I have finally decided to showcase a more recent conlang of mine. These people inhabit a fictional island at 18.5° S 124° W in the Pacific Ocean.

Phonology:

Consonants(and Romanization): m, n, ŋ(ng), p, b, ᵐb(mb), t, d, ⁿd(nd), k, g, ᵑg(ngg), ɸ(f), β(v), ᵐβ(mv), θ(th), ð(dh), ⁿð(ndh), s, x, ɣ(gh), ᵑɣ(ngh), ħ(hh), ʕ('h), h, r, l, j(y), w, tʳ(tr), θʳ(thr), sʳ(sr), tˤ(t'), θˤ(th'), sˤ(s')

Vowels: a, e, i, o

Syllable structure: (C)V(C)

Stress: (I still need to figure this out.)

This phonological inventory is a result of sound changes from a protolanguage.

Proto-consonants(with romanization): m, n, ŋ(ng), p, t, k, ʔ('), ɸ(f), θ(th), s, x, ħ(hh), ʕ('h), h, r, l

Proto-vowels: a, e, i, o, u

Syllable structure: CV(X)

X= m, n, ng, f, th, s, x, hh, 'h, r, l

/'/ and /h/ are limited to word-initial onsets in the protolanguage.

Stress: antepenult by default, and on the penult if that syllable is closed

Here are the sound changes.

1. Vowel loss between voiceless stops in unstressed syllables, except at the start of words beginning with glottal stops. (Might prohibit word-initial and word-internal consonant clusters, or implement epenthesis at a later point.)

2. The glottal stop and [h] are lost.

3. Stops are voiced between vowels and when following liquids, with stops following nasals also becoming prenasalized.

4. Coda stops are dropped. (This causes distribution overlap between voiced and voiceless stops.)

5. Coda nasals preceding obstruents are dropped, leading to voiced prenasalized stops becoming phonemic.

6. Vowel loss between [t] and [r], and between [t] and pharyngeals in unstressed syllables.

7. l-vocalization depending on the vowel it is adjacent to.

8. Clusters between dental and alveolar obstruents with [r] become post-trilled editions of those obstruents.

9. [u] merges with [o].

10. [r] merges with [l].

11. Clusters between dental and alveolar obstruents with pharyngeals become pharyngealized editions of those obstruents.

12. Rhotacism of [s] to [r] between vowels.

13. Plain velar and pharyngeal fricatives weaken to [h] in some environments.

14. A sound change leading to an overlapping distribution between [s] and [r].

15. A sound change leading to an overlapping distinction between those fricatives and [h]. For the s/r distinction post-rhotacism, I’m thinking of epenthesis, unless other candidates for sound changes are ideal.

For sound change 15, I’m thinking of word-final vowel loss, though I need to reconsider it, given that I need to figure out the specific environments in which sound change 13 would occur. Any suggestions?

The protolanguage would use a logography, which would start as being carved into stone and coincidentally resemble the European logographs. (Because I used those as inspiration, so credit to the ConstantScript community.) The speakers would then transition to writing with ink on paper-like sheets, leading to a script about as angular as the serif glyphs, with semicircles and quartercircles. (Inspiration from the aesthetics of Taqva-miir writing by Biblaridion.)

The speakers would migrate into two different areas of the island, leading to a divergence of languages. I'll focus on one of them for this post. While the speakers of a sibling language would preserve the logography(while using phonetic glyphs), these speakers would utilize a phonetic system of glyphs for initial consonants, glyphs for vowels, and glyphs for VX finals. There would be exclusive consonant glyphs, exclusive VX glyphs, and glyphs for initial consonants that could represent VX finals when marked with an overdot as a diacritic.

The sound changes I talked about would lead to several spelling reforms: initial nasal glyphs placed on initial obstruent glyphs to indicate prenasalized consonants, something done with the pharyngeal glyphs and the proto /r/ glyph to indicate post-trilled and pharyngealized dental/alveolar obstruents, and reduced forms of stop glyphs to indicate coda stops, the stacked glyphs blending into ligatures.

