Tvtropes Conlang

Also note that tʃ occurs in TV Tropes for me, kind of: my /tɹ/ is actually [tʃɹ].

My accent does the same thing, actually.

@Fargle: not true. The Japanese "R" is a separate phoneme altogether from the English "R" and "L" it just happens to sound the two phoneme's illegitimate offspring.

What Fargle meant was that the Japanese "r" (not actually referred to as that) phoneme actually covers both the "r" and "l" sounds in English, which is, as far as I know, true.

@Tzetze: Really, yes, but from a phonetic standpoint this is not correct.

But when did phonetics dictate our lives?

edited 19th Sep '10 10:14:58 PM by lockonlockon

From a phonetic standpoint... something phonemic is not correct...? That doesn't make sense.

Eh, I'm too tired to correct my self.

i'm done for tonight.

Verily, I will find a vocabulary list worthy of say, a first grader, and start translating.

Verily, I will find a vocabulary list worthy of say, a first grader, and start translating.

No! We haven't even decided on a phonology yet! Anyways, you don't just take any old words and translate - we don't want to end up with just a cipher. Sure, there are certain basic things that could just be translated directly, but we really should look at the culture of TV Tropes first, before making words, as the language should reflect the culture in many (but not all) ways.

However. We must decide on a phonology before doing any of that.

edited 19th Sep '10 10:32:25 PM by Matrix

@Matrix: I have, this is strictly for my phonology.

Lockon. This is a group project.

@Matrix: Right, sorry.

I'll wait for more people who actually know about this stuff to come on here, then we'll decide and stuff.

I still think "plan" should be derived from Xanatos.

edited 19th Sep '10 10:41:18 PM by lockonlockon

I still think "plan" should be derived from Xanatos.

That is a good idea, but you really shouldn't get ahead of yourself - and everyone else. That just leads to sloppy, mish-mashed work.

Right, sorry.

Once I get started on something, I tend to steamroll throu it and alll related to it.

but what I will do is think of some of the cultural aspects of TV Tropes and see what this would mean applied to a language.

Alright.

But for now, sleeping.

Okay, here goes with my proposals.

I'm a little confused as to how best to list these so I'm gonna go with the Roman Letter we would use followed by the various allophones that would compose that letter's phoneme. I've tried to keep it simple for the most part, no accents etc.

Consonants:

And five vowels that correspond to A, E, I, O and U : ʌ ɛ i o ʉ

I think that covers everything. What do you think?

edited 20th Sep '10 1:42:05 AM by Capt.Fargle

Now this kind of thing is what I, personally like to avoid. I can't objectively say it's bad but I like to keep things simple, as you can see.

First of all, I'll just say that I don't think we necessarily need that many allophones. ;)

I think this is rather disorganized, what with three people posting separate ideas. I'd kind of like to have something solid to work on, so could people try to suggest modifications to the current idea instead of entirely new ones?

Here's my proposed mash-up of previous ideas:

Consonants:

Vowels:

Well the reason I had so many sounds in my post was that I wanted to try and cover a relatively wide range of sounds.

That way we would have more variety to choose from when determining our own words but also so that if, like in many real languages foreign words get borrowed and worked in from time to time, that we will be able to pronounce and spell them without too much difficulty.

example: What if we wanted to use Schadenfreude as a word in our language in the same way that English has started borrowing it? We would need to make sure we had the basic sounds available in our language in order to use it and spell it.

We would simply approximate it with the sounds our language has. Like Japanese does with English words. And in English, even, we don't use the German pronunciation of "Schadenfreude"; we use the English R sound, for instance.

I'm also expecting to have mostly "original" vocabulary.

Wow, this is moving really, really fast. *gapes*

Re: phonology: I like zizoz's most recent idea, both the suggestion to not post random sound sets, and the table-oid thing that s/he posted. I would suggest adding the alveolar affricate /ts/, and if it gets too unwieldy, scrapping the voicing distinction.

Re: vocabulary: The writer/God conflation is sheer brilliance, and lockon's words are nice. However. We are trying not to relex English (meaning copy its grammar and sentence structure, for those who don't know), and those sentences on page 3 are a bit too close to that.

More stuff later, perhaps.

Agreed with the above, pretty much.

Going to lunch, then trying to do school work... Hope this doesn't distract me too much...

edited 20th Sep '10 9:35:14 AM by Zizoz

Zizoz's Mashup table is really good. My only suggestion for a change would be to add the Velar Plosive sounds 'k' and 'g' which are great phones for use in Sound Symbolism.

Particularly k, which is a wonderfully sharp sound which I think would be very good to use in words that evoke blades or stingers etc.

Just about every language has p, t, and k. Not including velars is doing something different.

Anyways, zizoz's mashup table looks good.

EDIT: Oh wait, right, alveolar trill. My accent of our language will be replacing them with alveolar taps, because I seem to be incapable of pronouncing alveolar trills.

edited 20th Sep '10 2:18:51 PM by Matrix

Thank you, LK.

As for grammar structure, I think that maybe we should use an agglutinative language. Basically, take the base word, then modify it by adding affixes.

So for for example: "person" = person, "smallperson" = child.

Actually I would argue that youngperson would be child. Smallperson to me would refer to someone with dwarfism. Fantasy Dwarves on the other hand would probably be Beer Beard or something.