The aim of this challenge is to create a sketch of a conlang that doesn't look like any particular natlang. If you want to create a real conlang and are looking for inspiration, then please use this challenge as a base.
Choose one feature from each of the three groups below, or alternatively, choose two features from one group, and one feature from each of the other groups. You must choose at least one
blue feature and one
red feature. Try to choose a combination of features that you don't know of any other language having. (If you find out later that there is indeed another language with all these features, that's fine.)
Group A
A1 Two or more laterals, not counting /l̪, l, ɫ, ʎ, Cˡ/. This feature may not be combined with feature B2.
A2 Fixed stress location of a type that you seldom or never use in conlangs. When affixes are added to a word, the stress moves so that it will stay on the specificly numbered syllable.
A3 Length contrast on vowels or consonants, that includes short phonemes, long phonemes and one more of the following: extra short phonemes, ◌̆; half-long phonemes, ◌ˑ; overlong phonemes, ◌ːː. Not every consonant or vowel or tone needs to have a three-way contrast, but at least one consonant or vowel needs to have all three.
A4 Consonant mutation
A5 Inflected adpositions
A6 Large amounts of non-concatenative morphology
A7 An animacy hierarchy alignment
Group B
B1 No phonemic nasals
B2 No phonemic rhotics and no phonemic laterals. This feature may not be combined with feature A1 or feature C6.
B3 (C)V syllable structure
1
B4 Grammatical tone
B5 Noun classes
B6 Uses prefixes way more often than suffixes
B7 Four or more distance contasts in demonstratives
B8 Verbs have person marking that agrees with the patient, but no agreement with the agent
Group C
C1 Lexical tone
C2 No phonemic fricatives
C3 A retroflex series, and not just on fricatives/affricates
C4 A series of breathy consonants (may or may not be coupled with an aspirated series)
C5 Phonation contrasts on vowels, e.g. breathy voice, creaky voice, strident voice
C6 One or more laterally released consonant, ◌ˡ. This feature may not be combined with feature B2.
C7 Sesquisyllabic root words, i.e. roots are either 1 or 1.5 syllables
C8 Conjunction of noun phrases works differently than conjunction of verb phrases
C9 Several postpositions, but few or no prepositions
C10 Genitives, adjectives and relative clause are formed largely/completely in the same way, using the same morphemes
WALS
1If you are thinking "nah, (C)V languages are boring", then challenge yourself by creating an esthetically pleasing (C)V language. Here are six tips on what you can do to make the conlang more interesting.
- Think about phoneme frequencies. For example, what would a language where /r, l, i/ are very common look like.
- Make a limit on how many vowels you can have in succession. Or make vowel sequences uncommon.
- Make restrictions on which vowels may appear next to one another.
- Create a sound change to put epenthetic consonants between vowels in the same word, so only the initial syllable can consist of just V, while all other syllables are CV.
- Include consonants that look like clusters, but are actually just one consonant. For example prenasalized consonants, palatal or palatalized consonants, labialized consonants, things like /k͡p, ʙ, t͡r̻/. If you choose to have e.g. palatalized or labialized consonants, maybe restrict this secondary feature to only some consonants, e.g. labialization only on velar consonants.
- Make a large vowel inventory.
Show a sketch of your language in this thread.
