Cool and weird things in your conlang

[CarsonDaConlanger]

This is a board to post interesting and unique features in your 'langs. This can be phonology, morphology, syntax, writing system, or whatever else you want!

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I'll start:
My lang, Kasya, has a four way distinction between stops(bilabial and alveolar only, velar only has voiceless and prenasalized.):
Voiceless
Voiced
Prenasalized
Implosive

This gives us
/p b mb ɓ t d nd ɗ k ŋg/

And a three way distinction between fricatives(sibilants only, non sibilants are always voiceless.):
Voiceless
Voiced
Nasalized

This gives us
/f s z z̃ ʂ ȥ ȥ̃ x h/

And it has phonemic nasal vowels.

But it has no phonemic plain nasals(they appear as allophones of prenasalized stops in the coda).

[Reyzadren]

Griuskant is one of the very few trigger conlangs in the world. While not as known as other notable conlangs such as Jutean, Ayeri*, Çuvvaccoçim, and X, can you name more on top of your head?

Incidentally, it is an uncommon trigger conlang with no cases, amongst many other such conlangs with cases. This situation interestingly mirrors the real world: there are many more "trigger" natlangs with cases than those without.


* Note: Carsten Becker recently re-classified Ayeri as nom-acc instead of trigger.

[Khemehekis]

Never heard of Çuvvaccoçim. How old is that conlang?

[DesEsseintes]

Never heard of Çuvvaccoçim. How old is that conlang?

It’s one of Linguifex’s if I’m not mistaken.

[Khemehekis]

Never heard of Çuvvaccoçim. How old is that conlang?

It’s one of Linguifex’s if I’m not mistaken.

Oh! The guy with the Caber logograms! It must be fairly recent then.

[KaiTheHomoSapien]

The only thing that's really weird about Lihmelinyan is the voiceless bidental fricative: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless ... _fricative It's a sound so rare that it's only known to occur in one dialect of one language, Adyghe. In Lihmelinyan it's a dialectal variant of /f/ and it's transcribed <f>. Thus:

féntas "young man, youth" - /'h̪͆ɛn.tas/

I remember making the sound as a kid and not being able to find it on Wikipedia, so I thought maybe I had invented it

[Ahzoh]

My conlang Vrkhazhian has a commissive mood, indicated by the prefix šə-:

sir nušəḥlannudam.
They promised to teach each other [something]

[Fluffy8x]

The list would be too long if I did this for all of my languages, so let's look at the ones that haven't gone completely mad.

Ḋraħýl Rase

No rounded short vowels.

Pivots are influenced by word order:
When two predicates are joined, which of ERG, ABS or ACC occurs first in the first clause becomes the first empty argument of (ABS, ERG, ACC) in the second clause.

Ineffective aspect <tṡalu>:

un-u-tṡalu [ɯnɯˈtɬalɯ]
cry-2-INEFFECTIVE
It's no use crying.

Varta Avina

A voiceless nasal /n̥/.

Not only do non-subject pronouns relative to the subject of the clause they belong to, there are bind pronouns that act as subject pronouns for the non-subject pronouns but are actually the possessors of the real subjects.

Base-14 numerals.

[Birdlang]

For me it’s the phonology
Pigeonese used to have a distinction between labial, alveolar, alveopalatal, dental retroflex, velar, uvular, pharyngeal, epiglottal, and glottal voiced and voiceless stops. And a 16 long and short vowels making there 32 vowels. And it has a distinction between slack voice, creaky voice, nasal, ingressive, and egressive vowels too. Which made there over a hundred vowels.
Now I’ve simplified that to a simpler phonology, with a lot of pronunciation variations, which makes the alphabet bigger, but the actual phoneme set is smaller than the alphabet. That is because the alphabet is based off of allophones.
My Africa based language isolate has a weird vowel system
/i ʉ ɯ e ɵ ɔ̈ æ̰ ə̆ a ɶ/ i û î u e ô o â ê a ȣ yes I used the ou letter.
And the consonants are just as weird
/m n ɴ̥/ m n n̈
/pʷʰ ɓ ʈ ɟ k ɢ/ p b t d k g
/ɸ̺ ṽ s ð̰ ʝ̆ ʁ/ f v s z ꞌ ⱨ
/ʀ ʟ r l h/ ɍ ƚ r l h
/ʎ̝̊/ ⱡ
/ɧ/ *ꜧ
*heng, an h with an eng hook.
Even wierder is Bartalonian which I used 6 way distinction between voiceless, voiceless aspirated, ejective, voiced, voiced aspirated, and implosive stops. And ingressive and egressive nasals and fricatives, which can be voiceless, voiced, or ejective. If you’re wondering how I wrote those letters, I used p pʰ p̓ b bʰ b̓ and n̥ n n̓ for regular stops and nasals, ingressive is marked with a macron above, and egressive with a breve. Fricatives would be s z s̓. Even weirder is that the vowel system is 15 long and short vowels which makes there 30 vowels.
/i y ɨ ʉ ʊ e ɘ ɵ o ɛ ɜ ɞ ɔ a/ i ü ï ů u é ë ö o è e õ ä a which can be long which means it is marked with a macron.
In my minimalist language Ŋehake with 10 consonants and an /i u ə/ i u a vowel system, there is a lot of strange allophony, which is why the alphabet is bigger.
It is as follows
/t c k ts n ŋ j l ɾ ʔ/ written as t p k c n ŋ y l r ɂ
/i u ə/ written as i u a
The stops can fricativize when in between 2 high vowels which gives us s f x h /θ ç x h/
The l can too which means ł /ɬ/
The vowels lower before and/or after velars which gives us e o ā /e o a/
The stops (excluding the glottal stop) can voice in between a high and a low vowel which gives us d b g /d ɟ g/ glottal stop becomes h
In between 2 a or ā stops voice and fricatize which gives us z v ġ ḥ /ð ʝ ɣ ɦ/
The consonants can be geminated, but the geminated tap becomes a trill.

