If natlangs were conlangs

[Travis B.]

Especially when one includes Finland.

[Jonlang]

Italy is one of the least-penis like peninsulas though!

Well apparently the Mull of Kintyre was used as a test of how erect a penis can be before it is deemed too vulgar to be passed by the BBFC.

[Qwynegold]

Mandarin? The trend of naming conlangs after fruit and whatever is still going? Anyhow, please don't make up your own phonetic characters (ʅ, ʯ, etc.), you can use IPA with its diacritics.

[Xwtek]

Sam: Here's the final map,
Lenny: Is that a penis?
Sam: It's a peninsula. OK, everybody pick a location and a family. Remember, we want it to be diverse and naturalistic.
Gerald: Top of this area. Indo-European.
Ross: I'll take the area to the east. Indo-European.
Greta: I'll take this little peninsula... just east of the penis. Indo-European.
Alia: I wanted that area... how about if I take this tiny little area right above you? Indo-European.
Sam: You can take bigger areas, you know. A few empires and such are naturalistic.
Lenny: I take the penis. Indo-European. Oh, we've also spread to this entire continent to the west.
Gerald: That's not even close to your peninsula. Fine, my family takes the northern continent. Also this big island continent in the east.
Ross: My area extends all the way across the top of the map.
Sam: Sigh. Please, we can't have the whole world be one family. I'll take this area in the center. Semitic.
Irene: I'll take the region to the east of that. Indo-European.
Jake: I'll take the eastern half of the mega continent and all these islands.
Sam: Oh come on, you can't take an area that big.
Jake: Fine. Just this little island group then, and it's an isolate.
Cory, Jake's younger brother: I'll take this peninsula. Jake's family.
Jake: You can't be right next to me and you can't be in my family.
Sam: He can be next to you if he wants. But Cory, Jake wants to be an isolate.
Cory [reading Jake's notes]: Yeah, yeah.
Inge: I want this big area east of Irene. Indo-European.
Sam: Goddammit. Fine. I'm taking the coast opposite this Indo-European megafamily so nobody can make more Indo-European there.
Calvin: I have a great idea for an Indo-European language which...
Sam: No more land grabs.
Calvin: It's OK. It's a family that's hung on just on the fringes of Gerald's area.
Gerald: What? Mine is obviously the dominant language of the planet, how could a whole language family continue to exist there?
Sam: You two work it out. Since it's not new territory, I'll allow it.

Sam: Semitic
Lenny: Latin
Gerald: Germanic
Ross: Russia?
Greta: Hellenic
Alia: Albania
Irene: ?
Jake: ?
Cory: ?
Inge: ?.
Calvin: Celtic

[Znex]

Sam: Here's the final map,
Lenny: Is that a penis?
Sam: It's a peninsula. OK, everybody pick a location and a family. Remember, we want it to be diverse and naturalistic.
Gerald: Top of this area. Indo-European.
Ross: I'll take the area to the east. Indo-European.
Greta: I'll take this little peninsula... just east of the penis. Indo-European.
Alia: I wanted that area... how about if I take this tiny little area right above you? Indo-European.
Sam: You can take bigger areas, you know. A few empires and such are naturalistic.
Lenny: I take the penis. Indo-European. Oh, we've also spread to this entire continent to the west.
Gerald: That's not even close to your peninsula. Fine, my family takes the northern continent. Also this big island continent in the east.
Ross: My area extends all the way across the top of the map.
Sam: Sigh. Please, we can't have the whole world be one family. I'll take this area in the center. Semitic.
Irene: I'll take the region to the east of that. Indo-European.
Jake: I'll take the eastern half of the mega continent and all these islands.
Sam: Oh come on, you can't take an area that big.
Jake: Fine. Just this little island group then, and it's an isolate.
Cory, Jake's younger brother: I'll take this peninsula. Jake's family.
Jake: You can't be right next to me and you can't be in my family.
Sam: He can be next to you if he wants. But Cory, Jake wants to be an isolate.
Cory [reading Jake's notes]: Yeah, yeah.
Inge: I want this big area east of Irene. Indo-European.
Sam: Goddammit. Fine. I'm taking the coast opposite this Indo-European megafamily so nobody can make more Indo-European there.
Calvin: I have a great idea for an Indo-European language which...
Sam: No more land grabs.
Calvin: It's OK. It's a family that's hung on just on the fringes of Gerald's area.
Gerald: What? Mine is obviously the dominant language of the planet, how could a whole language family continue to exist there?
Sam: You two work it out. Since it's not new territory, I'll allow it.

