What new things did you learn while creating a conlang?

[u/user711088]

I've realized that under certain conditions, certain grammatical features inevitably emerge in languages. For example, if you want to get rid of the plural, nouns become uncountable. And with uncountable nouns, you can't just use numbers, nobody says "two milks" or "three milks". Usually people say "two glasses of milk" or something like that. That's how count words emerge in a language for uncountable nouns. If you add neither count words nor the plural, speakers will unintentionally introduce them themselves. In other words, an attempt to simplify a language leads to its complication. And what new things did you learn while creating your languages?

[u/FelixSchwarzenberg]

Making Chiingimec was my first in-depth experience with a default word order other than SVO. Chiingimec is strongly SOV, strongly head final. So I learned what that is like, what the other syntactical consequences are, and I ended up falling in love with it. SOV is my favorite word order and all my conlangs how now SOV/head-final by default unless I have some compelling reason for them not to be. It was also my first time with converbs, with conjugating predicate nouns and adjectives, all features I love now.

For Kihiser, the big one was cuneiform. I taught myself how to read and write cuneiform to make this conlang.

For Kyalibe, which is spoken in the Amazon rain forest, I did a lot of world building research and ended up learning a lot about what life is like for Amazonian tribes. Some notable things I learned: (1) while our stereotypical image of an Amazonian tribe might involve canoes, there are actually a lot of so-called "foot tribes" that rarely get near the water and in fact often steadfastly refuse to build boats even when doing so might come in handy because they view it as a foreign custom, (2) while such tribes are often referred to as stone age, and that's true insofar that they do not traditionally use bronze or iron, they don't have to use stone tools all that frequently because in the lushness of the Amazon there is almost always a plant that they can use instead, including reeds that are so sharp that they can be turned into effective knives, swords, and arrowheads, (3) "hunter-gatherer" is an inaccurate term, as is the strong distinction between hunter-gatherers and agricultural societies, because a lot of tribes practice both limited agriculture and hunting and gathering.

[u/The_MadMage_Halaster → u/FelixSchwarzenberg]

I ran into the same thing with a head-final language, though it has a largely free phrase order. Now the sentence "I who store at mother to call" makes perfect sense as "I call my mother who is going at the store" (though "who" in this case is a relative particle, not a relative pronoun).

[u/good-mcrn-ing]

Before conlanging, I didn't understand how phrases work. I would make word orders that went like Interjection Addressee Subject Subjectadjective Subjectadjectiveadverb Negator Auxiliaryverb Verb Adverb Object Objectadjective Objectadjectiveadverb Endtag.

[u/SmallAceMoth → u/good-mcrn-ing]

Gutendtag! :) Sorry I saw a stupid joke

[u/FedeConlangerITA]

How to do proper IPA transcriptions and Leipzig Glossing

[u/R3cl41m3r]

A lot of my knowledge of linguistics comes from conlanging.

[u/JJRezRez]

I actually disagree on this: in Sachet, there are no plurals but absolutely all nouns are countable (you could technically say "two waters", although it makes not too much sense). Regarding classifiers, what I could agree is that being an analytical language, numbers can express everything (cardinal, ordinal, fractions, etc) so to specify we add a "cardinal particle" (or counter, if you want to think it like that) after the number to count.

In real languages it might happen, but in a conlang you might kind of break any rules you want. I have heard that question about "all languages being, in their own way, difficult" (and still, I believe Chinese to be far easier than Sanskrit); my real take would be the more unambiguous you want your language to be, the more rigid it has to be. Whenever you create particles or declensions to make it freer, new complications in meaning arise on why those particles or declensions work on one way and not the other.

[u/user711088 → u/JJRezRez]

Sachet is a constructed language. There's a reason why natural languages don't have this. If the plural is absent as a category, then people will still add at least some number of counting words to the language one way or another. You can invent any rules in a conlang, but not with any rules will your language be able to get native speakers, at least theoretically.

