Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby hashi » 2011-08-03, 11:12

Sophie wrote:
hashi wrote:
  • And then we have the knobs who think that replacing English one letter for letter is conlanging. Someone slap them??

I'd call that codelanging – making up a "coded language".

They're generally called cyphers ;)
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby Chekhov » 2011-08-03, 17:12

Substitution cyphers, to be exact - a very basic kind of code which is easily broken by the most amateur cryptographer.
"Useful" for what? When was the last time a conlang was "useful" for anything?
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby johnH » 2011-08-16, 22:18

Doing any foe the features I have in linguistic jokes for real or in conlangs.
Explain to me more exactly what kitchen sink languages are. I think I tend to out everything interesting together regardless but it doesn't end up ugly in general, I figure that is like my original version as for allophones their interesting to read about. Isolating kitchen sinks are called imperial by my fictional people hence the imperial languages. :hmm:
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby johnH » 2011-08-17, 17:02

Rockoff wrote:Do you guys think it's a mistake to attempt conlanging if you're only fluent in one language? I'm learning two but I'm not there yet and my first attempt at conlanging failed horribly before I even considered putting it here, I do feel like I know a lot more about languages now but perhaps I should hold off for a bit. It takes a lot of time and dedication to create an entire language and I want it to be as good as possible.


Yes and no, I.e. I think it's a mistake but it's better than doing neither, as in not conlanging and not learning a new language.

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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby hashi » 2011-08-21, 0:26

This isn't really a mistake, but it's something that pisses me off. People who say something like:

"This is my letter <e>. It is pronounced /e/ or /ɛ/". This mostly pisses me off because these sounds are completely different in my idiolect. You would not believe how many people decide to lump these sounds together on the basis they are similar in most varieties of English. Urgh.
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby Chekhov » 2011-08-21, 2:37

People who just say "X can be pronounced Y or Z" without explaining where or why, you mean.
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby hashi » 2011-08-21, 2:42

Chekhov wrote:People who just say "X can be pronounced Y or Z" without explaining where or why, you mean.


It depends. If it breaches boundaries of what I consider totally different sounds, then it'll annoy me yes. Most of the free variation in my conlang Niđalos is mainly due to sounds in the phonemic original version of my language merging with each time I change things. Mostly because of how I've been pronouncing them - which I think is a fair answer :P But yeah, "just cause" ain't always good enough.
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby razlem » 2011-08-21, 16:35

:P

I have e = [e]/[ɛ]; h = [h]/[x]; r = [r]/[ɾ]/[ɻ]/[l]; and no distinction between aspirates. :finger: :wink:
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby Ashucky » 2011-08-22, 12:51

razlem wrote::P

I have e = [e]/[ɛ]; h = [h]/[x]; r = [r]/[ɾ]/[ɻ]/[l]; and no distinction between aspirates. :finger: :wink:

Darn them dialects ;)
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby Linguistic14 » 2011-09-30, 5:50

hashi wrote:I need to get this off my chest, but it annoys me when:

  • a noob comes along and learns about phonetics and realises there's more sounds than just English ones and they get this omg-i-have-to-have-ALLOFTHEM mentality
  • they think every sound, and every single variation of such needs to be represented by a unique letter (combine this with the first point and you're destined for disastrous creations like čȧûļnó òṽë đðªjŋœªøþĸ$ł€øđ€łjøªþ$£@jœþŋðđµ. Yes, you can have it be totally representative if that was a conscious choice, not if that's the only thing you can do.
  • "My language is like.. what happens if Spanish is raped up the ass by French", cause these are the only languages in existence you can take ideas from. Romlangs are not cool.
  • Ok, now personally I am one for breaking convention, so it really pisses me off when people say "you <x> for /θ/ because no other language does". Is this not the point in conlanging?? Gosh.
  • And then we have the knobs who think that replacing English one letter for letter is conlanging. Someone slap them??

</rant>


I agree and disagree...

