Kintsugi Conlang Creation

I'd like there to be a spoken language, eventually, which means that a transliteration should definitely be something we need to be able to create.

 

Arrows might be hard to transliterate, depending on how flexible we're willing to make them.

 

There's something inexplicably amusing about this sentence. I like it.

 

I'm just worried about stuff like this:

How do you say this in a way that doesn't completely destroy the symmetry?

 

Hire a barbershop quartet to speak for you?

 

Any spoken representation of that will probably make heavy use of parallelism. Personally, I consider parallelism plenty enough symmetry for a spoken language, which is after all one-dimensional.

 

Stuff that rhymes a lot would have some of that same, drawing back on itself feeling too.

I don't have a vocabulary of the more technical terms used here, so I feel like I can only offer limited ideas/perspective. But I'll keep lurking and interkecting at the least.

 

Would anyone like me to start brainstorming some of the pictoral aspects of the language? Because I have a couple ideas, but I want to make sure it's not too early to do that.

While I'm here, may as well make a couple more suggestions for questionably-witty constructions...

[gullible][collection][proper noun] = Tumblr (lit. The Gullibles)

[professing] = saying this is something that I believe

[universe][adjective] = universal

Therefore:

[request][disprove] ([gullible][collection][proper noun] [professing])[unreasonable faith][distress] = Please tell me Tumblr is talking out of their ass today, the jerkbrain is using it to bludgeon me right now.

Compare and contrast:

[request][disprove][continuing action] ([myself] [professing] [universe][adjective])[my beliefs/experiences] = Please tell me whenever I'm overgeneralizing from my own experiences.

Please tell me if you like these, or if you think there's a better way to structure the language. I'm using SVO "word" order, mostly because nobody's said otherwise.

(I like how the very first example sentences in Kintsugi are about this.)

EDIT: According to conlang friend, I'm doing glossing wrong. He pointed me to a ruleset here. I'm not sure if I actually want to use it but I should note that it exists.

 

Glossing is definitely helpful for when you're trying to learn a language's structure, especially if they have concepts that your language doesn't.

I noticed that your examples don't have any indication that it's the first person requesting this. In Kabardian, the third person singular* is indicated by a null morpheme (nothing's there), so if there is no other morpheme indicating person it is understood that it's third person singular. Are we doing that with first person nominative?

*Ok, well, the third person singular ergative affix, but that doesn't have a 1:1 correspondence to English. If anyone wants a rundown, the subject of an intransitive verb is ergative, e.g., the I in "I eat". But if it's a transitive verb, then the subject is now the oblique and the object is ergative. If you tried to do this with case in English, you'd get something like "me see he"

 

Sorry I've been shit at doing this like I said I would I've been really distracted

 

If we want to start designing the pictorial/graphical aspects of the language, it might be useful to determine a few things about it so that the people designing the syntax know what has to be nailed down sooner rather than later.

So for instance, are words going to be a root glyph with attached markers, the way that Chinese characters have that root and radical system? Or are all of the markers going to have the same graphical size and are only connected to the root with arrows or whatever?
Also @Vacuum Energy brings up the idea of changing parts of speech. Are we going to have a unified mechanism for doing that, and if so, what happens when a thing that is a root gets turned into a part of speech that isn't normally a root?
If we don't go with root+modifier style glyphs and instead give everything the same graphical weight, then we get the arrowing situation, which isn't necessarily a bad system, but does present its own challenges: making sure that the root of a word can be easily distinguished from the modifiers is probably the key thing to keep in mind, and also that the arrows can be untangled without too much trouble. Those of us who have played with model kits or Ikea furniture can attest to how important clear diagrams and arrowing can be.

We also would need to figure out what kinds of things can be roots. Nouns? Verbs? Nouns and verbs? Are we going to allow sentence fragments, and if so, what about sentence fragments that don't contain any roots?

 

I would agree to nouns and verbs as roots. Moreover, I would suggest a clear graphical distinction between nouns and verbs, if only to make reading easier. That could also serve as the noun/verb part-of-speech changing mechanism. But in any case, it should be pretty obvious to the reader. As much as I love garden path sentences, they do not promote clarity.

 

This thread is reminding me of all of the horrible ideas that I had for my conlang that fortunately never got implemented, like having two root nouns, roughly meaning "subject" and "object" respectively, and a single root verb roughly meaning "does", and then everything else being adjectives and adverbs. Let's not do that.

 

Just remembered! For whoever wants to work on the graphical stuff, here's a nice site about writing systems: Omniglot.com. These are mostly alphabets and abjads but there are a few other kinds if people want to take a look for inspiration, especially stylistic inspiration.

 

Reminder that anything we use in common with German would annoy Mark Twain.