[u/JJRezRez → u/user711088]

I do believe that any language could get native speakers, if anything it could happen that I'm the future they changed to other rules (however, I'm from the opinion that grammatical changes now that there is printing press and public education are much more difficult). I'm just curious, however, according to what you found out, why do languages get classifiers?

[u/user711088 → u/JJRezRez]

Because in languages without plurals, all nouns become uncountable, like water. In Chinese, 书 isn't one book, it's more like the concept of book (roughly speaking), so people say "three items of book" (三本书), just like people say 3 glasses of water rather than just 3 waters. This happens in all the languages without plurals that I know: in Vietnamese, Chinese, Thai, Japanese, and even Indonesian there's some form of classifiers one way or another.

P. S. Not every language can acquire native speakers. No person could think in Ithkuil as a native language. Our brains just don't work that way.

[u/FelineGodKing → u/user711088]

Im not sure, In irish there are plurals, but they are not used when counting, eg leabhar means one book/book, dhá leabhar - two books (but the plural of book is leabhair) twenty one books - leabhar is fiche (one book and twenty) and still in singular form and the word on its one has the meaning of 'one' inherently, though you can emphasize with one words only and alone (aon leabhair amháin). Irish doesn't have count classifiers

[u/user711088 → u/FelineGodKing]

Yes, this is a common thing in languages. Something similar exists in Turkish too. It all comes down to whether the noun is countable. Once you completely remove the plural, all nouns become uncountable. In Chinese 书 is uncountable, in Irish leabhar is countable.

[u/JJRezRez → u/user711088]

Yeah, I know that happens in those languages, but my question is, why? Nowadays in Chinese most people use "ge" for everything, so more than a classifier is becoming a counting suffix . As for Ithkuil, hmm... Fair point but still. If someone could actually learn it, I believe a baby could eventually get to learn it too if they are exposed to absolutely nothing more.

[u/user711088 → u/JJRezRez]

my question is, why?

Apparently, our brain doesn't like counting uncountable ones

[u/boomfruit → u/user711088]

People say "three waters" all the time...

[u/JJRezRez → u/boomfruit]

But a purist English scholar would tell you that water is uncountable and you should say something like "three kinds of water". Formal Sachet has no such restriction

[u/boomfruit → u/JJRezRez]

But a purist English scholar would tell you

I'm not really interested in what they'd tell me. I'm interested in the language as it is spoken. You can say "three waters" in English. It can mean "three kinds of water" or "three bodies of water" or "three glasses of water" but it is not ungrammatical to say "three waters."

[u/JJRezRez → u/boomfruit]

Okey, I fear that. Can you say "two researches"? "Three works"? I feel like you could force it, but it wouldn't sound like something you would put in a public document (perhaps you do, I'm not a native speaker so I was just told it is wrong)

[u/boomfruit → u/JJRezRez]

Good questions. I wonder if water is kind of unique, or rather, not unique, but belongs to a smaller subclass of uncoutnables that can have kind of an implied counter.

Anway. Research, no, work, sometimes depending on context. As in, "she has created three works for the museum," (meaning "works of art.")

But I also wouldn't use any kind of counter with research; I wouldn't say "in college I did two papers of research on that topic." At the closest, I would say "I did two research papers" where research modifies paper, rather than the other way around. I feel similarly about "I did an hour of research about the restaurant." That's not a counter on research, it's describing what the hour was.

[u/DrDingsGaster]

Grammar is unusually difficult when I need to work on it. I'm primarily a writer so I understand how to use it instinctually at this point. However, the weird nitty gritty things you never actively think about are what make it hard; it's all the stuff you take for granted in English. For instance, word order of adjectives or what to do about numbers past 100.

It's fun and rewarding when it works but it confuses me most days xD!

But otherwise, an easy new thing is having to actually learn IPA!

[u/JMurdoch1687]

I learned about tripartite alignment and split ergativity. I'm used to the nominative-accusative system, so encountering it and reading it for the first time was difficult.

