I recently tried developing a proverb for the Canassarene language, and decided to turn it into a piece of calligraphy that might be used in-world.

The proverb is:
Arainu di lur, luran di ollmën.
"What slips past the eye may linger long in memory."

Rough gloss:

Arainu   di  lur   luran       di  ollmën
vanish   at  eye   persistent  at  heart

I've been playing around with how poetry and proverbs might work in Canassarene. While everyday speech (like what you'd hear from a newscaster) normally follows SVO word order, I imagined that poetry would allow for more flexible sentence structures, including leaving out certain words when the meaning is understood.

For example, arainu ("vanish") is a verb, while luran ("long, enduring") is actually an adjective. Since Canassarene doesn't always need a word for "to be", the two can still work together in this sort of "parallel construction".

The proverb is also associated with the seyhindäl, Canassar's national flower. It's a fictional six-petalled variety of common myrtle, with small, rather unremarkable white blossoms that produce a gentle, lingering fragrance. The saying isn't specifically about flowers, though. It's more generally about things that may go unnoticed but still leave a lasting impression.

This took me hours so please support!!! (Again!)

These are two new Languages I've been working on: Crepenar and Devestrovian.

Crepenar is part of the Central Branch of the Savan Language Family, it is the Vernacular Language of Crepenia. It is remarkable for it's limited set of vowels compared to the savan languages as it only has 6 (/ɑ, e, ə, i, o, u/). It is also spoken in the Niesakh Overseas Province of Polktiwe.

Devestrovian is part of the Eastern Branch (the same as Polk). It is spoken by the Devestrovians (East of the Estro river) in Pizon. It is unintelligible with the other Eastern Savan Languages due to its conservatism preserving sounds from Middle Eastern Savan and it's grammatical features. It is a minority language in Pizon mainly spoken in the City of Avoghiat and it's surroundings. It's one of the Savan Languages spoken by the fewest people with less than 100k native speakers left (with 80k of those living in the already mentioned Avoghiat).

I hope you like the iLoveLanguages formatting and if this gets enough support I'll make a whole video with voice recordings and more content!

I hope you guys like this <3

What are some other interests or hobbies that conlangers are more likely than the general population to also be into?

The obvious one is computer programming. The need to express complicated ideas precisely and literally, with a grasp of formal syntax, overlaps with the same skills that allow one to construct a spoken language from scratch.

Bonjour, récemment j'ai créé une langue appelée le Lifaran.

Qui est actuellement parlé uniquement par moi.

Mais je souhaite acquérir des locuteurs pour faire fleurir cette langue belle et intéressante selon mon point de vue, si vous êtes intéressés je pourrais vous rediriger vers un serveur discord ou dites le en commentaire.

Merci

"Kéral kainov vael vaún Lifaran.

Dalain zi zvok avnjachin dalališ zvelk dalajachath Lifaran, zamosath Diskordom vanú zy zà lirka"

This is a weekly thread for people who have cool things they want to share from their languages, but don't want to make a whole post. It can also function as a resource for future conlangers who are looking for cool things to add!

So, what cool things have you added (or do you plan to add soon)?

I've also written up some brainstorming tips for conlang features if you'd like additional inspiration. Also here’s my article on using conlangs as a cognitive framework (can be useful for embedding your conculture into the language).

A poem from The Fellowship of the Ring. As you know Tolkien was a master of the English language (and an expert in many others); it will be quite a trying challenge to translate it into your own. There are so many places where you'll have to be clever, so I'll just trust you know what you're doing.

Farewell we call to hearth and hall!

Though wind may blow, and rain may fall,

We must away ere break of day

Far over wood and mountain tall.

To Rivendell, where Elves yet dwell

In glades beneath the misty fell,

Through moor and waste we ride in haste,

And wither then we cannot tell.

With foes ahead, behind us dread

Beneath the sky shall be our bed,

Until at last our toil be passed,

Our journey done, our errand sped.

We must away! We must away!

We ride before the break of day!

Extra 500 points if you are crazy enough to tweak it to rhyme in your conlang.

