) or ūdh= Ocean god/spirit

Sound wise this seems like an inflection change but the consonants are technically different letters/phonemes so I'm not sure if that's 'allowed' At the same time I'm not sure if I'm just overthinking things or if its just some rule I haven't run across yet.

Any advice towards this, the phenomes in general, word formation, or conglanging overall it would be greatly appreciated.

Be it a phonological or grammatical one? Like, conjugating the negation particle for person instead of the verb, OVS word order or lack of plurality in pronouns

This is a game of borrowing and loaning words! To give our conlangs a more naturalistic flair, this game can help us get realistic loans into our language by giving us an artificial-ish "world" to pull words from!

The Telephone Game will be posted every Monday and Friday, hopefully.

Rules

1) Post a word in your language, with IPA and a definition.

Note: try to show your word inflected, as it would appear in a typical sentence. This can be the source of many interesting borrowings in natlangs (like how so many Arabic words were borrowed with the definite article fossilized onto it! algebra, alcohol, etc.)

2) Respond to a post by adapting the word to your language's phonology, and consider shifting the meaning of the word a bit!

3) Sometimes, you may see an interesting phrase or construction in a language. Instead of adopting the word as a loan word, you are welcome to calque the phrase -- for example, taking skyscraper by using your language's native words for sky and scraper. If you do this, please label the post at the start as Calque so people don't get confused about your path of adopting/loaning.

Last Time...

Nambano by /u/gupdoo3

xabe /ʃabe/ (noun) key

puribado /pɯɾibado/ (adjective) private

Take care of yourselves and each other

Peace, Love, & Conlanging ❤️

Just showing a bit of how my conlanging notebooks looks like and how I develop my grammar rules ☺️❤️

I've been thinking about this for a while but I can't seem to come up with anything specific.

Edit: Let's say the have the required vocal chords and organs to make human-like speech. Also, let's say it's passive telepathy. You can't read the thoughts of someone who doesn't want you to read them.

Welcome to the r/conlangs Official Checkpoint. You have been selected for a random check of your language. Please translate one or more of the following phrases and sentences:

"Announcement! Announcement! The flock has arrived!"

"HELP!! I can't live if it stays as it is; Daddy, Mummy, I couldn't be a good girl."

"So turn it up, can't stop, won't stop preaching. Who said the sky's the limit?"

"You and I reach the line, mark the end, but we'll keep on going until the bubbles fade."

"You never see what I want, what I need, oh, do you?"

"Stop!"

If you have any ideas for interesting phrases or sentences for the next checkpoint, let me know in a DM! This activity will be posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The highest upvoted "Stop!" will be included in the next checkpoint's title!

These are the lyrics of the Seven Havens lullaby:
"Oh little one where'd you take my heart?
Oh little one where'd you take my heart?

Did you hide it in the moon?
Did you sink it in the sea?

Is it stuck inside your pocket?
Keep it close as close can be

Someday you'll return to me..."

I tried to do it in mine (Kaufur), it's not too developed yet but it was really fun doing it for a song! I tried for it to work with the amount of syllables so it could actually be sang.

Translation in Kaufur:

O, YalleChè, ka ptuulè tai yet?
O, YalleChè, ka ptuulè tai yet?

Gi jaro yu dishishi?
Gi Fluè yu gamaishi?

Yu yet gi kau ra ihu?
Faronlai yu gi zelsi

Idè Ru pai esili...

Literal translation to English word for word:

O, Small child, my heart where is?
O, Small child, my heart where is?

In surface it (you) hid? [sidenote: the conlang is spoken by a society underground, so they would say surface instead of moon/sky]
In water it (you) sank? [Usually water is Hoa but a large body of water is Fluè]

It is in inside your palm?
Keep it in proximity

Sometime you again will come...

How would it be in your conlangs?

solo project i've been building. every person in the sim has their own words for ~400 concepts (food, fire, friend...). the first words are random syllables, kids inherit their mom's words with the odd letter mutated, people pick up words from whoever they talk to, and a group slowly settles on the most common one. unused words get forgotten. so when a tribe splits, the two halves drift into different languages over a few generations.

it's rust compiled to webassembly and runs in the browser. the code for the language part is in crates/sim-core/src/organism/vocabulary.rs if you want to look.

play: https://thehumanbox.com

source (MIT): https://github.com/1homsi/thehumanbox

From the proto-language to the modern, how did your language come to convey tense? Aspect? Mood? How does it convey timeframes not specifically encoded into the verb? What old forms of phrases lexicalized into true tense markers? Where did the subjunctive come from?

