Things Decided for Stupid Reasons

[storyteller232]

Just a fun question i thought of. Has anyone decided to include or to not include someothing for really stupid reasons? Like i dropped the glottal stop from my personal artlang mainly because i hate having to constantly switch keyboards on my phone to be able to put in an apostraphe for posessives and stuff.

[Vilike]

The formatting of entries in my Tüchte dictionary (XML tree) was so cumbersome to type that I regularised some morphological processes (derived from the ancestral language) to not have to include a supplemental stem for each noun.
(Now I use a variant of Shoebox so I shan't have the same problem... I guess.)

I also scrapped some slots on a verb template (future French) because the table wouldn't fit horizontally on a A4 page.

[bbbosborne]

i once combined 3-4 places of articulation as "postalveolar" so it would fit on paper and just put a bunch of footnotes clarifying it

[Nortaneous]

Amqoli lost ergativity and a lot of morphology because I kept forgetting it.

[Zaarin]

In a future English (sort of) I'm working on I collapsed all of English's diphthongs just because they kept interfering with my sound changes, since SCA2 parses <aɪ̯> as <a> + <ɪ> + <◌̯>. I could have gotten around it by rewriting my diphthongs using single symbols (and have done so before plenty of times), but in this case I just collapsed them for convenience. Ultimately it suited the aesthetic I was shooting for, so...I guess it worked out.

[bbbosborne]

i once added like 10 moods to a language to avoid auxiliaries

[zyxw59]

I got rid of /ɦ/ in one of my languages because I thought there wasn't a capital form of it in Unicode (there is: Ɦ)

[Kuchigakatai]

I decided against using · (the interpunct) in my conlang, as much as I liked it, because it turns out that even though it's part of the Latin-1 ("ANSI") character set (the most basic set after plain old ASCII, including e.g. <é> and <ô>), none of the "US-International" keyboards available on Windows 7/8/10 or Ubuntu/Fedora Linux support it, so it's a pain to type it. I tried editing the keyboard layout file in my Ubuntu Linux machine, but updates seem to replace the modified file with upstream versions. I think it's the only Latin-1 symbol that's not included in US-International layouts, for some Stupid Reason.

[akam chinjir]

I seem to be making significant decisions about a conworld based on what I come up with for example sentences, in the Akiatu thread and offline. (Need a ditransitive? Hmm, what nouns do I have? ...And suddenly it's a significant part of the Itamu tradition that she got her spear from her antagonist Kipaja.)

[zompist]

If anyone ever wondered why Verduria doesn't control the territory just west of the Eärdur... it's because for D&D purposes we needed a wilderness within easy walking distance.

[Pabappa]

I try hard to keep my languages clean of all natlang influence, even indirect influence .... for example, when I make words for modern technology, I prefer to work it out on my own rather than looking to see what various organic natlangs such as Ojibwe are doing. So I can only think of one thing right now, and it's only a possibility...

Poswa has six vowels, spelled {a e i o u y}, which have roughly the IPA values of /a e i o u ɨ/. There are four diphthongs: /ia ie io iu/. There is no /ii/, since vowel length isnt valid in this language. But there is also no /iɨ/, even though I could easily make one since the /ɨ/ vowel has schwa as an allophone. And Im not quite certain that I can ever rule out that I rejected /iɨ/ because of the fact that I would have to write it as {iy}, which I didnt like. Even though it'd be a falling diphthong, and therefore the /i/ part would be stressed and the orthography actually very well suited to it.

[bbbosborne]

i once changed a phoneme because i found out i had typed it slightly wrong everytime in my sample sentences

[missals]

Not mine, but David J. Peterson has remarked that if he's working on a language where, for whatever reason, he has decided the orthographic representation of long vowels will be a doubled vowel letter, then that language can never have long /e/ and long /o/ - he always gets rid of them by dipthongizing them or something else. This, he says, is because no matter what, no matter how many explanations are given, the actors will always, always read orthographic <ee> and <oo> as /i/ and /u/.

[bbbosborne]

Not mine, but David J. Peterson has remarked that if he's working on a language where, for whatever reason, he has decided the orthographic representation of long vowels will be a doubled vowel letter, then that language can never have long /e/ and long /o/ - he always gets rid of them by dipthongizing them or something else. This, he says, is because no matter what, no matter how many explanations are given, the actors will always, always read orthographic <ee> and <oo> as /i/ and /u/.

that's the most beautiful thing i've ever read

[mèþru]

I changed the spelling of the capital city of Faqeg from Pleksalatu to Pleksalutu because I spelled it wrong in my e-mail and I don't see a way to change it besides opening a new account.

[Zaarin]

Not mine, but David J. Peterson has remarked that if he's working on a language where, for whatever reason, he has decided the orthographic representation of long vowels will be a doubled vowel letter, then that language can never have long /e/ and long /o/ - he always gets rid of them by dipthongizing them or something else. This, he says, is because no matter what, no matter how many explanations are given, the actors will always, always read orthographic <ee> and <oo> as /i/ and /u/.

He could take a cue from Tlingit and spell /eː oː/ <ei ou> (Tlingit doesn't have /o oː/, but I'm analogizing).

[Curlyjimsam]

In a future English (sort of) I'm working on I collapsed all of English's diphthongs just because they kept interfering with my sound changes, since SCA2 parses <aɪ̯> as <a> + <ɪ> + <◌̯>. I could have gotten around it by rewriting my diphthongs using single symbols (and have done so before plenty of times), but in this case I just collapsed them for convenience. Ultimately it suited the aesthetic I was shooting for, so...I guess it worked out.

I very rarely have sound changes sensitive to stress, because I can't be bothered with the extra complexities involved in coding them.

[Yalensky]

Not mine, but David J. Peterson has remarked that if he's working on a language where, for whatever reason, he has decided the orthographic representation of long vowels will be a doubled vowel letter, then that language can never have long /e/ and long /o/ - he always gets rid of them by dipthongizing them or something else. This, he says, is because no matter what, no matter how many explanations are given, the actors will always, always read orthographic <ee> and <oo> as /i/ and /u/.

He could take a cue from Tlingit and spell /eː oː/ <ei ou> (Tlingit doesn't have /o oː/, but I'm analogizing).

Or from Klingon and use <E O> vs <e o>.

Getting actors to say the right sounds seems to have motivated Klingon's ugly case-sensitive orthography. I guess actors can take a lot of blame for weird orthographic/phonological design choices.

[xxx]

participating in conlang forums led me to drop my pasigraphic writing, in favor of a dubious Latin transcription of an almost improvised phonology ...
and the raw meaning of the pronunciation of my name led me to reverse the sound of two signs ... to make it more obscene ...
fortunately I returned more and more to the healthiest practice of manual writing ...

[jal]

Actually, I can't think of anything right now. I include what I like or makes sense, and leave out what I don't like or doesn't make sense.


JAL