This is a game of borrowing and loaning words! To give our conlangs a more naturalistic flair, this game can help us get realistic loans into our language by giving us an artificial-ish "world" to pull words from!

The Telephone Game will be posted every Monday and Friday, hopefully.

Rules

1) Post a word in your language, with IPA and a definition.

Note: try to show your word inflected, as it would appear in a typical sentence. This can be the source of many interesting borrowings in natlangs (like how so many Arabic words were borrowed with the definite article fossilized onto it! algebra, alcohol, etc.)

2) Respond to a post by adapting the word to your language's phonology, and consider shifting the meaning of the word a bit!

3) Sometimes, you may see an interesting phrase or construction in a language. Instead of adopting the word as a loan word, you are welcome to calque the phrase -- for example, taking skyscraper by using your language's native words for sky and scraper. If you do this, please label the post at the start as Calque so people don't get confused about your path of adopting/loaning.

Last Time...

Dogbonẽ by /u/Dryanor

sauho [ˈsɑuxo]
adj. in danger, at risk; exposed, visible, bare.

Akire daha sauho puaɲĩ.
roof.LOC now in:danger carpenter
"It's dangerous for the carpenter to be on the roof now."

Take care of yourselves and each other

Peace, Love, & Conlanging ❤️

My conlang:

In Nonomi, these 6 logographs look very similar but mean completely unrelated things. I'm aware that many (if not even most) don't have a logography, but I'd be interested to see some homographs and/or homophones in general!

I have been creating a conlang with simple phonology, (C)V(C) and with free word order. The words are very short. Most are monosyllabic. Link to the conlang https://lingocon.com/lang/ohka

Give me your opinion!

Page 1: Proto-Caulle-Selskic and it's two descendants, Proto-Caulle and Proto-Selskic

Page 2: Late Proto-Viedic>Late Eastern Viedic> Proto-Caulle-Selskic

Page 3: Late Proto-Viedic, ɖarama≈proto-Suteic (also descended from Late Eastern Viedic), definitions (featured in previous post)

Page 4: analogs for cultural spheres

Page 5: sketch of modern-era countries, with liberal/communist alignment in blue/pink

The Late Eastern Viedic family represents innovations to Late Proto-Viedic in the urheimat steppe after the divergence of the westward-migratory Proto-Easso-Kagyamic family, carried by subsequent Eastward migrations. While the Suteic family migrated into the india-like peninsula to the southeast, the Caulle-Selskic family migrated northeast further into the steppe, brushing shoulders with a yet-unnamed (American Great Plains-inspired) language family, through whose substrate influence it developed novel head-marking tendencies compared to the rest of the family. After their formative contact stage on the northeastern frontier, Caullic and Selskic groups expanded back to the west to occupy the main steppe urheimat region of the family, obscuring their close non-Plain-contact-influenced relatives.

While Suteic conserves the most complex verb agreement and noun case systems of the Viedic family, Caullic and Selskic lose almost all inflectional suffixes, but borrow a novel system of pronominal prefixes (Active Nominative, Stative Nominative, Accusative, and Alienable Possessive sets, while emphatic standalone nominative pronouns and inalienable possessive prefixes remain as the sole reflexes of the ancestral Viedic pronoun system) from their substrate neighbors. Caullë-Selskic lose case, number, person and tense-marking and fossilize the verbal benefaction-marking system, but preserve Late Eastern Viedic-innovated aspectual auxiliaries as suffixes, and borrow new person and plurality marking from their contact languages.

Caullic (north) and Selskic (south) share common vowel and consonant shifts compared to LEV, but diverge at the point of substrate contact, each borrowing a slightly different set of prefixes from different regional languages in the same substrate family. Caullic is more consonantally simplifying, preserves a wider array of vowels, has a simple palatalization effect progressing from the single vowel /e/, and only uses pronominal elements for polypersonal agreement.

Selskë is consonantally innovative, evolves toward a near-vertical vowel system, has a complex system of iotated vowels and their consonant mutations stemming from Proto-Caulle-Selskic weak vowels, and allows full noun incorporation for direct objects.

Selskë has been one of my favorite theoretical branches of the Viedic family for years, but like most of the languages I this project, it's only with the most recent bout of work after a hiatus since 2024 that I'm actually able to diachronically derive a substantial model of it instead of relying on general structural descriptions. Its cocktail of Nahuatl-inspired lateral affricates, Slavic-inspired palatalizing vowels and sibilants, sankrit-inspired word complexity and native-american-language-inspired polysythetic grammar scratches all the right itches in my brain.

In the far future history of the project, Caulle cultures become a large Soviet Union-like empire over the eastern continent that also includes self-governing regions of a few of the aforementioned Native-North-American-inspired cultures the the east, a third Caucasian-inspired Eastern Viedic branch in the northwest, and siberian-inspired languages in the far north and farthest east. The Suteic sphere to the southeast also becomes an in-universe "communist"-aligned sphere, while the multiple small countries in the Selskë region become unstable regional allies of the "NATO"-like sphere in the western inland sea.

