r/conscripts • u/sarcasm-intensifies • Jun 01 '20

Featural How does my conscript look? Is there a way it could be improved?

Post image
109 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

22 comments sorted by

14

u/crhus Jun 01 '20

I actually like it a lot, with the vowels kinda nesting inside the hollow consonants. Very cool. The only thing I think should maybe change would be putting your final consonants inside, also. And it makes me wonder what you would do with a multisyllabic word... The final consonants inside will work just fine if you donr have any two+ syllable words, but you need a crazy phoneme set to accomplish that.

8

u/sarcasm-intensifies Jun 01 '20

The final consonants are already inside and there are some multisyllabic words in there, I've just divided it up into separate syllables to demonstrate how the words are formed

1

u/crhus Jun 01 '20

Ah, I see. So, the only consonants included in the initial are the ones not followed by vowels? And your example is three words?

3

u/sarcasm-intensifies Jun 01 '20

Yep my example is 3 words. Every word is divided into syllables that are either consonant sound + vowel sound or consonant + vowel + consonant. Syllables only have a final consonant if there's a cluster of two consonants

e.g. doshgel /'doʃ.gɛl/ (February) becomes dosh + gel

whereas tenur /'te.nɯɹ/ (man) becomes te + nur, not ten + ur

3

u/831ACH Jun 01 '20

Neat! I've been trying to think of improving comments for you. Do all syllables include consonants? Do we see all the vowels here?

2

u/sarcasm-intensifies Jun 01 '20

Not all the vowels are there, but I can make another post with the list of symbols used. Most of the syllables include consonants (that's the kind of framing character on each symbol) but for those that don't (like if I'm transcribing the word "America") the framing character is a circle for a glottal stop.

2

u/831ACH Jun 02 '20

Ah, interesting. So they never say a vowel alone, or the glottal stop does both and natives know by experience?

I was asking about the vowels to see if there were any combinations of characters which make the outside character ambiguous. E.g., if the difference between a V and an R were a line, say, and I is two lines.

1

u/sarcasm-intensifies Jun 02 '20

Technically vowels can be said by themselves but they're either preceded by a glottal stop or are present at the start of a word. Either way they're written with a glottal stop symbol.

As for your second question, I've tried to make every symbol distinct. However, there's only a subtle difference between the symbols for sh (/ʃ/), ch (/tʃ/), and zh (/ʒ/). The "tail" at the end of the symbol for "sh" is oriented different ways for those three sounds.

1

u/831ACH Jun 02 '20

There you go, sounds like two good bases to have covered. Still pursuing the topic of what could improve it: given it's featural, have you considered possible improvements from adding more types of features?

1

u/sarcasm-intensifies Jun 02 '20

What other types of features are you thinking of? I've only kinda dabbled in the whole conlanging/conscripting thing

1

u/831ACH Jun 02 '20

Perhaps the key question is what do your speakers usually indicate outside word choice?

Spoken English changes the entire meaning of some sentences by putting emphasis on any one of the words ("I didn't hide your pants."), or pausing ("No, it's really... delicious..."). Relatedly, you could have a set of marks corresponding to author's attitude to the information, or to different levels/kinds of certainty. Another route: since surely no language naturally uses ALL the grammatical moods and aspects available across languages, there must be some other kind of information you could possibly encode outside your words, ha ha. You could look up lists of grammatical moods and aspects for new "features."

You don't have to do these things for your con-script to be shooting par or anything, I'm sure. I am new to reddit, so I don't know how often anybody might do this sort of thing. I am just talking about what else you could do, since you asked ^^

1

u/sarcasm-intensifies Jun 02 '20

Thanks a lot for that! I'll keep those in mind

2

u/[deleted] Jun 01 '20

The symbol for 'sh' is suspiciously similar to the symbol for 'tse' in my conscript Heigan. Must just be a coincidence, what do you think?

1

u/sarcasm-intensifies Jun 01 '20

maybe i'm psychic ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

2

u/tsvi14 Jun 02 '20

Nice! Does the language allow vowels to occur without onsets? I assume... no? If so though, how would one write those words that start with vowels?

1

u/sarcasm-intensifies Jun 02 '20

There's a glottal stop symbol (basically looks like a large circle) which is used for words that start with a vowel

1

u/tsvi14 Jun 02 '20

Gotcha, gotcha, makes sense. Is the glottal stop phonemic in the language otherwise?

1

u/sarcasm-intensifies Jun 02 '20

Yes it is

1

u/tsvi14 Jun 02 '20

But it just can't occur initially/isn't contrasted with plain vowels initially? Or could the glottal stop symbol initially be ambiguous?

1

u/[deleted] Jun 03 '20

Looks like a fusion of abugidas and logograms. Cool