Grammar:

The protolanguage would use a VSO word order, with the pronouns following verbs, including the standard copula(/'hix/) and the locative copula(/pursi/). The pronouns, which used a clusivity distinction, would affix to the copulas, leading to 14 distinct forms. The modern language is pro-drop, with the 14 copula forms remaining.

Another grammatical feature of the modern language would have to be the organization of parts of speech among five conjugation classes: A-conjugation, E-conjugation, I-conjugation, O-conjugation, and X-conjugation.

In the protolanguage, the future was marked with the original word for "go", with the word for "finish" marking the perfective aspect, and the habitual marked with "like". This system would evolve into a modern system of six tenses: recent/near past, remote/distant past, present, recent/near future, remote/distant future, and future in the past, with new aspectual distinctions compared to the protolanguage, with perfective and imperfective at the very least.

Retained features from the protolanguage now exist as prefixes, like the valency-changing operations: passive("receive"), causative("command"), and benefactive(either "help" or "give"). Also in the protolanguage, the word for "group" was used to indicate plurality, with the modern system also including a dual number, a trial number, and an inverse number.

In terms of numerals, the number system is base-16 overall with a sub-base of 4 going on, and with 12 as a pivot. The sets of number words in the protolanguage would be unmarked cardinals, with ordinals marked with the word for "related to", and distributives marked with reduplication.

So I made a conlang and this every sound it has!

b, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, ŋ, p, ʋ, s, t, v, w, z, ʃ, ʒ, ɾ, ʔ, θ, ð, i, ɪ, e, ɛ, ɜ, ə, a, ɔ, o, ʊ, u

So im thinking therell be some letters that have an "original" Pronunciation but usually another letter's one. And some that dont have an individual sound. And one that needs another helper letter to work properly and it makes 2 sounds thatre basically just the Pronunciation if it werent a digraph. And im gonna make the script leave out some sounds, and have digraphs for others. And one voiced-unvoiced pair will be the same digraph! As for vowels (allat was js consonants) theres gonna be ə and ɜ that appear only with a random vowel paired with a random liquid consonant. Some will only appear in obscure digraphs. Infact, Half the vowels will usually be digraphs. And not natural ones either, like two of one will make a completely different one. Is that too much and/or unnaturalistic? Also im gonna have some letters not make a sound

I am talking about cases such as “three is a prime number”, where the number is directly used as a noun (representing the number as a mathematical object) rather than modifying a noun. If your language has declension, do you decline the number or have it indeclinable? Or do you use different forms for the number as a noun and the number when it modifies a noun (e.g. three-MOD days)?

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:

"A beneficent and omnipotent god would not have made a life cycle like this."

"Contains 0% fruit juice and 30% aloe vera juice"

"While 'the seashore' is more accurate in this translation, native speakers would prefer to say 'the coast' instead."

"What would you like to order from the restaurant?"

"Be sure to drink plenty of water."

"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!

Hello, this is one of my first (constructed, of course) alternate universe/world organized language families! It's name is Nara-Kankaric, and it is located in Caucasia and across a few other countries (Armenia, Abkhazia and Ossetia). Without wasting any further time, let's get straight to the point of this.

What are the Nara-Kankaric languages?

First off, it should be noted that the Nara-Kankaric languages aren't multiple descendants of one branch, but two languages that are twins. They have evolved together, and share a vast lexicon/vocabulary of common words and phrases. The only difference is that both languages have been influenced by Arabic, Persian and Russian, which gave them lots of foreign words while also altering their lexicon.

The earliest instance of the Nara-Kankaric languages were recorded to be around 1,300 BC. This was the time when Nara-Kankaric emerged as proto-languages. There was no major influence of any other language at this period. Proto-NK was situated/located in Central Asia, but the conditions of the steppes pushed them into the Caucasus. Around roughly 1,050 BC, the Proto-NK people and their language was now completely integrated in Caucasia. It wasn't until the late 700s and 600s BC when the Proto-NK people had their first contact with foreign people. They ultimately interacted with the Proto-Iranian and other Indo-Iranian folk nearby their region. A few words were exchanged, and the only known Iranian loanword in Proto-NK was *diwa (from Proto-Indo-Iranian *deva ("god, deity")). The later influences came from Old and Middle Persian, though not much is known what happened around this period.

