Conlangers

These words, of course, sound very wrong. There is a difference between mass nouns (rice, money) and count nouns (apple, peanut) in languages and only count nouns will be pluralized. It was quite difficult for me, given the little knowledge of linguistics, which I had, to realize that these things are not the same in every language out there. I am still struggling with this. Seriously. It seems hard to me to imagine that certain mass nouns to be discrete and OTOH, certain words which are used for individual things to have a counterpart which refers to the mass of them. This is one of the things, which I still struggle to implement well in my ‘langs.

Kenshuite He Mo Gie, as a communist conlang which marks the singular, not the plural of course has the tendency to see many things as count nouns which are mass nouns otherwise. But apart from that, it is a question of, often random asignment. So, how do you do it?

Kenshuite He Mo Gie was created based on a definite idea how the culture is like and this idea was implemented in grammar and vocabulary. Tsali started with a vague non-cultural idea and a Pentium 1 computer. As such, creating the language meant also making up the culture on the go. While I was walking to Bergisch-Gladbach, the language gave me a big hint on the culture behind it: I thought about asking about the nationality in the various conlangs I created. Rejistanian would probably ask “Where were you born?” since Rejistanis do not have any concept of naturalization. You are citizen of the country you were born in. If they would want to know the official nationality, they would probably ask something like: “Where does your passport come from?”

The Kenshuite He Mo Gie speakers live on a barely inhabitable planet as survivors of a crash. Visitors would be asked a lot of things, nationality probably not being one of them.

Naeso would use a rather direct construction, though that has not been voted on yet.

And Tsali would ask which ruler one obeys. The reply would take the form “Berlin-obeyer am I” ie: the term for nationality is derived from the capital city, not the country. This is inspired by Singularity Sky by Charles Stross and I suspect that the Tsali speakers also have a distinctly authoritarian culture. Or if I go for the irony: Are a young egalitarian democracy, which still uses the language of earlier, absolutistic times. Irony or not: Some nations are going to be named after the family which rules them: Wintsor dia kpektsi (Windsoer-land) will the the UK and Sahud dia kpektsi (Saud-land) Saudi Arabia (which is named in this manner in German and English as well).

Conlangs are not normally looked at in terms of usability, however, it needs to be considered when deciding how to reach the goals of a language. There are different stages of usability and their lack. On the lowest level are languages like Rikchik which cannot be used by humans at all. The ones, which are designed for alien mouths. Then, there are the languages, where the mouth can pronounce the sounds, but the brain protests very much if you want to learn it as L2. Ithkuil/Ilaksh belongs here. As does Fith. And as does the nounless language quuxlang, which I developped. A step further towards ease is a language which uses really odd grammatical structures or phonological features. Here, for the first time, the L1 of the wannabe-speaker is relevant. A speaker of German will struggle with anything tonal. And at least one speaker of British English was unable to hear a difference between /h/ and /x/ in rejistanian words. Also languages with natlang-grade amounts of exceptions fit here since they require a lot of rote memorization. Then there are the simplified languages, Esperanto, Ido, Volapük, Rejistanian (which is a fictional auxlang)…

And then there are languages, which try to fall into this category but overdo it so much that they are actually quite challenging. Like Toki Pona. Yes, it has only 100ish words, but it needs to know so any terms which have to be memorized that it actually cannot be considered easy anymore.