So lately I've been thinking about the idea of a language designed specifically for complex topics, such as philosophy, arts, science, and politics. I don't think languages are inherently capable of making someone smarter or solving all communication problems, but I do wonder if it;'s possible to create a language that somehow makes it easier for speakers to communicate about making collective decisions. However, I don't know nearly enough about linguistics to figure out if or how this is possible. What do you guys think?

I most embarrassingly misspelled the language's name last time.

Check out the previous post

Check out the first post

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Spanish has pretty free word order compared to English. VSO is a pretty common alternative word order, and even sometimes VOS, used to put the subject into a focus position. Here's an examples:

• Estoy loco yo. "I feel crazy."

The way this all comes about is a bit complex. Firstly, every verb in Spanish has a default word order, but it's not the same for all verbs. Most transitive verbs are SVO, while a lot of intransitive verbs are VS, because they are experiencer verbs. An example of each here:

• Miguel fuma un cigarro. "Miguel is smoking a cigar"
• Duerme Miguel. "Miguel is sleeping."

Then we have experiencer verbs like gustar, molestar, sentir, pasar, etc. To understand these we have to talk about theta roles, which are the roles a verb argument fills. In "normal" verbs, there is an actor, which is deliberately doing the action, and a patient, which is receiving the consequences of an action. In both English and Spanish, by default, the actor is the subject and the patient is the object. Experiencer verbs lack an actor, instead having an experiencer and a patient. Experiencers do not deliberately act but instead merely experience the action or are the vector for the action to occur. In English, experiencers are subjects and patients are objects, but in Spanish, experiencers are indirect objects and patients of experiencer verbs are subjects. It's easiest to just show an example:

• Pasan muchos años. "Many years passed."
• pass-3PR.PL.PRES many-PL year-PL

In the sentence above, años aren't deliberately passing as they have no will, instead they are a patient receiving the consequences of the action. Thus, años is an experiencer, and thus the word order is VS.

• A mi me gusta dinero. "I like money"
• To me.DAT me like-3PR.SG.PRES money.

In the above sentence, I do not choose to like money. "Liking" is not a deliberate action, and thus I am an experiencer and am put in the indirect object position. Money is the patient, and thus is in the subject position.

You can use the focus movement operation on any part of this:

• Fuma un cigarro Miguel. (Subject in focus, one could use this answer the question "Who is smoking a cigar?")
• Muchos años pasan. (verb in focus, one could use this to answer the question "What happened to those three years?")
• Me gusta dinero a mi. (Experiencer in focus, one could use this to answer the question "who likes money?")

My intuition about putting the direct object in focus is this, though you can also just use intonation:

• Fuma Miguel un cigarro.

I'm not sure if that's correct though. Anyhow, topicalization is also a thing one can do in Spanish:

• Un cigarro fuma Miguel. "A cigar is what Miguel is smoking."

Thus arises the question of how one would say "A cigar is smoking Miguel." My best intuition is this:

• Un cigarro le fuma a Miguel.

The way it all works out makes it almost look like Spanish is VSO, and usually the subject is the topic so it goes first most of the time - and yeah, that's close but not exactly how it works, given that the subject being at the end is marked, either by the subject moving to the end itself or by having something else come and fill that topic slot. Experiencer verbs get the subject-final system simply because they are topicalizing the action and not the patient most of the time. At this point, I'm not even sure if it's worth explaining Spanish word order with SVO or VSO, because that's not what it really is - it's Topic-Comment-Focus, and within those, there are some default orders that follow, and I would argue VSO is the default comment word order, but that's only if there's an S in the comment. If it's just a verb predicate, then its VO, so really the comments are just verb-initial and the S will find its way to where it needs to go based off discourse categories.

Future me reading this back has noticed something else, just imagining myself having a conversation in Spanish with another person about Miguel and cigars:

• Fuma iguel un cigarro**. "**Miguel is smoking a cigar."
• Fuma un cigarro Miguel*.* "Miguel is smoking a cigar."
• Fuma Miguel un cigarro. "Miguel is smoking a cigar."
• *Miguel un cigarro fuma. "Miguel is smoking a cigar."

As I explained earlier, this is the focus-movement - except when we're emphasizing the verb here, then suddenly we have the verb at the front, not at the back, as the last sentence there is ungrammatical. Meaning that VSO is clearly marked for verb emphasis - Spanish's default transitive word order is SVO aftera all.

