Our /lang/uage

This is going to be a long post. I might separate it into parts.

/lang/, stay with me for a second here, what if we (the /lang/ collective) were to write, publish, and fluently speak our own language? Wouldn't that be interesting? You remember when you were kids you always had dreams of concocting your own language to speak with your friends and stuff? Same concept, only you probably have the capacity, with a little patience, ingenuity, and help from others, to actually ACCOMPLISH it. This thought came to me a couple days ago, I was listening to "Prenzlaurberg" by Beirut, and since the song sounds like slurred gibberish, I decided to transcribe it the way I heard it/maybe fudge what I hear a little and have it take on its own meaning. I'm going to post a small portion of the song, what I think it would say in the new language. Completely by ear, make your own assumptions for any loanwords that it looks like I used

Prenzlaurforue / District of Prenzlaur (forue being a suffix)
Sol la vor ' manie fonore / The sunshine ' [on] balcony's edge
Zlait crie eurnre remoir / Even when people lament
Sol la vor ' manie fonore / The sunshine ' [on] balcony's edge
Zlait crie em nol dem deed / Even when I'm old and dead
Aicanter toni, zlait au crie / Singing tonight, even still
An lo eisis vai ensom foture / And look, [the] moon's face tells [of the] future
Addolot sem sair por la vire, soilar / [The] neverending sea dances at lit. "the"; in context: "its" call, shaking
Em wachet ver por la vire, taim, taim.../ He abruptly stills at his call, wait, wait...

Literally any question/comments/criticism are welcome, I really hope it can become a success.

>>39
Good point...

Also, I'm creating a wikia, I will post info here so we can edit it.

>>35
Kinda confusing, please explain.

http://langian.wikia.com/wiki//lang/_Wiki

I registered with the email dickinator@mailinator.com

username: 4chanlang
password: 4chan

>>28
I'd like be spoken too :D

>>31
I speak Classical Latin, I was even correcting people's at Locutamus Latina.
I'll take Attic Greek course next year, so I can help with it a bit.
Arabic isn't hard to find since many Muslim study proper Quranic pronounce.
Sanskrit, well, drag Indian people in the project :D
Middle Chinese can be tricky, but in worst-case scenario, we use Mandarin in its place.

About reading with English or Spanish vowels, well, there's just 5, not a lot, so mispronouncing them isn't a great deal.

>>33
I have some objections... L vs. R, I would make both a single phoneme, like East Asian languages do. And "helio" (Greek) instead of "sol" (Latin) is easier to adapt.

And, even if we're only 3, it's OK for me, but if this project gets more serious, we'll NEED more people.

>>34
Why not separate words? Like, instead of "ĉevalino" (she-horse), use "female horse"?
(BTW, not ĉevalo, please... ekwo - see Equus equus :D)

>>40
Old English
Romance Language

Right, we need to think of some basic vocab and decide on the grammatical structure.

I propose that verbs are structured like French/English, using a participle with and auxiliary verb to denote the exact tense.

As for nouns, we definitely need nominative and accusative cases, maybe prepositional, but we could just use acc for that...

>>44
If you don't mind, how'd you learn Latin?

Also, here's an idea, pronouns can be one letter, and we can have 3 genders, male, female and neuter. Male and female are only used for living things (for clarification purposes) and neuter is for nonliving things. The pronouns can be like this:
a-she, her
e-his, him
o-it

>>46
This sounds good

also, forgot to trip in >>47

>>45
I know that Old English is Germanic -__-
I just meant that other conlangs like Esperanto talk almost all their words from Romance roots, thus making it not culturally neutral and defeating the purpose.

>>47
Why have genders at all? They serve no purpose and only exist because of the evolution of natural languages.
Also, we definitely must not have any articles!

>>38
Instead of Old English, somewhat understandable only for English users, why not Germanic, understandable by German, English, Dutch?
(YES: it still sounds badass :D)

>>40
This' a bit unfeasible, but we can try...

>>42
Well, it's something like this. All languages has some restrictions in "what is a valid syllable". So, while in English /sprait/ (sprite) is an acceptable syllable, it isn't in Japanese or Portuguese that allows essentially consonant+vowel syllables.

However, some languages allow syllables not allowed in English, like Arabic /wahda/ - yes, this /h/ is like in Hung, the sound exists in English, but not in syllable ending.

Hey, this can help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonotactics

>>49
It doesn't have to be culturally neutral, that kind of shit is faggots anyway.
We aren't trying to be culturally neutral, we're making a language to discuss languages. IMO classical langs and former lingua francas would probably be best suited for this.