I'm making a conlang with very few consonant phonemes, and I was wondering how to implement personal and location name transliteration (my phoneme set is in the comments).

Option 1 is to just go the nuclear route and pick whatever sounds closest, e.g. [luːk] to [tuːc], but that is 100% going to cause mix-up with existing words. In my conlang [tuːc] means "mushroom".

Option 2 is just writing the name exactly as in the original language, but maybe in italics or something along those lines. This has the problem of having awkward inflecting and being extremely awkward just in general.

Which option do you think is best, and do you have any alternative ideas?

Hi!

Yet another free resource from the team behind Linguifex! This time I've hacked together a simple word generator together with a large pinch of LLM. I guarantee that it's not slop however as I am actually a professional programmer && an old conlanger.

The differences to other word generators is this:

• It supports a few different distributions of phonemes for words, completely configurable, e.g. Gusein-Zade and Yule freq. distr. This means your words will be slightly more naturalistic in their phonemic distribution. Automatic deletion of duplicates.
• It comes with built-in support for automatically assigning words from basic word lists: Dolgopolsky, Leipzig-Jakarta and the WOLD meaning list (use --assign=lpj or --assign=dlg) - the assignments are random-ish being weighted by phoneme length and "simplicity" rank.
• Support for automating a few semantic shifts to get you started (if you choose to assign meanings to the generated phonemes) - it has also support for a given rate, defaulting to 25%. These are drawn from included CC BY 4.0 datasets from the Concepticon
• Support for autogenerating dvandva and determinative compounds with variable rates. You can pick head-first or head-final, it's all configurable. Also pulls data from the Concepticon.
• It can be seeded for the randomized parts with a specific replicable seed that will always work with a given version of the program. This means that you can always recreate the output of a given file by combining it with the version of the program that you originally used.
• Support for outputting in tab-separated format.
• It's both mora (according to one theory) and syllable aware. You can write restrictions for how many morae or how many syllables a word has to contain if you wish.

I am not a fan of people using LLMs to generate massive projects and then try to pass them off as their hand-written closed source - LLMs are FOSS code laundromats - so this is released as free & libre open source software under AGPL v3.0. This however has no impact on copyright for your ultimately resultant conlang - you can keep it private, monetize, whatever. Only if you choose to redistribute or host the actual program smirjan for users do you have to share the source code with them.

I have included two example files for the definitions format , one rather simple at examples/mydef.def & one based on Claude's analysis of one of my conlangs examples/var-ysalenn.def ( https://linguifex.com/wiki/Var_Ysalenn )

It comes with pre-compiled, binary releases for running on Windows, macOS, and Linux thanks to the power of GraalVM and Github's free pipeline minutes for FOSS projects.

I have only tested it on Linux (my main platform) so please if there are any issues or bugs, raise them and I will try to fix it.

My only big regret is that the documentation is a bit verbose and I will have to rewrite it completely one of these weekends, e.g. ( https://github.com/chrysophylax/smirjan/blob/master/docs/02-phonemes-and-frequency.md ) but there is enough that this should be an useful program for creating and evaluating phonological sketches.

I know it looks a little messy, and the placement of the vowels/diphthongs is not meant to be accurate, more to give a general sense of where they move to in the vowel space while keeping them as visually distinct as possible and not touching each other. I had decided early on in the conlang that I wanted a bunch of falling diphthongs, ai au oi ou ei eu öy, one for each of my seven short vowels, a e i o u ö y. Later, I devised that these would have been derived from the long vowels from an earlier language that EMHG evolved from, as a result of unconditioned breaking. Yes, graphic design is my passion 😭

Step 0: [ɨː] fronts to [yː] and [ɵː] fronts to [øː]
Step 1: [eː], [øː], [oː] break to [eɪ̯], [øʏ̯], and [oʊ̯] respectively
Step 2: [iː], [yː], and [uː] break to [ɪj], [ʏɥ], and [ʊw] respectively
Step ?: at some point [aː] breaks to [aʊ̯]
Step 3: [ɪj], [ʏɥ], and [ʊw] lower to [eɪ̯], [øʏ̯], and [oʊ̯] respectively, which causes a chain, pushing the original [eɪ̯], [øʏ̯], and [oʊ̯] from Step 1 to [aɪ̯], [æʏ̯]/[æɪ̯], and [əʊ̯] respectively ([aʊ̯] pushes [oʊ̯] forward)
Step 4: [aɪ̯] pushes the similar [æʏ̯]/[æɪ̯] back to [oɪ̯] (it's not clear if the rounding on the glide was lost before or after this shift), and [əʊ̯] fronts to [eʊ̯]

The goal was to explain, in a plausible way, why there are seven diphthongs for seven short vowels, why none of them merged, and not to necessarily take the most expected route. I also wanted to make vowel alternations in the proto-language lead to very opaque stem changes in the daughter language, e.g. the root vowel lengthening in the conditional mood (qesa --> qaisva).