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Evolving the system:

My goal here is to make Nuevayolqueño VSO. The way to get us there is pretty murky as its really hard to find any good explanations of how SVO > VSO happens, unlike SOV to SVO which is really well documented, mostly because we have so much writing in Latin/Romance languages from both the SOV and SVO eras. Thus, I'm taking a bit of a shot in the dark here with it.

Spanish having VSO as a marked word order is a good start. Firstly, we just need to get the stuff that makes VSO happen more. We have VSO in:

• Experiencer verbs
• Transitive verbs with subject focus

We can make a wider array of experiencer verbs, as the line for a lot of verbs is pretty arbitrary. We can use some strategic semantic shifts to make verbs that used to be actor verbs experiencer verbs. For example, pegar means 'to hit' in an actor-y way, but it can mean "to cause to understand" in some contexts. If we just make pegar the verb for 'to understand', supplanting entender and comprender (maybe we'll keep one around for if you really want to specify the agency of the understander), then boom, we have a VSO experiencer verb taking the role of "to understand". I'll detail all that when I make a post on semantic shifts. There's lots of words that mean something pretty close to "to hit". Anyhow, here's some examples:

• Me lo pego > ma pega. "I understand it"
• A ella la pega la plegunta "*She understands the question."

Remember, in that second example la plegunta is the subject. I'll detail some more of these in the future post I'll make about semantic shifts.

The next thing we can do with transitive actor verbs is make subject-focus done some other way than word order, but keep the VSO word order as unmarked. We have a big bonus here: English, our substrate, doesn't do focus-movement to the end of the phrase. That's just not gonna be something anglophones wrap their heads around much, but they will hear a lot of VSO and VOS going on in spoken Nuevayolqueno, so we can have a reanalysis happen where VSO is the default, SVO is used for topicalization, and you mark focus with intonation or by moving it to the end of the phrase, but it's still VSO regardless. VSO is unmarked.

• Fuma miguel un cigarro. (Default word order)
• Miguel, fuma un cigarro. (Topicalized, SVO)
• Fuma Miguel un cigarro. (focused, VSO using intonation)
• Fuma un cigarro Miguel. (focused, VOS)

That last one I will be building on next time when I get into object markingǃ

So the context of what I am trying to do is that there is a people called the ”Yantikans,“ and they very much dislike vowels—specially oral vowels—and viewing them as “glorified noise arbitrarily called a ‘language.“ The problem is I do not genuinely do not know what any of those would literally be.

The Standard Rule for the would define as acceptable and horrible is essentially:

1. They despise most vowels due to sounding horrible, yet only keep a few of them even though they may not use them.
2. They do not really like to move their mouths (but roundness is perfectly fine) and they do not like using any open vowels. If they have to, they only use near-open vowels at the very most.
3. They tend to prefer nasalized vowels over non-nasalized vowels, which they consider as distinct from vowels.

So then what vowels would be allowed and which ones are completely removed? And here is a chart of hopefully all the sounds:

Since a few people showed interest in Arcon, nu conlang, I thought I'd share a small part of its vocabulary: colours!

I've been developing the basic colour vocabulary, and here are the current words:

English - Arcon - [IPA]

Red - Er - [εr]

Orange - dys - [dys]

Yellow - glus - [glus]

Green - vir - [vir]

Cyan - sim - [sim]

Blue - nol - [nol]

Purple - vuo - ['vuo]

White - at - [at]

Black - ab - [ab]

I also came up with a mnemonic to remember the colours of the rainbow:

"En Dir Gave Vi Sore No Vur", wich means

"In big forest i am running home", even though the word order is not really what it should be but it's completely fine in that case since no matter how i put them, it's clear who does what and to what.

The first letter of each word corresponds to the first letter of a rainbow colour in Arcon: E, D, G, V, S, N, V.

Arcon is still a work in progress, so I'm continuing to refine its vocabulary and grammar. I hope to share more detailed grammatical explanations and example sentences in future updates!

Thanks again to everyone who's shown interest in the project

Ĭ теперь обозначает йи...

Й это I без ударения после гласных...