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.
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Anonymous2010-10-20 1:55
Sorry, forgot to specify. I meant 'z being ch as in church and ts as in cats'.
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Khaos!!8djvqLidNzjGUwt2010-10-20 2:05
>>81
Nah, default is like CHurCH, but if one like to pronounce it as TS, no problem :D
It's like Langian "sees" both as the same thing, unlike English that opposes them (ex: caTS vs. caTCH). You choose which one you like better :D
I set the allophonic rules lax for a reason - you're still understood, but let bits of your native lang to "color" your speak. I think this gives a subtle "respect the differences" message.
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Khaos!!8djvqLidNzjGUwt2010-10-20 2:09
>>81
Contrasts languages use differ from language to language...
So, while English sees /kh/ and /k/ as the same phoneme/thing (like in Kill vs. sKill - note the aspiration), Mandarin contrasts both as different phonemes.
/ts/ and /tʃ/ in Langian could work same way, while English contrasts them, Langian see them as the same thing...
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Langian Anon!JSN8X5.Us.2010-10-20 2:21
>>82 >>83
Thanks for clearing that up. Interesting concept of Langian as more of a "communication tool" than a black and white "language". I like the idea, but something tells me it might get a little lost as development progresses. Also, I'm out for the night, the thread'll be here in the morning. Again, thank you thank you THAAAAAANK YOU for the ideas/comments/friggin EVERYTHING. Everyone. This will be great, I'm sure of it.
This has been /lang/ian Day 1, 10/19/2010 19:55 4chan time.
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Khaos!!8djvqLidNzjGUwt2010-10-20 2:36
Made some random vocabulary... I'm a bit bored, 4AM and no sign of sleep... see if you like...
>>84
Good night... till tomorrow. I'll see if I get some sleep too.
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LangianFag!!wZYgQex4QcHMk7J2010-10-20 6:14
Alright, I put some of the numbers on the wiki.
>>85, this vocab's great, but not all that common... we need to decide how to form the accusative case.
>>58 I like this way of forming verbs, by using a seperate auxilliary word to denote tense. So:
F- for past
Z- for future
B- for present
-AJ for continuous
-U for non-continuous
-ON for hypothetical/subjunctive
Just throwing out ideas...
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LangianFag!!wZYgQex4QcHMk7J2010-10-20 7:02
>>87
Few more ideas about verbs:
The verb on its own isthe infinitive i.e. WIDE = to see
The auxilliaries on their own form the verb to be:
BAJ/BU = I am
FAJ/FU = I was
ZAJ/ZU = I will be
And with the hypothetical suffix:
FON = past conditional
ZON = present conditional
BON = present subjunctive (useful for a few constructions)
Holy shit guys, good work. I gotta go back to class in a little but maybe we can work on this more tonight...
I also think that we should not have many synonyms, like we do in English. We have several different words that mean almost the same or the same thing, since we borrow from a lot of languages, but I think Langian should avoid that because it's more about communication than expressiveness.
I figure I should contribute some vocab, so here is some from off the top of my head...
mater, pater (Latin)
matre, patre
mother, father
Or we could have one word for "parent" with a suffix or prefix denoting gender, if the gender is needed for context.
Well I've had nothing to do all day so I've come up with some ideas for pronouns and also prefixes:
эху = I
тйу = you (s)
дйу/гйу/йу = he/she/it
кэху = we
вйу = you (pl)
кйу/докйу/гокйу = they/(all masc)/(all fem)
D(o)- = masculine
G(o)- = feminine
K(o)- = plural
I hope this makes some sense...
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Langian Anon!JSN8X5.Us.2010-10-20 13:17
I'm awake as well, I also have to step out for class for a bit, and I also would've felt like a douche if I didn't contribute some preliminary vocab.
heartbeat = vitarith (from Latin "life" and Old French "rhythm")
house = chambrul (Old French' "house")
sing = utamuz (Japanese "song" and Russian "music")
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Langian Anon!JSN8X5.Us.2010-10-20 13:22
>>93
I'll work on those with what we've already gathered from the thread, good building block.
internet = nebul (from Latin "web")
thread = caten (from Latin "chain")
friend = fere (Old English "companion") - could become dofere/gofere if we use the prefixes I proposed above
We need some sort of consensus on what should stick..
What structure are we using? Are we just making up words?
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Anonymous2010-10-20 16:26
...The development of this is going to take as long as an actual language. I.E. Hundreds if not thousands of years. Can't we just bastardize another language outright and call it our own?
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Anonymous2010-10-20 16:48
>>99
Frankly, there's no structure at all at the moment.
We need common noun, verb, adjective etc endings for starters..
>>107
Prefer this to mine. I couldn't find any hi-res 4chan logos...
But I think ultimately we need to come up with something entirely original.
Can we finally decide on endings??
-o(s) for nouns
-a for adjectives
-e for adverbs
-en for infinitives
Anyone disagree or shall we set these in stone?
>>92
My bad, I used the Russian Cyrillic alphabet (where the backwards E looking thing corresponds to our E sound).
I dunno what we're doing, I thought we'd be using the Russian Cyrillic and the Latin alphabet.
>>94
How will we add the plural marker to the feminine and masculine? Would we just add both on to the verb?
And can we shorten the pronouns? I like how in English they're two and three letters, we should make 1 and 2 letter pronouns.
>>100
Because that's how long every other conlang has taken to make.
Just a thought, was thinking about this earlier...
It might be advantageous to end verbs in some type of suffix (i.e. I love the way the Japanese language does this) That way it would be easier to learn, and I just like it better, as apposed to different words for different tenses on the verb itself. The solution would be to have particles that denote such changes directly before the verb word, that doesn't change, is used.
>>113
Something like:
>vulpos marroa celera hoppen supe kanos pirassa
Verb is in infinitive (need to decide on tenses), vocab could be better - mostly from Latin/Romance/Greek
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LangianFag!!wZYgQex4QcHMk7J2010-10-20 20:16
>>114
Exactly what I was thinking about the verbs. And just like Japanese we should have past/non-past positive/negative, we a base te/ta-y type thing to add to other words for more complez constructions.
>>115
Вулпос марроа кэлэра хоппэн супэ канос пирасса
First sentence in Langian, in Cyrillic. That's assuming the ce in celera sounds the same as ke would.
I think we should stick with the Latin alphabet, we all already know it and we won't have to switch keyboards and shit. But Cyrillic does look cool as fuck.
>>116
Can I get a link explaining that? I know shit all about Nip
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Anonymous2010-10-20 20:36
>>118
Cyrillic can be the official alphabet but we should probably do all the designing in Latin to save time and make it easier to read.
>>119
Okay cool, we can work to transliterate it later.
I just make a page on the community portal for this too, but I like this idea if we do decide on Cyrillic.