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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
drbollocks @lemmy.blahaj.zone

what’s your favorite constructed language? any of you created your own?

i love the idea of creating conlangs. i’ve experimented with the idea of them in years past but have never done anything with them, let alone created one.

i did create some toki pona-based ones as they consist of few words (~100) but i want to create ones that aren’t just based off toki pona.

59 comments

  • Lojban. IIRC it's inspired by the Saphir-Worf hypothesis that states that the capacity for human thought is shaped by the language you speak (side note: this is also explored in my favorite movie Arrival).

    As someone who is probably on the spectrum I am incredibly frustrated by imprecise language and misunderstanding between people, and how people always seem to be reading between the lines instead of paying attention to what you are literally saying.

    Lojban is designed almost like set-theoretic mathematical expressions, leaving minimal room for ambiguity and misunderstanding. It trains your brain to think about exactly what you are saying. It's like a utopian language for me.

    Ironically after it gained only a couple of hundred speakers it started to develop slang expressions and ambiguity. People even wrote poetry and jokes that proliferate and exploit ambiguity or subtext. I guess it's human nature to shun precision in communication.

    • It's been our biggest error since the Scientific Revolution, assuming the universe can be broken down into its simplest most precise parts. Materialism has many strong achievements but it's not the whole picture. Perhaps it is the interplay between polarities that brings us closer to understanding precision as contextual and nuanced...

      Recognizing how our consciousness permeates our percepts, and how language is the synthesis of this... Everyone is being as precise as they have the capacity to be, colored by spirit and with their soul.

  • I think Globasa is one of the best attempts at creating an international language without bias toward any natural language family (looking at you Esperanto).

    • If I were to learn another besides toki pona, I'd def go with this one. The way globasa adds words makes it much more international than nearly every other conlang.

  • https://minilanguage.com/ is an interesting one to look at. There are exactly 1000 words in the total vocabulary. That’s Mini Mundo though. A second, smaller variant also exists: Mini Kore, with 100 words.

    I started learning it too soon after learning Toki Pona and lost steam. But I agree with the design principles. They stem from the observation that Toki Pona, as fun as it is, is just too damn ambiguous for anything non-superficial. All too often speakers need to clarify what they said by switching to a natural language. Even my own Toki notes become indecipherable after a few days.

    Toki Pona: fun, therapeutic mental exercise, made even better with sitelen pona. Feels like writing poetry. Never meant to be a useful language. Easy to learn, hard to use.

    Mini: useful as a language for general purpose communication. Small, primarily latinate vocabulary. Harder to learn, easier to use.

    • Checked it. They used Amigo instead of shortening Ami. Discarded. Why are all these "global languages" Spanish in disguise?

  • Interslavic is neat, It's a single language able to be understood by most Slavic speakers, and it works fairly well

59 comments