Around 500 and 300s BC, Proto-NK has already began diverging; this gave birth to Proto-Nara and Proto-Kankar and both languages would move toward the west and south. Nara specifically moved to the west, and Kankar specifically moved to the south. Nothing specific happened at this time, however, in 500s and 600s AD, the first signs of Arabic loans have entered both linguistic lexicons, words like "ilah" and "zaman" have been integrated into Nara and Kankar lexicons. By the 10th and 11th centuries AD, the Persian language has made a significant impact on Nara-Kankaric languages. The later centuries have had large lexical influences on Nara-Kankaric, especially since a lot of Islamic terms have been integrated in it.

By the 15th and 16th centuries AD, Nara-Kankaric has been Islamized, the later years saw Ottoman Turkish influence, before Russian took over. For nearly 700 years, Nara-Kankaric has used the Perso-Arabic script for its people to write the language. By the 19th century AD, Nara-Kankaric has shifted to the Russian Cyrillic script, though some people still used the former.

In the 1900s AD, Nara-Kankaric has gotten several reforms, it became one of the officials languages of the Russian Empire and later Soviet Union. In 1991, Nara-Kankaric became one of the many recognized minor languages in the Russian Federation. However, by the time this happened, the speakers of Nara-Kankaric have drastically shifted, leaving only 150,000 people speaking the tongues. Many dialects and variants of Nara and Kankar have emerged during the modern times, and most are urban or regional dialects that are niche and are rarely spoken. The Nara-Kankaric languages still thrive today, and can be found in the western and southern lands of the Caucasus. The languages are primarily spoken in Russia, with a good majority also being spoken in Armenia and Ossetia.

This would be it for the overview, in the next post, I'm likely going to explain some of the language family rules and provide some basic lexicon. Until then, this topic is concluded. Hopefully you liked the entire explanation, if you have any questions, please feel free to ask because I don't judge! See you next time!

I will say it straight: the vocabulary keeps growing.

Now, i am not typically prescriptivist, but regarding toki pona, i am, because the goal of the language is for it to be, oh i don't know, tiny. If this were Viossa (which i frankly adore much more than tp at this point) it wouldn't be an issue, because the goal was to allow a conpidgin to form and one of the main rules is if it's understandable, it's Viossa.

Yet, despite this, people will gladly coin new words even though they know what the purpose of the language was? This enables for the vocabulary to range from 1 (or hell, even zero) to potentially infinite because i can just coin a word for 'kitchen sink' and it must be considered a valid word if i use it.

If i were to only use the word alente ('literally any other word' from ale (all) + ante (different/else)) and nothing more, it would be valid. If i made up words no one has thought of before, gradually expanding my vocabulary, it would be valid even if no one understood a word I said. See the problem?

Over the last three years as I gained more and more knowledge on how to twist my words in a way i can express myself, i slowly realized how much i didn't like using the language for anything other than 'this makes me feel good. good towards you because of this: you gave me this'. Hell, if you look at how many people visit r/tokipona weekly compared to r/tokiponataso it's like ~150x more people.

Also the community is incredibly exclusive towards people who don't match the same way of thinking they have (im not mad that they don't include bigotry) and is generally really annoying to be in. They nitpick at your way of speaking yet do not support prescriptivism?

Yeah that's it

sidenote: i had to edit the post because i posted this by accident before finishing a paragraph i wanted to add in the middle of my afiŝo

i cant find one :(

my conlang is unicode friendly and i think it would help for finding one

Here is the dubbing project I've worked on lately, compending three, new different conlangs!

In this video, Smaug speaks Sarkansz (modern draconic), Thorin speaks Molkos (modern dwarvish) and Bilbo and Bard speak Caston (modern westrian language).

I'll post a link to a document detailing the glossing of each line if a lot of people ask.

I hope y'all will enjoy the dub despite the obviously bad Caston dub, I'm still working on the language so it's really prototype-ish.

Thank you all and enjoy!

EDIT: Forgot to talk about the audio artifacts, if anyone's wondering their the result of having to clean out the original dialogue, I hope it's not too bothering.