And for genders, they would only be there for animals really, just because I think it'd be simple and cause no confusion in conversation. But everything inanimate would be neuter.
Just throwing out ideas.

>>47
Hmm...one letter pronouns...i dunno about that. But it's not my language, if the majority prevails, i wouldn't mind.
>>44
Sure sure, no problem. That was just by ear, to be honest I actually always liked helios more than sol.

>>50
Old English is hardly understandable for us Anglophones. The only line I understood was "That was a good king" because it sounded like "That vas gud kinging" and the subtitles still help me there. Hardly any Anglo-Saxon words are understandable to us, those words that we still use from Anglo-Saxon roots have been changed quite a bit (in pronunciation and spelling).

Forgot to trip in >>51

>>52
In my opinion as well, Greek sounds a lot better on the ear than Latin

I'm think Japanese should be the base for the grammar i.e. monosyllabic particles to denote case, dropping pronouns.

>>49
I can see why you'd need genders for certain things... perhaps make every word neuter and then use masc/fem prefixes when you need to be specific (that way it's not sexist like Esperanto either)

>>53
Old English is closer to the Norse languages than modern english, but I think it's inferior in that it has too much inflection. But I do think we should use eth and thorn as they are badass letters.

Forgot to trip in >>54

>>54
I guess that'd work, the prefixes. But I'm honestly not big of a fan either, but I don't like how you can be talking about "my friend" in English and kind of have to guess the gender. It's not a big deal, but it can get annoying sometimes.

Aight, well I'm out, I got school tomorrow (HS senior, you probably didn't see that coming).

>>55
Old English is closest to Old Dutch, if I recall correctly. Apparently, if it wasn't raped by the Normans and subsequently the Norse, it'd be pretty mutually intelligible with Dutch.

>>46
NOTE - I'll use Latin vocabulary to explain this idea, but most of it will change, so stick in the adverb, ok?

EGO - I (from lat. "ego")
WIDE - see (from lat. "uideo/uidere")
EKWO - horse (from lat. "equus")

"ego faj wide ekwo" - F means "past", AJ means "continuous". So, I was seeing a horse, watching it for some time.

"ego zaj wide ekwo" - Z means "future", AJ is still "continuous". So, I'll watch/see/observe the horse for some time.

"ego fu wide ekwo" - F means "past", U means "non-continuous". So I saw the horse, but was only an instant.

Something like this... making adverbs decomponable in tense [past, present, future], mood [continuous, not-continuous, hypothetical], or even like Arabic running vs. steady (so the same verb is used both for "ride a horse" and "sit in a horse").

>>56
I'm gonna go too. I'm on my holidays but it is 5am xD
Hopefully the language will have advanced somewhat by the time I wake up!
Oh and we must decide on the default word endings for noun, adjectives, verbs and adverbs so we can start inventing words.

>>54
I actually know a lot of JP, in this element I can be useful :D

And yeah. +1 for neutral nouns excepting animals

>>58
Oy vey. singular letters being full concepts? I dunnoooooo....

Also, I updated the wikia.

>>47
Made some classes in Linguistic course... I was forced to abandon the university (it was in other city and momma got depressed :-/ don't laugh, please), but I continue studying with Wikipedia, Catullus, a bit of Wiktionary, Plauto's Aulularia... BTW, Aulularia for English speakers works great.

About genders: I think using "it is a female kid" is better in this case tha "she is a girl". Many language works well without genders, nor in pronouns neither in substantives.

>>52
From Greek and Latin words, we can wipe out last -S and -M since it's only declension... so helios>herjo
And if we change Latin -US/-UM to -O, it gets closer to Romance langs, so forum>foro

>>55
Þ and ð are cool to see, but will Langian use THink and THe sounds? I vote "no", but majority decides...

>>57
Not only Normans... Vikings and Renaissance borrowed Latin helped too. English has far more Latin vocabulary than Dutch.

>>60
Single letter: It's just a letter, but we can expand them... like, using a syllable for each concept. What do you think?

Japanese: yes, it is. Especially because where English is hard, Japanese is easy, vice-versa...

And now you're entitled to care the Wikia :D

About the name: lan.gi.an? Or lan.gjan?
And what about we only use minuscules?

