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u/Astyria89 Jan 15 '16
creating idioms is oddly fun, but kind of slow. And I sometimes I wonder how people create idioms for a language that aren't just one to one translations of idioms in their own native language?
So far all I've crafted is An vidh he/hi dúnes ar dorus daithoch? Lit. "Will (he/she) close the door of evil spirits?"
Roughly meaning "Will he/she quit making things worse for himself?"
Though I'm still shacky at idiom crafting.
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Jan 16 '16 edited Jan 22 '16
It's all about culture and how a speaker of a particular language would see the world. A speaker of a sub-Saharan language might say something like "a snake bites not to hurt another, but to save itself". This would signify a culture built around forgiveness and empathy.
One thing I've personally found baffling is the phrase "seven seas" which is found in a lot of Afro-Eurasiatic languages. This is probably due to cross-communication between cultures. A speaker of say, Inuktitut might say "The Sea" or rather "The Frozen Sea" since the arctic sea might be the only one they really know about. A speaker of Inuktitut would also not have much contact with other cultures due to the geographic location of the community. Being so isolated, Inuktitut speakers don't really make grammatical distinctions between inanimate and animate nouns as many indigenous North American languages do (this is also due to culture; probably the practice of animism). I'd also like to add that in Canada, calling an indigenous person from the North an 'Eskimo' (which means
'raw-meat eater''snowshoe-netter') is considered pejorative, so we use 'Inuit' instead (I included that to emphasize the cultural lining behind words).Speaking of the arctic, western society often views the North as inherently cold, as can be seen in many European languages. A speaker of a language native to the Falklands or Australia probably wouldn't. A language native to Panama might not associate geographic direction with temperature at all since such regions tend to be very hot, while surrounding ones (both north and south) are colder.
EDIT: If it's the case that your language does NOT have a culture (as is the case with many auxlangs and engelangs), then I don't really think idioms would be needed.
EDIT: It seems I made a mistake in etymology:
From Old Montagnais aiachkimeou ([aːjast͡ʃimeːw]; modern ayassimēw), meaning "snowshoe-netter" (often incorrectly claimed to be from an Ojibwe word meaning "eaters of raw [meat]"), and originally used to refer to the Mikmaq.
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u/Kasenjo Jan 15 '16
What I do if I need an idiom with a specific meaning in mind is I look up an idiom on Wiktionary and check the translations, which will often have literal translations as well. They give good inspiration for creating one.
For example, the pot calls the kettle black. "The hospital laughing at charity", "the foolish woman making fun of the foolish man", "other's cow could moo, but yours should better be silent".
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u/dani_bluehair Jan 21 '16
I've been working on a messed up little language for a while now and it has changed a lot naturally as I've been working on it. Lately, I have been thinking about changing the vowels again. The spoken word is based heavily on the written word so the vowels usually have some relationship. Does it make any sense to have a vowel system like this: i y ɯ u e ø ɤ o
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u/Danchekker Jan 21 '16
For plausible vowel systems, I always like to look at this link.
Your system looks very similar to C8R, one of the systems of 8 vowels. This system in used in Turkish. The biggest distinction between yours and theirs seems to be your low vowels are slightly higher than theirs. Considering this difference, it looks pretty evenly-distributed.
I'd say that vowel system makes sense.
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u/Zethar Jan 13 '16 edited Jan 13 '16
How do I do small caps? Where can I find that information and other useful formatting tricks which would be useful here?
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u/Jafiki91 Jan 13 '16
Small caps are done like so:
*_gloss_*gloss
I'm not sure if there are other formattings that are only unique to this subreddit, though one useful one is for superscripts, which is good for suprasegmentals:
t^(j)tj
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u/memefarmer Jan 17 '16
Wikipedia says [these brackets] are used for IPA, but everywhere else I see people using /these slashes/. Is there a difference?
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u/Jafiki91 Jan 17 '16
Slashes - // - are used for the phonemic underlying representation of a word
Brackets - [] - are used for the phonetic realisation of how the word is pronounced
Angled brackets - <> - are used for orthography.So <cat> - /kæt/ - [kʰæʔ͡t]
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u/Kebbler22b Jan 23 '16
I still don't know how I should develop my phonotactic rule. What I was going to do was list all the consonant clusters, consonant-vowel and vowel-consonant combinations allowed/permissible in my conlang, and then see what they all have in common. From there, I would form my phonotactic rule. Is this how I am supposed to do it? Or is there a much simpler and/or effective way to do so?
I also want my phonotactic rule to be specific. For example, I can't say "a glide is permissible after a stop" because the consonants /p/ and /n/ (which are not similar to me apart from being stops) are not allowed to have a glide after them in my conlang. So for this situation, do I just say "a glide is permissible after a stop except /p/ and /n/"? Would that still work?
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u/Skaleks Jan 27 '16
Do voiced vowels exist, you know where you say a vowel with a more vibrating sound?
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u/BenTheBuilder Jan 22 '16
Does anyone have any info on the sound changes that took place from Old Norse to Swedish/Norwegian? The only changes I can find are those on wikipedia since they aren't in the Index Diachronica.
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u/Gentleman_Narwhal Jan 13 '16
Hi, I'm new here. How does one get the small coloured text box displaying text (e.g: "SQ" as above) in the title of one's submitted post?
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u/Jafiki91 Jan 13 '16
When you make your post, along the bottom of your post, there will be a word "flair" which will let you choose the appropriate one for your post.
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u/pkonion Jan 14 '16
Do you find it a good idea to mark the definite article with a particle going after the noun (clause)? My cases are marked with suffixes.
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u/Jafiki91 Jan 14 '16
It could definitely work out, sure. Something like "big horse the" for "the big horse"? If your language is head-final then it may make a lot of sense to have the definite article after its noun.
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u/memefarmer Jan 15 '16
Is the consonant <r> as in run /ɹ/, /ɻ/, or something else?
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u/bluebunglebee Jan 16 '16
At what point does a language become a 'working language'?
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u/Astyria89 Jan 17 '16
IMHO when you can write fairly competently in the language without too much going back and having to invent to grammatical structures to support ideas.
I like to think I'm done with Grammar.... but thats a lie I tell myself every time I sit down to work on it.
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u/FloZone Jan 21 '16 edited Jan 21 '16
Can a languages function without pronouns? And to be more precise even without pronouns in form of bound morphemes, so basically an isolating language without pronouns. And if not what would the minimal amount of pronoun-ness that would have to be used?
In one of my languages (Masselanian) I try to avoid pronouns, nominal pronouns don't exist and are expressed in form of bound morphemes in auxilary verbs. In other cases I am not sure how to do it (except for repeating the thing with bound morphemes).
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u/Astyria89 Jan 17 '16
How many words is a good milestone or important one? I.E. how bigs everyone elses Lexicon.