u/tamtrible

I've been working on a possible conlang here. I was thinking of naming it by the most distinctive feature, the markers (essentially pseudo-pronouns, assigned during discourse, to help avoid the "which she do you mean?" problem that comes up in most languages).

I paired all of the (Ca) marker syllables together in various combinations. After trying to clean the list of things that sound like other words in English or other major languages, I was left with:

kapa

nata

pama

pana

sama

sapa

taka

tana

tasa

Any obvious "conflicts" I missed? Any thoughts on which ones sound the best?

I may not be able to eliminate all possible "conflicts", so if I get down to 3 or so that haven't been eliminated, I will just pick the one I most like the sound of.

And I'm trying to assign basic words at least semi-logically, but I'm only one person, so if anyone wants to help, head over to the other post and let me know what word(s) you'd like to work on.

Inspired by someone's response to a recent hypothetical situation I posted

He heard they are really into pain there.

The bored Nth-dimensional being is making you an offer. She will turn you into a tree. You can reverse this state at any point, but while you remain in it, you will reverse age at one year for every 3 years that pass. While you are a tree, you will be vaguely aware of your surroundings, but in a slow, dreamlike way.

You will be somewhere where you will be protected from being cut down, and you will be a species that is resistant to things like beetles or forest fires, but you may still have to deal with things like woodpeckers or people carving their name in you. These things (including the beetles or fires) will hurt, but not cause permanent harm to your human form.

Whenever you decide to become human again, or when you reach age 5, whichever comes first, you will become human again, wearing whatever you were wearing when you transformed (including anything that was in your pockets or whatever). You can have up to a month to sort out your possessions and so forth before she transforms you.

Do you take her up on the offer? Why or why not? If you do take her up on the offer, how long do you think you would stay in tree form? Any other thoughts?

Edit: just to not completely exclude people with spouses or children, if you can convince your spouse and/or children to also become trees, she will extend the offer to them as well.

The idea is, while still using a "universal" phoneme set, try to make a language that is, as much as practical, both concise and precise.

Just using the Latin alphabet (because it's what I know), the phoneme set is a, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, p, s, t, w, and u. 10 consonants, 3 vowels.

"Legal" syllables are CV, CVC, and VC, with CV being explicitly reserved for grammatical/functional words (conjunctions, pronouns, etc), and single syllable CVC words mostly being common nouns, verbs like run or give, and other concepts that would come up a lot. most other common words would be two syllables, with three syllables generally being reserved for either things that are compounds of other words, or obscure complex concepts.

Also, I had a possibly novel for a way to simultaneously keep the language compact in actual use, while minimizing confusion and ambiguity. instead of especially third person pronouns, the language would use a series of explicitly assigned reference markers. And the specific combinations used in the reference markers would not show up elsewhere in the language.

The idea, in practice, would be something like the following.

There are six marker syllables, ka, ma, na, pa, sa, and ta. They are assigned by using a click or pop noise, whatever noise of that general structure you can easily produce, you could probably even use snapping your fingers or something. Then, until they are reassigned in that particular conversation, the single short syllable is used instead of the noun.

For example, if you wanted to talk about Bob and Mary going to the beach, you might say something like "Bob * ta and Mary * ka went to the beach * sa. Ta forgot the towels, but ka had a blanket they could use instead. Sa was very crowded, but ta and ka had a good time anyway." (the * is supposed to represent the click).

It avoids the "Which she are we talking about?" problem, by explicitly assigning pronoun equivalents to individual subjects, instead of assigning them to general categories and hoping for the best.

I think VC syllables should be reserved primarily for affixes, which will probably all be suffixes for simplicity's sake. And, to avoid the false appearance of apparent markers, "a" is not used in VC syllables (so you don't have, eg, ket+ap sounding like you're using the marker ta)

What do you think?