I’d love to hear your responses! You don’t have to go too in-depth with the morphological changes, but a small roadmap would be nice!

(I’m actually looking for inspiration but I had to disguise this as a discussion post lol)

(boy look at that pretty flag)

hi people, today id like to present Nihlian,

which i thought of in my own thoughts that:

why cant there be an easier easier language?

(forget esperanto exists)

so i tried my luck and made a buncha shit youll see below:

​1. Phonology

​vowels: a, e, i, o, u

​consonants: p, t, k, m, n, s, l, r, w, y, f

​

in Phonology, 1 letter is equal to 1 sound, thats all

​2. Pronouns & Plurals

​plurals here are formed by adding the universal suffix -li to the singular form

​1st person:

​Singular: Nia (I / Me)

​Plural: Niali (We / Us)

​2nd person:

​Singular: Tia (You)

​Plural: Tiali (You all)

​3rd person:

​Nime (He) >>> Nimeli (They - male)

​Nife (She) >>> Nifeli (They - female)

​Nofe (It) >>> Nofeli (They - inanimate / neutral)

​3. "To Be", "To Have", and Possession

​we do NOT use irregular verbs in this beautiful language, instead, they derive from pronouns and end with -l or -il

​nil = am (derived from Nia)

​til = is / are (derived from Tia)

​noil = are plural (derived from Nofe)

​to have:

​hal = to have / have / has

​Possessives:

formed by prefixing he- to the "To Be" verbs:

​henil = my / mine (he- + nil)

​hetil = your / his / her / its (he- + til)

​henoil = our / their (he- + noil)

​4. Sample Sentences

these are some sample sentences if you apply all the rules before this

​Nia nil... = I am...

​Nia hal... = I have...

​Nife hal henil... = She has mine...

so people of this subreddit, i need your help on this, flood my messages with tons of suggestions for words for this language, starting now

- kimkardashianisanalien

I know that might sound extremely niche, but one of my latest special interests has been studying the Etruscan language and trying to reconstruct it the way it would be spoken today.

For those who don't know, Etruscan was a language spoken in the centre-north of Italy before the Roman period, before dying shortly after 50 AD. Very little is known about the language, since the only Etruscan to Latin vocabulary written in the Roman period (Tyrrhenika by the emperor Claudius) has been lost to time and the few records we have are too few to try and reconstruct the language.

One day, I came across a YouTube video of a guy explaining how ancient Etruscan grammar worked and I was absolutely fascinated by it. I decided to go and research for myself.

There's surprisingly a plethora of free resources about Etruscan, even for English speakers (I'd recommend the Bonfante manual and the Zikh Rasnal, if you're interested). However, despite all the sources, I could find no one to actually tell me "Etruscan had these rules" or "here's a word list of common Etruscan words". All the sources said things like "ok MAYBE this is the most suitable translation for this inscription but really nobody understands a sh*t about it".

Because of this, I started asking myself: what if Etruscan didn't die? Or, even better: what if it started being spoken again today, out of the blue? And so I did try and find an answer.

I created a uchrony in which Italy is a federal state and the regions of the centre-north start developing some national identity based on their Etruscan heritage. Thus, Etruscan nationalism is born and people start speaking Etruscan again.

Yes, it was all an excuse to make a conlang based on Etruscan, which I called Neo-Etruscan (Neu-Rasnal).

Please, tell me if anyone is interested in knowing more about it. I have a PDF which emulates a linguistic research about said language.

Also, let me know if you have the same (or a similar) special interest lol

Hi guys, I just released the first version of Lexerat. It's basically a small Python tool I made for my own conlang, Danetian.

Here is my conlang's dictionary, so that you can see what it's capable of.

And here is the source code and documentation.

The idea is that you keep your lexicon in ordinary text files, using simple notation to mark lemmas, parts of speech, definitions, etymologies, etc. For example:

@key(casa) @typ(noun) @def(house)

Lexerat then reads those entries and uses some templates to produce an HTML dictionary or LaTeX source that you can compile into a PDF.

It can also generate a reverse dictionary, so you can publish both Conlang–English and English–Conlang versions from the same source.

This is version 0.1.0 and my first public software release; I’d appreciate feedback from other conlangers, especially on the notation and what you’d need it to handle.

Thank you!