About vocabulary - found some .txt here, colour names (it's still from Sinpjo):

rubew - red, from Latin "ruby"
dahaf - yellow/orange, from Arabic "gold" (ðahab)
sumurus - green, from Arabic "emerald" (zumurrud)
sama - cyan/sky blue, don't remember source (maybe kwano<Greek "kyanos"?)
asayar - blue like HTML links, from Arabic "lapis" (laazaward)
mazenta - magenta/fuchsia, from Italian "magenta"
abjas - white, from Arabic
sowdo - black, from Arabic

correcting: asayar>asaWar (I was using Y for /w/)

Numbers (from PIE). Radicals are nice but composed numbers need fix badly:
0 zero
1 ojno
2 dujo
3 trewe
4 kweta
5 penka
6 sweko
7 hefta
8 johto
9 newe
10 ojno-zero (lit. "one zero")
11 ojno-ojno
20 dujo-zero
123 ojno-dujo-trewe (lit. "one two three")
1,234 ojno-kiro dujo-trewe kewta (kiro<kilo)
1,005,000 ojno-mega penka-kiro

I really hope Langian doesn't turn out like Lojban for a lot of reasons. Also I think th would be a nice sound to have in the repertoire.

Guys, why not just learn Lojban?

http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Lojban

>>65
Lojban's objective is help with artificial intelligence, so many of its features are unnatural by design, not by mistake.

However, Langian IMO must avert this, since we're making it to use with other humans.

My worst fear is Langian becoming a second Esperanto - obscure with all unsaid rules, using hard to contrast sounds (like h and ĥ), and plain ugly both to read as to listen.

(Oh, here's a espeRANTo: http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ )

>>63
Very very cool. I agree with those constructions. Although! Once you get to 10 on, and I suggest it might be "ojonjo" 20 being "odunjo" but I dunno. It's late, I'll probably cut out soon.


>>62
I would think general two-letter, three-letter...OH PRONOUNS! I'm such an idiot. One letter pronouns are fine, one letter PARTICLES is what I'm hesitant about.

>>66
Forget you Ash. You're not helping.

(As you can see, my call for recruits has horribly failed)

>>67

"Lojban's objective is help with artificial intelligence,"

From the site: "Lojban is a carefully constructed spoken language designed in the hope of removing a large portion of the ambiguity from human communication.

#  Lojban is designed to be used by people in communication with each other, and possibly in the future with computers.
# Lojban is designed to be culturally neutral.
# Lojban has an unambiguous grammar, which is based on the principles of logic.
# Lojban has phonetic spelling, and unambiguous resolution of sounds into words. "

Example: http://www.lojban.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=tu%27a+le+cukta

>>69

:(

Perhaps I can make a wiki for us?

>>38

Anything can sound epic when you say it like that, but he has the inflection of the story all wrong.

>>71
Nope. Already got one. http://langian.wikia.com/wiki//lang/_Wiki
I didn't start it though.

In closing, go away.

>>74
no u

>>70
Making the language is part of fun, at least for me.

About Lobjan: I'm reading some about it, seems like major improvements from Volapük, Ido and proto-Ido, using capital letters to mark stress is a nice hack, but I would make some few improvements...
*vowel vs. semivowel - different letters help syllabification.
(This is one of reasons I like Cyrillic - while you have different letters for vowels and semivowels, their conection is pratty obvious.)
*wipe out schwa sound - a e i o u is the single most common ground for vowels, showing itself in many languages (Latin, Japanese, Hawaiian...)
*Wipe out v/w distinction - few langs use it.
*Tidy phonotactics - I understand that CVCCV and CCVCV has a reason, but assimilation can mess badly with it (like /nm/>/n/ or /m/, and /Sn/ (written cn) > /sn/ (sn))

Khaos, why consonants that represent multiple sounds? Doesn't Cyrillic have enough letters to avoid that?

>>68
Ũnh. Maybe shorting them? Like:
10 ojzero
11 ojojno
20 duzero
123 ojdutrewe (lit. "one two three")
1,234 ojno kiro dutrekweta (kiro<kilo)
1,005,000 ojno mega penka kiro

Better? Or worse?

>>78
Definitely better. They're more concise now.


Ash, put on a name. Just do it.

>>77
If "same sound" you mean ч/z (/tʃ/ like in CHurCH), I made it to act as an unity... having an affricate helps with loanwords, and it's a common feature.

If you mean x/h sounding as German CH (/x/) or English H (/h/), they're just allophones - default is /x/, but if one finds hard to pronounce, I suggested using /h/ instead.

If it's none of above, care to explain? :D