So, I'm a longish-time lurker, delurking for my brilliant  ^*

^{okay, maybe not}

idea: Tvtropes needs its own conlang. I don't know how a language could show a unique troper worldview, but surely it can be done? And if not, at least we'll have fun making a language. Takers?

Update: There is now a page for the language, which for convenience may be found thither.

edited 22nd Sep '10 5:28:53 PM by LKtheGreat

I thought "Trope" was our language a la Tv Tropes Will Ruin Your Vocabulary

That's just a relexed English, though.

Yeah, but it needs a fancy name. "Tropese"? "Tropish"? "Troplish"?

Tropeliteric. It's my best idea for a name.

Dur, how about we worry about the name later and comes with some cases or phonology or something?

Trope, Xanatos, and Cthulhu should be important, if not absolutely essential parts of the language.

We should incorporate "bigonkers" somehow.

Or, perhaps not should...

Gotta use the aorist tense.

Sounds fun.

I think you're confusing language with jargon.

One of the biggest criticisms of this site is tropers using trope-speak outside the wiki.

Well, if TV Tropes has it's own language, no one else will be able to understand any of it, so they won't be able to complain! Et voila! Problem solved!

edited 17th Sep '10 2:43:04 AM by MidnightVelvet

Is that really a criticism of the site itself, when the problem is with using tropespeak outside of the wiki?

Each element of the language should be inspired by one of the most popular tropes. i.e. Magnificent Bastard guides the Tropese/Tropian/Tropska/Tropois's orthography.

I'm thinking we should make it relatively simple. One pronunciation for each character, and tenses are just matter of sticking some on.

I think the important thing is that it isn't just a cipher for English (or Spanish, French, Japanese, etc). The grammar and so on should be fundamentally different. We can draw on any of those languages, of course.

I"m with zizoz on this. Also we have to consider whether noun should be gendered or non-gendered and other such cultural things.

If we have gender, than "distaff" or some derivative should indicate "female" and "spear" or some derivative would indicate "male".

Either that, or I think we should go non-gender.

I don't think we should have gendered pronouns like "he" and "she". But noun classes are probably fine.

So, what sort of sounds would you like? I recommend the bilabial trill. :P Although it should be part of an affricate, otherwise I can't pronounce it.

"Th" should have its own letter.

For sounds, we should have the "a" sound as in "dad", the "o" as in close, the "e" sound as in "friend", the "i" sound as in will, and the U sound as in truth.

Those are the best and most useful vowel sounds.

Different people pronounce words differently. For instance, "friend" and "will" have the same vowel for me. That's why I suggest using the IPA. I think you are talking about /æ/, /ɛ/, /ɪ/, /o/, /u/. I would substitute /i/ for /ɪ/, but otherwise I'm fine with that. If these are the only vowel sounds, I think we should allow for variations in their pronunciation, so [i] and [ɪ] would be allophones of the same sound anyway.

edited 17th Sep '10 2:13:21 PM by Zizoz

I mean obviously some nouns should be gendered implicitly or otherwise, but I'm thinking like in romance languages where some inanimate nouns have genders.

I myself would prefer to have 'a' be 'ah', e be 'eh' i be 'ee', o be 'oh', and u be 'oo'. But maybe we should have characters for the other vowel sounds.

Also: Should we use roman characters or some other character set? Maybe even a custom character set?

edited 17th Sep '10 2:42:05 PM by lockonlockon

I think Roman characters are necessary so we can discuss it. Or at least, we need to have a standard transliteration.