Conlanging!

[DanielH]

Could you try to explain what the easily explicable morphemes of this are? My brain wants to say that -em is the plural form of -is, and that kor- isn’t quite related to that, but it’s just wildly inventing probably incorrect patterns.

In any case, I agree that those look like they could be words in the same language. I would be careful with the letter r, though; very few languages actually use rhotic vowels, which is how my American English–speaking brain wants to pronounce kor-, puramem, and densilard.

Also, I like the idea of translating those to make sure they don’t mean anything you don’t want to say in some real-world language.

[Unbitwise]

There are no plurals on display. In fact, I haven't even invented any affixes or systematic transformations at all, and that would be a good thing to do. Care to suggest one (or two, actually, two would be useful)?

I'm not giving the complete meanings because I'm planning to throw this at MWF (or maybe sandboxes, but that requires more investment on someone else's part, but if anyone's volunteering…) without having explained What's Going On In This World at first. Feel free to tell me that's a terrible idea. The ones which are relatively nonspoilery are:

• ta, tan, tar — person/self/own
• bel, ber — family/household
• tel — task/role/job/organization
• em — a whole, or significant-in-this-specific-way grouping
• is — name
• silt — made thing

Oh, heh, “em” is a bit more plural than “is”, if you squint. Doesn't actually work as a plural, though.

As to the letter “r”, uh, my bad? I'll just arbitrarily declare that in my world “r”s happen to be more common. (I'm already planning on unrecognizable history and subtly tweaked brains, so that's hardly a stretch.)

[DanielH]

I didn’t mean for you to get into spoilers; by “easily explicable” I meant “corresponding to existing English concepts”, which I imagined wouldn’t really get much spoiler territory.

I wasn’t saying you shouldn’t use “r”, just that if you do the language might look a bit more Englishlike than you intend. Alternately, other languages use “r” in a different way, and you could get away with it meaning something slightly different phonetically and still transliterate to the same character. I don’t know enough about the details to say more than that, though.

[Unbitwise]

By the way, for anyone interested, the reason my conlang fragment hasn't made more than a one-word appearance in MY FIRST RP THREAD YAY is that the particular Handwavy Translation Magic in use strongly prefers English over precision.

[Kappa]

YOUR FIRST RP THREAD YAY is really fun to read and I'm excited about both the conlang and the attached worldbuilding. A+ very nifty. :D

[Unbitwise]

*happy squirm* Thanks!

I figure once I've gotten through the teaching part of this one (to help spot any holes in my worldbuilding before I'm stuck with them), I'll be up for other threads. Dropping Thanjen in assorted worlds is most certainly a possibility. (I have one other defined-enough-to-go-on character, but she's less suited for adventure and will probably find the MWF first if she doesn't appear in this sandbox.)

Fun fact: Drop Thanjen in a superhero world and suddenly he's just another person with a unique, probably unteachable, power. He will be mildly disgruntled about this, because (a) everyone should have as much fun as he does, and (b) that's not how things work.

(Feel free to take further discussion to a more fitting thread since it's off-topic here — I read everything.)

[Unbitwise]

I'm thinking about inventing some grammar. Not because I want/need to exactly (nobody is speaking complete sentences, only borrowing (possibly by way of translation magic) individual words), but because what a particular word looks like depends on what meanings go in affixes and what go in separate words and that depends on what the grammar has in it.

Does anyone have suggestions for a resource to use as a checklist for what kinds of things need to be expressible? I imagine either a literal checklist of broadly-defined features ("questions, hypotheticals, tenses, plural-vs-singular, …") or a collection of sentences that one should be able to translate.

[DanielH]

I don’t know if that’s a thing you can do, or at least you shouldn’t necessarily hit every item on the checklist. For example, some languages don’t have grammatical tense but specify time in words when relevant (like how in English you can say something is to the North, but only bother when the location is relevant).

[Alicorn]

I liked http://www.zompist.com/kitlong.html when I was self-teaching conlanging in college.

[Unbitwise]

DanielH: I meant to give a list of semantic features, but it's harder to think of the right words for that. I suppose I should have said "temporal relations" instead of "tenses".

Alicorn: — I should just browse that site.