[k1234567890y]

I don't know if this counts, but Lonmai Luna has a proper noun determiner(PND) which is added before proper nouns. For example:

Alen Huan dem on dal
PND Juan see the person(Interlinear)
Juan sees/saw the person(Gloss)

This is not unattested in natlangs though, Chamorro, for example has a similar determiner.

[eldin raigmore]

I don't know if this counts, but Lonmai Luna has a proper noun determiner(PND) which is added before proper nouns. For example:

Alen Huan dem on dal
PND Juan see the person(Interlinear)
Juan sees/saw the person(Gloss)

This is not unattested in natlangs though, Chamorro, for example has a similar determiner.

I like that! I want it for a conlang of mine!

Actually I like everything in this thread so far; it’s just now that I felt moved to comment.


BTW how does this PND interact with vocative markings like English’s preposition “O” or Sumerian’s clitic postposition “-e”?

[k1234567890y]

I don't know if this counts, but Lonmai Luna has a proper noun determiner(PND) which is added before proper nouns. For example:

Alen Huan dem on dal
PND Juan see the person(Interlinear)
Juan sees/saw the person(Gloss)

This is not unattested in natlangs though, Chamorro, for example has a similar determiner.

I like that! I want it for a conlang of mine!

Actually I like everything in this thread so far; it’s just now that I felt moved to comment.


BTW how does this PND interact with vocative markings like English’s preposition “O” or Sumerian’s clitic postposition “-e”?

In Lonmai Luna, the vocative word is yal, which is one of the two postpositions in the language(the other one is the topic marker alo, and except for alo and yal, all adpositions in Lonmai Luna are prepositions), and I guess it does not make a change.

Also, in some colloquial speech, especially those by human beings, the PND is often dropped.

[Znex]

I don't know if this counts, but Lonmai Luna has a proper noun determiner(PND) which is added before proper nouns. For example:

Alen Huan dem on dal
PND Juan see the person(Interlinear)
Juan sees/saw the person(Gloss)

This is not unattested in natlangs though, Chamorro, for example has a similar determiner.

Portuguese and Greek are somewhat similar to this, where they often have definite articles preceding known persons (who are known to both interlocutors in conversation) and proper names, and abstract nouns.

eg.
O Joaõ vê a pessoa.
DEF.M John see.PRS.3SG DEF.F person
ὁ Ἰοάννης ὁρᾷ τὸν ἄνθρωπον.
DEF.M.NOM John.NOM see-PRS.3SG DEF.M.ACC person-ACC
Ο Γίαννης (το) βλέπει τον άνθρωπο.
DEF.M.NOM John.NOM (M.OBJ=)see-PRS.3SG DEF.M.ACC person-ACC

[k1234567890y]

I don't know if this counts, but Lonmai Luna has a proper noun determiner(PND) which is added before proper nouns. For example:

Alen Huan dem on dal
PND Juan see the person(Interlinear)
Juan sees/saw the person(Gloss)

This is not unattested in natlangs though, Chamorro, for example has a similar determiner.

Portuguese and Greek are somewhat similar to this, where they often have definite articles preceding known persons (who are known to both interlocutors in conversation) and proper names, and abstract nouns.

eg.
O Joaõ vê a pessoa.
DEF.M John see.PRS.3SG DEF.F person
ὁ Ἰοάννης ὁρᾷ τὸν ἄνθρωπον.
DEF.M.NOM John.NOM see-PRS.3SG DEF.M.ACC person-ACC
Ο Γίαννης (το) βλέπει τον άνθρωπο.
DEF.M.NOM John.NOM (M.OBJ=)see-PRS.3SG DEF.M.ACC person-ACC

ja...I have heard that in some variants of German dialects, it is also the case.

However, in Lonmai Luna, there's a dedicated definite article for common nouns which is different from the Proper Noun Determiner. In Lonmai Luna, the definite article for common nouns is on, and the Proper Noun Determiner is alen, and generally the uses are not interchangable.