  • Haha... The first point of the phonetics was luckily not me. I tried it though, and failed HORRIBLY!
  • If I use all that kinds of weird letters as used in the IPA, I made one as a cipher for English... BUT NEVER AS A CONLANG... it just doesn't make sense...
  • I also tried romlangs... it just confuses me with English, French, Spanish, and all the other languages from the Romance Language group.
  • I understand it doesn't makes sense.... but if it has a history or reason... maybe that works... I once used the d as Sh because in my conlang, the word for life was shiwaaz and i had a second definition which was dalam. When I only used one word it was always shiwaaz and never dalam. But that was in my dictionary. One day, I fused them together making shawan. Shawan was also changed due to the phonology change in the new conlang. But yet I always remembered SH... in the beginning of the word shawan. The word shawan was changed to davan but pronounced as shawan due to historical reasons.
  • And the last one... isn't conlanging... ! PLZ SLAP THEM!
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby YngNghymru » 2011-10-01, 16:54

Linguistic14 wrote:I understand it doesn't makes sense.... but if it has a history or reason... maybe that works... I once used the d as Sh because in my conlang, the word for life was shiwaaz and i had a second definition which was dalam. When I only used one word it was always shiwaaz and never dalam. But that was in my dictionary. One day, I fused them together making shawan. Shawan was also changed due to the phonology change in the new conlang. But yet I always remembered SH... in the beginning of the word shawan. The word shawan was changed to davan but pronounced as shawan due to historical reasons.
[*]And the last one... isn't conlanging... ! PLZ SLAP THEM!


I think you are confused about what constitutes a 'historic' reason - if you're saying what I think you're saying, which is that you couldn't remember a word properly so ended up writing it one way and pronouncing it the other.
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby Linguistic14 » 2011-10-01, 21:02

YngNghymru wrote:
Linguistic14 wrote:I understand it doesn't makes sense.... but if it has a history or reason... maybe that works... I once used the d as Sh because in my conlang, the word for life was shiwaaz and i had a second definition which was dalam. When I only used one word it was always shiwaaz and never dalam. But that was in my dictionary. One day, I fused them together making shawan. Shawan was also changed due to the phonology change in the new conlang. But yet I always remembered SH... in the beginning of the word shawan. The word shawan was changed to davan but pronounced as shawan due to historical reasons.
[*]And the last one... isn't conlanging... ! PLZ SLAP THEM!


I think you are confused about what constitutes a 'historic' reason - if you're saying what I think you're saying, which is that you couldn't remember a word properly so ended up writing it one way and pronouncing it the other.


pretty much... but that was my reason why the pronunciation of d changed to sh.
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby YngNghymru » 2011-10-04, 8:20

That's not really a good reason. Obviously we can't tell you what to do with your conlang - but a 'good historic reason' means 'justified by diachronics', which means 'because of sound change, generalisation, or other related concepts'. On first glance, <ough> for /ʌf/ (or any of the other sounds it represents) is pretty stupid, but it is justified (if not fully) by the historic presence of an [x]. German <sch> for [ʃ] is explained by a former stage where [sk] became [sx], I believe. Internal reasons, not 'I kept making a mistake so I kept it around'.
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby mszegedy » 2011-10-06, 0:02

When someone sources every single facet of their conlang from Wikipedia, after they've learned, "OMG, there's way more cases/moods/aspects/phonemes/numbers/gramatical features than I thought there are! My conlang is going to be totally stuffed with these, cuz it's WEIRD and cool to speak a language where you can EXPRESS YOURSELF USING LESS WORDS. I think I'll balance it by having about ninety sounds, so that it doesn't get repetitive!"

And, well, there are certain people, that, when asked what languages they speak, list Pig Latin as one. Just no.
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby Koko » 2014-07-16, 7:41

linguoboy wrote:
YngNghymru wrote:You don't have to be able to pronounce your language yourself - as long as phonemes are generally salient enough to not merge, whether or not an English speaker finds it difficult to distinguish them is irrelevant.

Yeah, limiting yourself to phonemes that the average English speaker can distinguish seems like a recipe for creating exactly the sort of cyphers of English that I'm always so down on. In general, there's a certain progression among noob conlangers:

Stage 1: Thesis. Your conlangs are all cyphers of your native language. Maybe there'll be a crazy feature or two (e.g. objects first! no verbs!) but they won't be very well thought out and certainly won't take into account how actual natlangs with that feature work.

Stage 2: Antithesis. Your conlangs are all kitchen-sinks. Now you've learned about all sorts of crazy features and you want to use them all so that your language is nothing like English! So you have OVS order and ergativity and eight kinds of front rounded vowel and noun cases and noun classes and polypersonal agreement on verbs etc. etc. Not even you can keep track of them all and produce sensible sentences.

Stage 3: Synthesis. Eventually, you calm down and some balance is restored. Your conlangs are more focused: Here I'm going to make a language with serial verbs, maybe with an active-stative distinction rather than transitive-intransitive. Here I'm going to make a language with a huge sibilant inventory for a race of snake people. Not everyone gets here, of course, but it's the goal you should be aiming at.