Sam: Semitic
Lenny: Latin
Gerald: Germanic
Ross: Russia?
Greta: Hellenic
Alia: Albania
Irene: Iranian
Jake: Japonic
Cory: Koreanic
Inge: Indo-Aryan
Calvin: Celtic

[zompist]

Yes, Ross = Russian, i.e. Slavic.

(I didn't think they'd be quite so much a puzzle!)

[Xwtek]

Mandarin? The trend of naming conlangs after fruit and whatever is still going? Anyhow, please don't make up your own phonetic characters (ʅ, ʯ, etc.), you can use IPA with its diacritics.

I think it's the other way around.

[Xwtek]

Yeah, the mega-thread probably went something like this:

Sam: Here's the final map,
Lenny: Is that a penis?
Sam: It's a peninsula. OK, everybody pick a location and a family. Remember, we want it to be diverse and naturalistic.
Gerald: Top of this area. Indo-European.
Ross: I'll take the area to the east. Indo-European.
Greta: I'll take this little peninsula... just east of the penis. Indo-European.
Alia: I wanted that area... how about if I take this tiny little area right above you? Indo-European.
Sam: You can take bigger areas, you know. A few empires and such are naturalistic.
Lenny: I take the penis. Indo-European. Oh, we've also spread to this entire continent to the west.
Gerald: That's not even close to your peninsula. Fine, my family takes the northern continent. Also this big island continent in the east.
Ross: My area extends all the way across the top of the map.
Sam: Sigh. Please, we can't have the whole world be one family. I'll take this area in the center. Semitic.
Irene: I'll take the region to the east of that. Indo-European.
Jake: I'll take the eastern half of the mega continent and all these islands.
Sam: Oh come on, you can't take an area that big.
Jake: Fine. Just this little island group then, and it's an isolate.
Cory, Jake's younger brother: I'll take this peninsula. Jake's family.
Jake: You can't be right next to me and you can't be in my family.
Sam: He can be next to you if he wants. But Cory, Jake wants to be an isolate.
Cory [reading Jake's notes]: Yeah, yeah.
Inge: I want this big area east of Irene. Indo-European.
Sam: Goddammit. Fine. I'm taking the coast opposite this Indo-European megafamily so nobody can make more Indo-European there.
Calvin: I have a great idea for an Indo-European language which...
Sam: No more land grabs.
Calvin: It's OK. It's a family that's hung on just on the fringes of Gerald's area.
Gerald: What? Mine is obviously the dominant language of the planet, how could a whole language family continue to exist there?
Sam: You two work it out. Since it's not new territory, I'll allow it.

Not shown: the group decides that their species evolved in Africa, which should therefore have the most diversity, only Ben has already grabbed most of the continent for his "Bantu" and won't give any of it up.

Also not shown: to cover up Gerald and Lenny's outrageous land grab, the group puts all their older and wackier conlangs on those continents in random locations.

Ben: I take these southern Africa, Bantu.
Andi: I take these islands, my family.
Ben: That island is already mine, and it's not even close to your other islands.
Andi: You wanna fight?
Ben: Okay, okay, it can be yours.

[Seirios]

I really, really can't believe nobody's mentioned the biggest elephant in the room yet: Modern English. It's quite a ramble, so I hope you could bear with me...it's just some frustration with the highly odd conlang I've been having.

Yes, the idea of adding layers of history to your conlang is cute, like you've done by conlanging it and then apply wholesale changes like the Great Vowel Shift and "spelling regularisations". The idea of introducing oceans of loanwords along the way to both augment the historical and sociological layers and mask any deficiencies potentially created is ingenious too. But let's all get past all that, shall we.