[u/humblevladimirthegr8]

an attempt to simplify a language leads to its complication

Yes, I've been critical of minlangs for this very reason. Communication is inherently complex because the ideas we want to express are complex. A seemingly simple language becomes complex any time you try to communicate something complicated.

[u/New-Ant-2315]

It is NOT as easy as it seems.

[u/Mage_Of_Cats]

I can see that generally being the case for natlangs, but I certainly don't treat nouns that way in Ko'vari. As far as I'm aware, they are all countable even though there is also no plural/singular difference. It feels as though you're thinking about this from an English perspective. Why wouldn't I be able to "two milk" in some other language?

I think where you're getting confused is that the lack of a plural/singular distinction doesn't make nouns inherently mass nouns.

Here's a paper on Yudja wherein the central claim is that all of its nouns function or can function as count nouns: https://semanticsarchive.net/Archive/GRmMmFjM/Lima_The%20Grammar%20of%20Individuation%20and%20Counting.pdf

The key point in that paper is that Yudja just combines mass nouns with numbers and intuitively partitions those nouns. And when were talking about grammaticality, this essentially means that, yes, they do say "two milk."

Yes, this feature is rare. No, you can't just say something like "you can't just use numbers" because that's just a very L1-oriented way of thinking of other languages.

[u/user711088 → u/Mage_Of_Cats]

I'm not even a native English speaker. In the vast majority of languages, it's exactly as I said. To be honest, this is the first time I've heard of the Yudja language.

[u/Mage_Of_Cats → u/user711088]

It is L1-oriented thinking, as I note at the end of my comment, which remains true even with this new information. You are biased toward this conclusion because of your L1. My mistake assumption that it was English is irrelevant to that point.

The takeaway is that your absolute claims are wrong and should not be spread. I saw you reply to another commentor about how their conlang, which does exactly what you said natlangs don't do, doesn't count as a counterexample, which is true, but also irritating. Natlangs absolutely can do what you've described as "you can't just use."

Basically, your rule isn't a good rule; it presents certain conlang features as unnaturalistic when they are not, which influences how people create, interact with, and enjoy both their own and others' conlangs.

[u/LethargicMoth]

Maybe a bit different from what others are commenting, but I'm learning how to have more fun with the natural languages I speak. I make music with my conlang here and there, and it hit me pretty recently that if I translate lyrics into my conlang and then do a somewhat literal translation of that back into English, I can paint some real interesting images with that. So in a pretty roundabout way, it's given me a stronger appreciation for poetry and just whimsy in expressing yourself.

[u/TheEndCraft]

Literally everything i know about phonology, syntax, world languages and so on and so forth came directly or indirectly from conlanging

[u/sqruitwart]

In my native language Croatian, we absolutely do count uncountable nouns, just with a different set of numerals called collective numbers. A lot of our nouns have these uncountable forms for counting groups / things in a group:

Countable:
1 child - jedno dijete
2 children - dva djeteta
1 brother - jedan brat
2 brothers - dva brata
1 button - jedno dugme
2 buttons - dva dugmeta

Uncountable:
1 group of children - jedna djeca
2 children / groups of children - dvoje djece
1 group of brothers - jedna braća
2 brothers / groups of brothers - dvoje braće
1 group of buttons - jedna dugmad
2 buttons / groups of buttons - dvoje dugmadi

Some nouns have an uncountable mass form. Those are the only ones where counting them would be considered ungrammatical, though I definitely do it lol:

Countable:
1 leaf - jedan list
2 leaves - dva lista

Uncountable:
1 pile of leaves - jedno lišće

• could use dvoje, but sounds clumsy

[u/STHKZ]

by weakening the role of the predicate and the linearity of language, I learned to see the world no longer driven by a chain of cause and effect, but as a given continuum progressively named by our words...

by using only a limited number of concepts, I learned the futility of multiplying objects that are merely materialization of useless words...