Alicornutopia

Would you like to be questioned about it? If so, would you prefer here, on Dreamwidth, or somewhere else? If on Dreamwidth, in a message, a reply, or another way?

Your "universal language dictionary" link appears to be broken. Also, I find this sentence structure thing hard to envision (and the way you're arranging the words in text isn't quite getting it across for me) but I am fascinated by the possibilities.

(Also, re: Lucy Liu - maybe this slots with the crossover where Sherlock Holmes and Dade Murphy are the same person... :D)

Question away! Anywhere is fine, probably prefer comments over messages if you want to ask on Dreamwidth. It's only on dreamwidth rather than here because it's so very rambly.

Arranging the words in text definitely doesn't get it across well, but I don't have scanning abilities right now, so it'll have to do. The fascinating possibilities are my favorite part.

I, of course, totally welcome, support, and encourage rambliness on this forum - see also: my Gruesome Magical Girls thread XD

Now that you've fixed the ULD link: oooooooooh shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiny.

Hmm, I wonder if I should dig up my old Sessiaki writing system... possibly this thread needs to split into different threads for different conlangs, once we've got three or more going XD

(Sessiaki writing system: Sessiakitsi perceive angles and distances more clearly and immediately than humans, so their writing system is based on laying down selective arcs of concentric circles for vowels and decorating them with marks for consonants, like so. Only the coloured portions appear in actual Kiessa (the language) writing; the grey background lines are for the sake of us poor humans.)

Eeeeee! That is a pretty writing system!

It is! It is also a clever worldbuilding thing. I like what you've done with the Sessiaki in general, it's pretty cool.

PlainDealingVillain: I like it! In particular I really like the stacked sentence structure (how many stacks deep does their working memory permit the typical sentence to grow?)

As for prepositions, sign languages have the convenient feature of being able to demonstrate the physical relationship in space of the objects with decent fidelity (like onomatopoeia in spoken languages), so if you want to be lazy you could say prepositions are mostly just done with classifiers. If you want to have discrete words for prepositions, they'll probably be frozen forms of classifier-like things, such as a flat hand resting on a fist for "on" or an index finger moving from touching the opposite index finger to nearby it for "next to". I suspect that temporal prepositions are going to be the trickier ones to come up with, but since you've already got a time system going, you can probably base them off of that?

Kappa: Ooooh that is a neat writing system! So compact and elegant, and I really like how it makes use of their perceptual differences.

Yay people like things XD

I am proud of the Sessiakitsi. (Plurals in Kiessa: add a ts, then repeat the most recent vowel. Ithue, ithuetse; Sessiaki, Sessiakitsi. I'm sure I came up with a good way to deal with terminal consonants, but then I forgot it.)

This thread seems like the place to ask...

I am working on a world to use for MWF/glowfic, and I've been stuck on one thing due to its (for me) sheer arbitrariness: making up words for terms that "cannot be directly translated into English", and naming characters in the same language.

I am interested in suggestions as to how to invent a collection of morphemes that look consistent and plausible, and not either keyboard mashing or too lacking in variety. Or suggestions to solve the above problem in other ways.

The background/feeling I want is "alt-history Earth diverged 2000-4000 years ago", as opposed to "fantasyland", for what that's worth. I've therefore also considered using real historical word roots (and making up a few) with different sound/spelling changes applied, but that seems just as hard.

Picking some sounds you like (or historically used ones) and plopping them into a language generator such as gen seems like a way to come up with plausible morphemes. That's mostly what I do when I want to generate languagebits.