Things Decided for Stupid Reasons

[Bessunire]

Recently I was scrolling through my Hathirysy dictionary and realized I had four words for 'path' because I had forgotten I already had a word for it multiple times. Now I have to figure out what the distinctions in meaning between ver, aspa, bao, and nieda are.

[Zaarin]

Recently I was scrolling through my Hathirysy dictionary and realized I had four words for 'path' because I had forgotten I already had a word for it multiple times. Now I have to figure out what the distinctions in meaning between ver, aspa, bao, and nieda are.

This gives me bad flashbacks to developing Medieval Punic and Punic's 13 words for "stele." :p

[Pabappa]

Recently I was scrolling through my Hathirysy dictionary and realized I had four words for 'path' because I had forgotten I already had a word for it multiple times. Now I have to figure out what the distinctions in meaning between ver, aspa, bao, and nieda are.

Four sounds like a good number you could try having a distinction between trail vs road vs corridor, plus a cover term for all. possibly also a word for an abstract concept as in "i followed the trail of the snake", though i think most languages use the same words for literal & abstract and use context to make the distinction clear.

[linguistcat]

In my cat lang based on (Old) Japanese, I decided to drop a lot of /a/s. Why? I wanted to keep /i/ and /u/ as much as possible because cat sounds.

[akam chinjir]

In my cat lang based on (Old) Japanese, I decided to drop a lot of /a/s. Why? I wanted to keep /i/ and /u/ as much as possible because cat sounds.

That sounds like a good reason though.

[linguistcat]

In my cat lang based on (Old) Japanese, I decided to drop a lot of /a/s. Why? I wanted to keep /i/ and /u/ as much as possible because cat sounds.

That sounds like a good reason though.

Could have dropped others, just chose /a/ because.

[Xwtek]

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).

and then they still pronounced like like ee. Whoops

[JT the Ninja]

In one of my languages I eventually gave in and added /v/ and /z/ to the phonological inventory, because it seemed improbable that there was a p/b, t/d, k/g distinction but not f/v and s/z. In retrospect, I could have justified it by saying there were no voiced fricatives, but whatever...helped me create new words.

Still, I refuse to budge on there being only a single nasal, /n/. Just because.

[Zaarin]

In one of my languages I eventually gave in and added /v/ and /z/ to the phonological inventory, because it seemed improbable that there was a p/b, t/d, k/g distinction but not f/v and s/z. In retrospect, I could have justified it by saying there were no voiced fricatives, but whatever...helped me create new words.

Still, I refuse to budge on there being only a single nasal, /n/. Just because.

A lot of languages having voiced plosives and not fricatives (see: Latin) or vice versa. :p Also a single nasal (that probably assimilates to following consonants) is not unusual either.

[JT the Ninja]

True.

However, the fact remains that I left out Z and V for years simply because I didn't want to come up with new glyphs. And I refuse to add nasals just because. It makes native speakers have a distinct accent, too.

[bbbosborne]

i completely changed the pronunciation of a word because i was typing it on my phone on this board and i was too lazy to go copy and paste ipa symbols from another tab.

[Frislander]

My current project, Asta, has a phonology which was entirely determined by my desire for a romanisation which completely lacks ascenders (I've never much liked them, and I think that's part of the reason I don't use voiced stops much generally), which resulted in the lack of a velar stop (despite having both a fricative and nasal at said POA) because I will not use <c> /k/ ever.

[JT the Ninja]

i completely changed the pronunciation of a word because i was typing it on my phone on this board and i was too lazy to go copy and paste ipa symbols from another tab.

Sounds reasonable! Although if you're on Android there is an IPA keyboard you can download, which I've found useful.

[storyteller232]

Sounds reasonable! Although if you're on Android there is an IPA keyboard you can download, which I've found useful.

Just downloaded it, though nowhere near the point where i need it yet.

[JT the Ninja]

Sounds reasonable! Although if you're on Android there is an IPA keyboard you can download, which I've found useful.

Just downloaded it, though nowhere near the point where i need it yet.

Yeah, it's useful to have in advance...I got it for the sole reason of being able to type an ŋ easily, I think. #ontopic

[Alvin Littell]

I've decreased the number of phonemes because both LibreOffice and GoogleDocs did a poor job sorting words containing digraphs and letters with diacritics. Today I sort manually anyway, but it's too late, the vocabulary is big and I don't want radical changes.

[xxx]

In the 70', I read in a linguistics book an idea for conlanging...
Even if this kind of construction implied an internal idea far from my point, I tried it...
the success made my entire life i used it...
I think my mind changed, the internal idea is definitively mine...
Sapir-Whorff hypothesis is not, for me...

[chris_notts]

In Sint, I needed a vowel to host the agreement prefixes when a host pre-verb wasn't available. I didn't want to always use the same vowel, so I decided there should be a vowel alternation for action "here" vs action "there". This then had to be generalised so that the alternation surfaced within the preverb itself when a preverb was used.

Having made all those decisions, I'm now debating whether to roll them back. Marking this distinction by a single vowel alternation which can surface in a couple of different locations doesn't feel distinctive enough, somehow.

[jupiter]

I added a second augmentative because I realized I had made fire "naťa" and sun "naťizi," and wanted to make it work with the augmentative I had already made. So now I have two augmentatives: -iz- and -ov-.
(In case you're wondering, the i and a are gender suffixes.)

[Vlürch]

The main reason I kept the plain locative case in Phenglộl as a "vague locative" even after having come up with specific locative cases was that I liked the suffixes; I repurposed the old locative for when the exact location of something is uncertain or changing constantly. It seemed like a cool and pretty unique idea, so...

Also in Phenglộl, the reason vowel quality and tone are largely connected at the phonemic level (back = low tone, front = high tone) was my inability to easily pronounce back vowels with a high tone and front vowels with a low tone, and I wanted it to be a language I could actually speak myself, at least in theory. For some reason I still struggle a bit with the pronounciation of back vowels with a high tone and front vowels with a low tone, which is really weird since it (obviously) isn't a problem when singing... but well.

In one of my gazillion unnamed conlang sketches, /i/ was [i~c͡çe] in free variation and /k/ was [c͡ç] in contact with palatal consonants and front vowels. The reason? I liked [c͡ç] and wanted to have as much of it as possible, but didn't want to have it as a phoneme because I didn't want digraphs or diacritics. A lot of clusters would've been allowed, so words like /ikt͡ʃki/ could've existed, phonetically leading to [c͡çec͡çt͡ɕc͡çc͡çe] and whatnot, which went a bit too far and became too unpronounceable.