Conlang

I created my own language for fun, because I really enjoyed learning Latin and Greek in secondary school. Languages that are created like this by a single person instead of naturally developed by a large population, are called conlangs, or constructed languages. I constructed this language with the goal of making a language that is fun to use, by trying to minimize unnecessary and redundant rules. This is one reason I have never really liked writing or talking in English. Even in my mother tongue, Dutch, I feel quite limited.

A language can be broken up into the following parts:

• Phonology (sounds)
• Orthography (writing)
• Grammar
• Vocabulary

Phonology

The consonant sounds I have chosen for my language are the following:

And these are the six vowels I chose:

Word structure

Not all combinations of sounds are easy to pronounce and I therefore created the following word structure:
[G] {B G} [D]
using the following definitions:

• [X] means X is optional
• {X} means zero or more occurences of X concatenated with eachother
• X Y means X concatenated with Y
• A means either the letters a, o or u
• B means one of the following starting consonant clusters:
  • z, zm, zn, zl, zj, zw
  • s, sm, sn, sl, sj, sw, sp, st, sk, sf, sx
  • m, n, l, r, j, h, w
  • b, bl, br, bj, bw
  • p, pl, pr, pj, pw, ps, pn, pm
  • d, dl, dr, dj, dw
  • t, tl, tr, tj, tw, ts, tn, tm
  • g, gl, gr, gj, gw, gn, gm
  • k, kl, kr, kj, kw, ks, kn, km, kf
  • x, xl, xr, xj, xw, xs, xn, xm
  • v, vl, vr, vj, vn, vm
  • f, fl, fr, fj, fw, fs, fn, fm
• C means one of the connecting consonants m, n, l, r or j
• D means one of the following ending consonant clusters:
  • s, sp, st, sk, sf, sx
  • p, ps, pt
  • t, ts
  • k, ks, kt
  • x, xs, xt
  • f, fs, ft
• E means either the letters e, i or y
• F means one of the (reduced) connecting consonants m, n, l or r
• G means either the letter sequence "A", "E", "A C" or "E F"

Lastly, the stress of a word is always on the second to last syllable.

Orthography

This is the part where you could design your own alphabet, syllabary or some other writing system. For my language however, I chose to stick with the Latin alphabet, with each letter directly representing the corresponding sound. In fact, the IPA symbols used for the sounds of my language are basically just the same as the letters of the Latin alphabet, with the exception of c and q. Also, the sounds of a, e, o, i and y do not necessarily have to pronounced as [a], [e], [o], [i], [y] respectively but can also be pronounced [ɑ], [ɛ], [ɔ], [ɪ] and [ʏ] or something in between, as I consider these sound pairs the same in this language. In Dutch, this distinction does exists and these other sounds are called short vowels as opposed to long vowels.

Sentences in this language are written in all lower case, including names, because I think it looks better. There are no silly rules and exceptions either when it comes to punctuation: you are allowed to place any number of commas (,) anywhere in a sentence and end them with a full stop (.), question mark (?) or exclamation point (!).

Grammar

Here I describe the grammar of my language.
In short, it has a simple case system for a relatively free word order. It is less complicated than Latin, however.

This language uses inflections to denote different functions of words, so the word order is more free.

Nouns

Nouns follow a regular scheme, with three noun cases: nominative, accusative and dative. Also, this language incorporates the definite/indefinite article into the inflection table as well.

Which suffix is used depends on whether the stem ends with a consonant or vowel. Words that end in a consonant will get the -o suffix in case of the indefinite accusative for example, while for a vowel ending word, the indefinite accusative gets the -lo or -l, whichever you like.

It is important to note that the stress of a word applies to the final, inflected word and not the root. You could say the stress moves when one of the vowel-containing suffices is used. For example, the stress on the word olwa moves from the first to the second syllable in olwalo.

Instead of using suffices, you can also use the following adjectives, which need to be placed in front of the modified noun:

Additionally, the following suffices can be appended instead of the main suffix:

The -(a) in these suffices means you need to put in an extra a when the root ends with a consonant.

The nominative, accusative and dative suffices for nouns can also be used for adjectives, in which case it turns into a noun. This is similar to the English -ness suffix in weirdness for example. To get the definite nominative for adjectives, you should use the -(a)wa suffix. The -(a)la is only used for adverbs and prepositions.

Finally, it is possible to construct comparative and superlative forms such as bigger and biggest by appending one of these suffices:

Verbs

Moving on to conjugation, my language consists of four different tenses: present, imperfect past, perfect past and future tenses. For each of these tenses, four different moods can be specified by using different suffices, resulting in a 4 by 4 table:

Again, you can also use the following adverbs, which can be placed anywhere in the sentence:

These are the additional suffices:

For example, sikapop means giver, while sikapok means gift. Another example: slidowop means collider, while slidowok means collision.

Adjectives

Adjectives are very simple: they are placed before the word or word group they modify.
In case it is placed before a noun, it modifies the noun.
In case it is placed before a verb, it acts as an adverb.
In each case, the resulting combination is considered a single word group.
As mentioned, the suffices for nouns also apply to adjectives.

Adverbs

Adverbs always modify the verb and can be placed anywhere in the sentence. If there are multiple verbs, the adverb modifies the main verb in the (current sub)sentence.

Binary operators

Numbers

These are the words for the digits 0-9:

With the word zux, you can specify hexadecimal numbers as a series of digits and letters. For two digit decimal numbers, you just concatenate the words of the digits. For example, the word for 42 is vato. For bigger numbers, you use the following words:

Then, digits can be prepended to any of these bigger number words, while a string of these number words gets its meaning by looking at whether they increase or decrease in value. If a given number word is lower than the previous number word, add its value. Otherwise, multiply. Examples:

Numbers act as adjectives, which means they can be placed directly in front of a noun to indicate a certain amount of that thing. In this case, the noun does not need the plurality suffix -(a)n as that would be redundant.

Positionals

To construct more complex sentences, with multiple verbs, you can use certain words to move into a subsentence. To get back to the main sentence, you can go one level "up" using either sa or si, whichever one you like. You can also go one level "down" without adding extra meaning using the words wa and wi. You can even turn these entire subsentences into nouns by appending a noun suffix to these "downward moving" words. In that case, the entire subsentence including beginning and ending words is considered a word group. I call these words that begin and end subsentences positionals.

Duplicating

Vocabulary

My language currently consists of approximately 2100 words. I still need to put them in dictionary form and finalize it, so I am not sharing the entire vocabulary yet.

Alphabet

These are the names for the letters of the alphabet, which do not act as nouns, but as names. This is to avoid ambiguity, since many of these words already have other meanings, such as i, which means "and".

Pronouns

These are the personal pronouns, which grammatically act exactly the same as nouns.

Some random words

Example sentences

I constructed the following simple sentences to illustrate the idea of a less restricted language, which means that some of these translations might sound a bit odd. These were actually constructed very early on, before I started building a large vocabulary with the help of my word generator tool.