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The Weekly c/conlangs Post #1

pe'el!

Welcome to the first weekly c/conlangs post!

Conlang of the week

This week's conlang of the week is: Klingon! The constructed language devised for the strict warrior aliens of the same name, Klingon was first heard spoken in 1979. Klingon is one of the first conlangs to be widely recognised in popular culture, with there even being groups of people learning and speaking the language.

What do you think of the language Klingon? Does it succeed at its goals? Do you speak some Klingon? Was it what first got you into the wonderful world of constructed languages? Tell us about your thoughts in the thread!

Linguistic feature of the week

Keeping in the theme of Klingon, which was designed to sound extremely alien to the audience, the linguistic feature of the week is any feature not existing in a natural, human language.

Klingon was meant to sound extremely alien. This was mostly achieved by picking features and sounds that were exotic to English speakers. The most alien thing I could find in Klingon is the fact that it uses OVS word order, the rarest of all word orders. Some people say Klingon has not really succeeded at being "alien", because pretty much all features it has exist in some human language.

What cool and interesting "alien" features does your conlang have? Or which features do you think are super cool and would you love to see in a conlang one day? Please share it with us in the comments!

Post of the week

There will be no post of the week this week yet, as all posts so far have been made by us, the moderators. Maybe your post can be here next week?

Happy conlanging everyone and thanks for being apart of the c/conlangs community!

Qapla'!

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9 comments

  • I remember reading about an attempt to raise a child speaking Klingon but had to stop because they didn't find words for mundane daily objects.

  • While I don't consider it "alien" because it's built upon features found in real languages, Tarune's phonemic inventory is really weird in comparison with your typical European language:

    • / p t ʈ c q /
    • / b d ɖ ɟ ɢ /
    • / f s ʂ ç h /
    • / w l ɾ ɻ j /
    • / a i u a: i: u: /
    • / ã ĩ ũ ã: ĩ: ũ: /

    No, I'm not forgetting about /m n/ and the likes - Tarune doesn't have phonemic nasal consonants at all. The associated sounds only surface allophonically, for voiced stops "sandwiched" between nasal vowels. Nasalisation is primarily a vowel contrast in the conlang.

    Same deal with velars - you get some velar allophones for the palatal and uvular series, like /qi/ and /cu/ being realised as [ke] and [kʊ], but you don't really have a */k g x/ series.

    • really interesting to have the alien feature actually be something that’s not there! This language seems really interesting! Would love to see more about it!

      • Thank you! I'm planning to create a full post about it here, in the future, but to keep it short:

        Tarune (native name Taruōmda /taɾ.wũ:.da/ ) is the classical language used by scholars, in the conworld that I'm building. It isn't spoken natively any more, although most people in the Meza Republic and Lāng Kingdom speak descendants of the language (Meznagar, Paṛ Ngara, Mín Wān, etc.)

        The language also has two "sister" languages, Old Sirtki (with a phonology inspired on Ubyx) and Makshna (the "white sheep" of the family). In turn, all three descend from the language spoken by star travellers, unknowingly recolonising Earth 10 million years after humans were locally extinct.

        The major inspirations for the phonology were Kaingang (from where I got this idea of removing the nasal series), Sanskrit (the retroflex series) and Quechua (uvular series and 3 basic vowels system). I'm currently re-working the morphology, trying to implement a fusional version of case stacking alongside marked accusative. Easier said than done.

    • Oh, I've never heard about this conlang. Is it yours?

      • Yup, it's mine. Sorry for not clarifying. It's a 10yo or so project, part of a rather large language family, but still incomplete.

  • I'm going on 160+ days on Duolingo relearning tlhIngan Hol. Soon I'm going to have to start watching the movies and see if I can keep up at all.

9 comments