So let's talk phonology...this language has four (4) vowels in the close vicinity of low vowels, /æ/ /ɒ/ /ɐ/ /ɑː/, but no low central /ä/. Great messing around, but that's typologically very unusual. They even have the audacity to make one major accent shift to /æ/→/ɛ̞/→/a/ like a) it could be a real thing, and b) the result would have been phonologically or typologically plausible or tenable, not to mention supposedly within a few decades. And they bend /æ/ in the other major accent in strange ways *away from* the low center (and raise /ɐ/ to a schwa) like some really enjoyable mental gymnastic.

So the author is working on multiple "major accents" because they'd like to show diversity. Cool thing. But to make the largest variety have syllabic r, l, and n's so that a sentence need not have any vowels is a tad bit too obvious in the imitation effort. 2/10.

Orthography - phonology - sociolinguistics. As said, it is perfectly fine to make your conlang all historical and messy, but it is completely unrealistic to then go on and say that "this language is the lingua franca of the whole world". Like come on, that's hardly plausible. You wouldn't even get me or any number of fellow conlangers interested in learning it. What makes you possibly think that everyone in the whole conworld would be seriously taking it as the exclusive lingua franca?!!

Lexicon. For all the creative ways they have for asking questions, can't believe they've stipulated that *"how manieth" or *"whicheth" would be forbidden. 3/10.

Syntax. They want to make the language somewhat inflectional but not too much at all. Okay I get that. So they've put in minimal inflectional verbal endings just so that it is nominally a synthetic language even though also largely analytic. Not bad. But how did they think they would be theoretically accounting for their so-called "phrasal verbs"? It's completely fine that verbal agreement is attached to the end of verb, and you can utilise prepositions to make new verbal constructions too, even idiosyncratic ones because idioms are legit after all. But what are the little "particle-ish things" supposed to be like in the so-called "phrasal verb" carry out? The inflectional "ending" gets inserted in a completely messed up position. It's "We carry out this investigation" but "we carried out this investigation", not *"we carry outed"? How's that supposed to fit in a scientific universal linguistic framework? out isn't even a preposition according to their dictionary. Just arbitrarily wanting to flout language universals and syntactic structures isn't the way to work. Yet, they somehow make them extremely common in normal speech registers. 0/10.

Morphology.

• Word derivation: Um...I get they maybe want to be cute and subtly show the irony of the baked-in "subjugation" of this supposedly "dominant" people as contrasted to its (ridiculous, again) "high" status. But it is completely nonsensical and insensible to disable most any word derivation from native words, so that you can't regularly derive adjectives from common words at all and must resort to a different register and origin of vocab. Like the adjectival forms of bird, noun, nose, ear, and eyes don't become something like *birdish, *nounish, *nosish, *earish, *eyish , or *-ly, like their rules technically allow, but freaking avian, nominal, nasal, aural and ocular, and what's more, these "high register" loanword-based adjectival forms often have no corresponding nominal forms; i.e. the paradigm is defective in both ways just to be complementary, e.g. there's no form like *nase (even though there's nostril -- supposedly from the same loaned source but it just *has* to be different from the root form nas-; aura exists but it's even etymologically unconnected, whose adjectival form is the, right, auratic) -- seriously? What's the point of all this labor?
  
  The hospital divisions for the stomach and the intestines, women's medical issues, and heart-related ones are the divisions of gastroenterology, gynecology, and cardiology, not divisions of stomach and the intestines, women, and heart (the words for "stomach and the intestines", "women", and "heart"). The long words are supposed to be double loanwords, borrowed from a different ancient prestige language via the "normal ancient prestige language", and originally mean "the study of ...". Apparently that's how biological words are supposed to work. How would they have the heart to make visiting hospitals and doctors so hellishly impossible for their conpeople? Have they no compassion or mercy? A cardiologist isn't a *heart medic or *heart (medical) doctor, but cardiologist. A psychiatrist isn't a *mind doctor, but psychiatrist, again a double loanword; the original meaning is supposed to be (romantically) "soul doctor", and here for strange reasons the creator actually makes a double loanword morpheme properly meaning "doctor", because "psychologist" now means properly "people studying psychology". But they don't use the morpheme practically anywhere else, e.g. it's never a *cardiatrist, and there's no *gyneciatry, as if it could suddenly make sense not to make the distinction here.
  