Lol, I started at stage I (kind of: Kōnen is a little cipher, but very cultural with the verb forms of "to be." It has a crazy orthography with at least three representations for each English phoneme. /l/ and /r/ are represented by <r>… it's the language even I hate now), then moved to stage 1, then to stage 3. After I made Beth'clésha, (the <'> is a glottal stop, so don't freak that I used the whatsitcalled apostrophe 'cause I didn't) I moved on to another one, which was designed with a 15 min. phoneme inventory whose words didn't exceed three letters: obviously I gave up on it. (Jurran is before Isyan, it's not bad either, but i'm more proud of the latter) Now I have Isyan whose only irregularities I can see but don't care about are the <th> (like in English) and <ö> /œ/ but no phonemic /ð/ nor /y/*. Early in the creation of Isyan I created a kitchen-sink language which had at least 13 cases, it had active/mid-passive/passive voice, seven tenses including hesternal, and maybe five aspects and moods. I am so glad I stopped it and returned to Isyan. (the other one only lived for two days…)


Sorry if it's hard to follow, I don't know how to separate them without making one sentence paragraphs.



*In some regions of Isyan, /œ/ is often risen to /y/, however, a distinct phoneme in those regions. But this doesn't cause any confusion since to the Isyans the two sounds sound the same.

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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby Koko » 2014-07-16, 8:03

Recently, however, when found my Kōnen notes again, I decided to make it a little more reasonable by adding history to it. Its proto-lang was extremely tonal, like Chinese where it's more than rising and falling; but rising-falling and falling-rising; with some high, low, and mid tones. These tones either became diphthongs, risen versions of the pure vowel, lowered versions, or backed versions. There were pre-aspirated consonants represented by a <Vh> (it was and is alpha-syllabic) but these become the simple vowel, and then aspirates who became either dental or basic consonants depending on the origin of articulation.

Verbs have strange participles because of infixes and sound-changes that occurred in the protolanguage.


It's also less cipher than I thought actually, there's more differences than there are exact equivalents. And for some English sentences, you would use idiomatic expressions that aren't found in English.

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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby Irkan » 2014-07-17, 12:26

linguoboy wrote:Stage 1: Thesis. Your conlangs are all cyphers of your native language. Maybe there'll be a crazy feature or two (e.g. objects first! no verbs!) but they won't be very well thought out and certainly won't take into account how actual natlangs with that feature work.

Stage 2: Antithesis. Your conlangs are all kitchen-sinks. Now you've learned about all sorts of crazy features and you want to use them all so that your language is nothing like English! So you have OVS order and ergativity and eight kinds of front rounded vowel and noun cases and noun classes and polypersonal agreement on verbs etc. etc. Not even you can keep track of them all and produce sensible sentences.

Stage 3: Synthesis. Eventually, you calm down and some balance is restored. Your conlangs are more focused: Here I'm going to make a language with serial verbs, maybe with an active-stative distinction rather than transitive-intransitive. Here I'm going to make a language with a huge sibilant inventory for a race of snake people. Not everyone gets here, of course, but it's the goal you should be aiming at.
I've been laughing my ass off for far too long because of this Hegelian conlanging dialectic! It basically sums up all of my conlangs. I started with a couple of basic conlangs that were actually just Spanish with different words and the jumped to some language with a tripartite alignment, singular-dual-trial-plural distinction and a crazy phonetic inventory with ejectives and an unbalanced vowel inventory (maybe Linguoboy remembers it, it was one of the nooblangs he commented on).
But now, years later, I'm starting to make cute conlangs that sound natural to me, and that makes me really happy :)

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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby Koko » 2014-07-21, 8:28

hashi wrote:[*] "My language is like.. what happens if Spanish is raped up the ass by French", cause these are the only languages in existence you can take ideas from. Romlangs are not cool.

Lol, but… isn't that Portuguese?

I have a really nice romlang in the making (IMO).- Gi' sun fant' un mullo bell romlang.

Depending on the romlang and it's influence, I'm fine with 'em. If it's, like, Portuguese and Romanian influenced, go away. That's not even a likely thing to happen.

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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby Fox Saint-Just » 2014-07-22, 14:16

Not really a mistake, but a pet peeve: people putting the velar nasal into every conlang and asking you why you don't use a specific character in your conlang to indicate it. I would like to answer "Because I often suffer from rhinitis and I hate nasal consonants that go beyond /m/ and /n/", but I think it would be impolite.

Also, the typical Elvish language that seems like a bad clone of Welsh or Irish.
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Re: Common mistakes of conlangers that piss you off

Postby mōdgethanc » 2014-07-22, 17:44

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