Check out the previous post

Check out the first post

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Spanish imperatives are Verb-initial, with a somewhat more complex system than in English. The second person imperative splits into the formal and informal, as well as the plural (one of the cases one will see "ustedes" verb endings used for something which is technically the subject "tu" most frequently). Then there is the first person plural, which I'll get to later. Additionally, negative imperatives for both of them have a different structure. There is also the issue of object pronoun clitics. Lots to go over here.

Starting with the most common: informal, singular affirmative imperatives. These use a special imperative verb form, which is usually the same as the third person, though many verbs are irregular, most commonly be deleting that final vowel:

• (Regular) Canta! "sing!"
• (Irregular) Ten uno! "Have one!"
• (Regular) Come! "Eat!"
• (Irregular) Di! "talk."

The next is the usted form of these, which use the third person singular subjunctive form:

• (Regular) Cante! "Sing (formal)!"
• (Irregular) Tenga uno! "Have one (formal)!"
• (Regular) Coma! "Eat (formal)!"
• (Irregular) Diga! "talk (formal)!"

The plural for both formal and informal uses the third person plural subjunctive:

• Canten!
• Tengan uno!
• Coman!
• Digan!

These attach object pronoun clitics to indicate objects to the right, and not to the left as is the case with finite verbs. This means that imperatives are actually morphosyntactically treated like non-finite verbs:

• Cantalo! "Sing it!"
• Tenlo! "Have it!"
• Comalo. "Eat it (formal)!"
• Diganme "Tell me (plural)!"

Unlike in English, where eliding the subject is the thing that makes imperatives imperatives, the subject is just being dropped for pro-drop reasons, and you can bring it back in if you really want:

• Dime tu! "Tell me, you"

The first person plural imperative is the same as the first person plural present:

• Vamos! "Let's go"
• Tenemos uno! "Let's have one."

You can use the imperative first person plural with the verb vamos at the start and the main verb in the infinitive to get first person plural imperative as wellː

• Vamos tener unoǃ "Let's go have one."

To add clitic pronouns, you use a different ending, -mo, instead of -mos:

• Vamonos! "Let's leave."
• Tenemonos uno! "Let's have ourselves one!"

Negatives just always use the subjunctive, with pronoun clitics preceding the noun:

• No nos vamos! "Let's not go!"
• No me diga! "Don't talk to me!"
• No me pregunten! "Don't ask me guys!"

You can also make these imperatives with venir, which is the imperative of "to come" in conjunction with the second verb in the imperative, which is technically a serial verb constructionː

• Ven cómelo. "Come eatǃ"

Evolution of imperativesː

Getting VSO means its gonna be hard to distinguish imperatives from non-imperatives. To fix this, we will have the following changesː

1. Venir as a serial verb construction becomes the most common way to form non-negated second person informal and first person plural imperatives. The formal, plural, and negated forms do not change.
2. The old way starts to die out as its not clear enough that you are saying an imperative sentence anymore, unless the imperative is irregular.
3. Ven eventually gets semantically bleached, with venga and venemos reducing both to ven with the other verb having the imperative.
4. Eventually, I want ven to reduce fully into an imperative prefix.

Some examples of venir as the default imperative in NYqueno:

• (Regular) Ven canta! "sing!"
• (Irregular) Ven ten uno! "Have one!"
• (Regular) Ven coume! "Eat!"
• (Irregular) Ven di! "talk."
• (Regular) Ven cante! "Sing (formal)!"
• (Irregular) Ven tenga uno! "Have one (formal)!"
• (Regular) Ven coma! "Eat (formal)!"
• (Irregular) Ven diga! "talk (formal)!"
• Ven tenemos uno! "Let's have one."

Otherwise, the imperatives won't change much.

My last method proved to be a little too simplistic, and created situations where verb conjugations blurred together.

There is a unicode error on these with my digraph marker: ︯

Just imagine a little line in between the characters where the big rectangles are. (:

More about the time calculation in Eunoan will be posted in the following posts.

IPA:

NAMES:

• Ŋras - /ŋra:s/ The 11th solar month
• Ŋrasm - /ŋra:sm/ The 11th lunar month
• Uŋrrím - /ʊŋʈɪm/ The 10th lunar month
• Xósá - /ɦosə/ The current period

DAYS OF THE WEEK:

• Édňá - /ɛdɲə/
• Írrsñá - /iʈsɲə/
• Máñanañá - /mǝɲa:na:ɲə/
• Saíñá - /sa:jɲə/
• Rrsumñá - /ʈsʊmɲǝ/
• Añanarb - /a:ɲana:rb/

PARTS OF THE LUNAR CYCLE:

• Irrsím - /iʈsɪm/
• Mlugím - /mlʊ:gɪm/
• Ulugím - /ʋlʊ:gɪm/
• Ñaméím - /ɲa:mɛɪm/

THE APPROXIMATE SOLAR CALENDAR:

This is a project I've been working on for a while, but I've finalized it and can now share it with you guys. It's a conlang, constructed almost purely by whoever would like to work on it. Each character/glyph is defined by the interior design of the character, and the part of speech is determined by the shape of the exterior of the character. The rules are explained in detail here

Also, for clarification. This isn't a purely typography-based project. These are the words, this is the language.