  And while we're at it, there's no reason the adjectival form of bird should be avian instead of avial. It makes little sense to introduce so many derivational suffixes with the same meaning and quite arbitrarily stipulated rules of when and where they may or may not be applied.

• Hardly any compounding either. A hospital must be a hospital, a refined loan word originally meaning "of a guest", instead of the way more sensible *sickhouse or something. And patients have to be patient (loanword, originally "suffer-ing"; also homonym of the adjective for "patient") instead of like *sickfolk.

Creative, and clearly an insane amount of work and care must have been put in. But 0/10.

Just a few examples. Those interested are welcome to consult any grammar books published on the quite unusual conlang called "English".

[Salmoneus]

I'm not sure which one your third low vowel is, but FWIW IMD there are at least five: TRAP, BATH, LOT, THOUGHT, CUT plus marginally/incipiently SHIRE and SHOWER*, while SQUARE and COMMA are also generally rather low in the vowel space.

Historically, of course, there were more: CLOTH split from LOT and iirc was for a while separate from THOUGHT, PALM may have monophthongised before merging with FATHER, and of course BATH split from TRAP long before merging with FATHER (and indeed still hasn't done in some western dialects). Many 20th century dictionaries, meanwhile, reported a further split in the TRAP vowel (though this has since become subphonemic in England), and of course the THOUGHT vowel (/O:/) was paired with a HOARSE diphthong (/O@/).

British English just LOVES low vowels...

And, FWIW, none of these are strictly distinguished by rounding, and the 'rounded' low back vowels are actually sulcalised (while there's a mid vowel that's primarily characterised not by its quite variable position but by its sulcalisation).


*Both monophthongs in much casual speech, though still triphthongs in careful speech; also I think two distinct vowels and both separate from BATH, although the distinctions are not great, particular between SHOWER and BATH.

[mèþru]

Also, FYI I'm pretty sure English was mentioned by several people in this thread.

[Qwynegold]

Mandarin? The trend of naming conlangs after fruit and whatever is still going? Anyhow, please don't make up your own phonetic characters (ʅ, ʯ, etc.), you can use IPA with its diacritics.

I think it's the other way around.

What? The name? A fruit was not named after a conlang, come on!

[zompist]

Sal, would you like to go out for a beer sometime? It would be nice to meet, though I confess that my real motive is knowing how you pronounce CUT with a low vowel.

[Salmoneus]

Sal, would you like to go out for a beer sometime? It would be nice to meet, though I confess that my real motive is knowing how you pronounce CUT with a low vowel.

Well, "low" is relative, of course. I'm not saying it's at the bottom of the possible vowel space or anything. But it's pretty low, sure. As in wikipedia's chart of "modern RP" (SSBE).

(my SSBE is actually less modern than that. My BATH may be around there, but my LOT is more conservative (i.e. much lower), and my TRAP is a bit conservative too (i.e. higher, though certainly not at its height in an earlier generation). )

[Seirios]

I'm not sure which one your third low vowel is, but FWIW IMD there are at least five: TRAP, BATH, LOT, THOUGHT, CUT plus marginally/incipiently SHIRE and SHOWER*, while SQUARE and COMMA are also generally rather low in the vowel space.

The third one is CUT, with its contemporary SSBE (SSEE?) value. I did miss BATH/FATHER (makes it the fourth, ha!), but THOUGHT wouldn't strictly be low. I don't count mid-low (e.g. /ɛ//ɔ/) as "low". Also, in SSBE I feel the current value of THOUGHT is definitely /oː/, and I've heard someone (London-raised) say it like /uː/.

I guess I was thinking about a more conservative RP where LOT was truly /ɒ/, maybe like yours. Mine is like that. Its vowel quality nowadays in Southern England is probably best described as /ɔ/, so that wouldn't count as "low" now.