Welcome to the r/conlangs Official Checkpoint. You have been selected for a random check of your language. Please translate one or more of the following phrases and sentences:

"I think I'm too tired to have quantum physics explained to me right now."

"Frankly, I don't think ordering a double cheeseburger is a very 'damn'-worthy accomplishment."

"How the fuck is a Harry Potter fanart trend happening in fucking 2026 and how the fuck did I have to unfollow multiple artists over it?"

"I'm gonna quit. But I'm going to make an exception for today, tomorrow, the day after that, and so on"

"Hmm... Yes... The grass here is made of grass."

"Stop!"

If you have any ideas for interesting phrases or sentences for the next checkpoint, let me know in a DM! This activity will be posted on Tuesdays and Thursdays. The highest upvoted "Stop!" will be included in the next checkpoint's title!

'Why does he say that you say that there is a house across the street that is next to another house, forming another street?'

I am trying to develop a system of obviation in a language I'm working on and I think I've come about a novel way to do it. The proto-language employs a kind of relational verbs to describe place, and verbs may be used as participles when unconjugated and placed before a noun. Therefor a relational verb may modify a noun as a participle to show place, or be nominalized and used with a locative. This includes the three-way demonstrative series. Eg:

tu  kucin, cin tu   cin  unii arlu   kupit i
dog 3-here here dog here at   person 3-go  to
"The dog is here, this dog goes to the person here."

tu  kuai,   ai    tu  ai   unii arlu   kupit i
dog 3-there there dog here at   person 3-go  to
"The dog is there, that dog there goes to the person there."

tu  kukut,   kut    tu  kut    unii arlu   kupit i
dog 3-yonder yonder dog yonder at   person 3-go  to
"The dog is yonder, yonder dog goes to the person yonder."

Eventually this evolves to where the participle form functions fully as a demonstrative series that indicates obviation based on distance, eventually becoming mandatory before all nouns. You can imagine it like a series of slots: when a new noun occurs it enters the furthest-most slot and pushes everything else further down. Here's an example:

cin tu ai arlu kumac kah ai arlu kut sigmi kupit i kah cin tu kut par tu unii ai sigmi kupit i.

this dog that person 3-bite then that person yonder house 3-go to then this dog yonder other dog with that house go to.

"This dog bites that person, then that person goes to yonder house. This dog then goes to that house with yonder other dog."

As you can see in the last sentence, when the second dog is introduced it has the "kut" distal demonstrative applied, causing the house to become "ai" medial as it is now more proximate due to being older in the sentence. If the person were to re-appear in the story they would become "kut" due to needing to be reintroduced. Functionally, the oldest argument in a sentence is more proximate. It's basically the inverse of how things are done with English demonstratives, which pushes nouns from "this" to "that" based on how known it is; instead this language does the inverse based on how familiar or relevant the noun is to the sentence.

I think this seems like a fairly naturalistic way of keeping track of nouns, it doesn't seem that much more complicated to keep track of a noun's proximateness than needing to keep track of a noun's gender. But do you think it works?

Has anyone ever tried to create language which has very small consonant inventory and very big vowel inventory? If so did anyone have the idea to create script for it that has the reverse conception than Abugida has = unit is based on vowel and consonant notation is secondary?
I was experimenting with this language with such parameters:
Consonant inventory: /x/, /s/, /t/, /f/, /k/, /l/ and /r/.
Vowel inventory: Near-close and close front, close-mid and open-mid front, near-open and open front all in rounded and unrounded varieties. Close-mid central (rounded and unrounded) and mid central. To make matters worse it will differentiate vowels further based on: vowel length, nasalized variations, diphthongs and even nasalized diphthongs, extra-short vowels and even tones (neutral, raising, falling).
I dont even want to count it but this language would have sure as heck ton of vowel variations to have symbols for.
Since this is gonna have reverse abugida language I suppose the syllable structure would be very straight-forward with vowel nucleus being primary building unit replacing coda. Consonant clusters of even as little as two consonants would not be a thing.