British English just LOVES low vowels...

American English kind of does too, though not exactly. They do it by hating mid back monophthongs. Western North American English has merged all of LOT, THOUGHT, and FATHER to /ɑ/, and currently its mid back vowel space is basically empty. There's just [ɔ] before /r/ and in the diphthong /ɔɪ/, and the diphthong /oʊ/.

And, FWIW, none of these are strictly distinguished by rounding, and the 'rounded' low back vowels are actually sulcalised (while there's a mid vowel that's primarily characterised not by its quite variable position but by its sulcalisation).

Interesting! I didn't know that. What is the mid vowel?

[Neon Fox]

• Word derivation: Um...I get they maybe want to be cute and subtly show the irony of the baked-in "subjugation" of this supposedly "dominant" people as contrasted to its (ridiculous, again) "high" status. But it is completely nonsensical and insensible to disable most any word derivation from native words, so that you can't regularly derive adjectives from common words at all and must resort to a different register and origin of vocab. Like the adjectival forms of bird, noun, nose, ear, and eyes don't become something like *birdish, *nounish, *nosish, *earish, *eyish , or *-ly, like their rules technically allow, but freaking avian, nominal, nasal, aural and ocular

Now, to be fair, there is that affix -like that can be stuck on 'native' roots; as far as I can tell birdlike, nounlike, noselike, earlike, and eyelike are perfectly cromulent...though they seem to have a slightly different meaning? It looks to me like you can only call things that aren't actually birds 'birdlike', e.g.? And anyway it would have been nice for that affix to be mentioned in the main text instead of buried in a table of derivational affixes! Zomp's thing where the derivational morphology gets called out in detail is much more useful.

And while we're at it, there's no reason the adjectival form of bird should be avian instead of avial. It makes little sense to introduce so many derivational suffixes with the same meaning and quite arbitrarily stipulated rules of when and where they may or may not be applied.

You can blame that bit on that Indo-European mega-project, I think. The same place that weirdness with ab-/ad-/an- and in-/im- comes from. Come to that, 'Latin', but all its descendants are...Romance, after the city the language was spoken in!

[Xwtek]

Mandarin? The trend of naming conlangs after fruit and whatever is still going? Anyhow, please don't make up your own phonetic characters (ʅ, ʯ, etc.), you can use IPA with its diacritics.

I think it's the other way around.

What? The name? A fruit was not named after a conlang, come on!

A fruit in a conworld can be named after a race, that is also a name of its language

[Ryusenshi]

Let's talk about something else for a minute: elements. There are several nice element tables: the four classical elements, the five Japanese elements, the six Buddhist elements, the Five Chinese elements, the eight Tao elements.

But the guy who created this con-table didn't really do a good job. I mean, it's nice to have something a bit more complex than the usual ones: having several sorts of metals (like gold, silver, iron, copper, tin) makes some amount of sense. But there's no discernible theme, or any sort of symmetry whatsoever! Neither water nor air are elements, which is original but doesn't seem very realistic. I mean, water isn't an element? Come on, very single nat-table includes water!

Besides, the whole thing is completely unbalanced! On the one hand, only two elements are liquid. On the other hand, just how many grey metals do you need?? Not to mention some of them have really ridiculous names, like samarium or praseodymium. Would you imagine playing a tabletop RPG, and the DM says you encounter a praseodymium elemental? No, that would be ridiculous.[*]

The authors can't even seem to make up their mind as for the total number of elements, and keep adding more at the bottom. That's just sloppy.

[*] OK, I stole this joke from this page. And I've already seen titanium elementals, chlorine elementals and even an osmium elemental.

[zompist]

Just found this:

Persian 'wire' — sim
Icelandic 'wire' — simi

I know, inspiration flags, but really smh.

[Qwynegold]

A fruit in a conworld can be named after a race, that is also a name of its language

Aha. But I think this person called their ethnicity "Han". The guy who did Korean also called their ethnicity Han. You two need to sort this out.