Re: "frankenlang"

From: "Henrik Theiling" <theiling@...>

> Hehe, when I started to learn Mandarin, it occurred to me to have a
> phoneme structure just like that (shang, chang, zhang, xiang, jiang,
> qiang, sang, cang, zang).
I think there's a form of Mandarin (not another Chinese language, Mandarin
itself) that has an extra class of sibilant: for "s/sh" type sounds, an /S/
in addition to /s/, /s`/ and /s\/. I don't think any NW Caucasian languages
except mayby Ubykh have that feature!

> My fourth conlang sketch (S4) seems to meet the criteria of a
> frankenlang: it has some 800 or so consonant phonemes (and I left out
> a retroflex series because I did not like the sounds, also I found
> epiglottals to hard to pronounce).  This is the list of consonant
> phonemes:
How DO you get 800 consonants into an inventory? I tried for a thousand or
something, then gave up for the sake of realism (okay, Tech will have up to
a measly 216 consonants and at least six vowels, but I'm really trying to
have an equally complex grammar and vocabulary!)

[I've gotten past the phonological stage finally; I'm coming up with words
now, a lot just stuff culled from Proto-Semitic and Proto-Indo-European
reconstructions, like one finds in the Appendix to the American Heritage
Dictionary. So there will be a lot of English cognates in my language,
making it not a very secret language at all.]

[phonological data snipped]

> Well....  (Pharyngeal affricates with phonemic length... <shaking
> head>) The numbers give the number of choices for each feature, so one
> can calculate the number of phonemes more quickly.  Morphology is not
> threatening, but it has consonant degradation (we have enough of
> those, right?).
Degradation instead of gradation... I like that. And if UPSID can claim
Arabic and Irish G. have 54 consonants, I say the Conlang community can use
high numbers too.

> The language has three vowels a, i, u and two level tones, high and
> low.
>
> I invented a plain ASCII romanisation that, of course, used long
> sequences of letters...  E.g. the dative ending is
>
>    -gnctlku
How do you pronounce THAT!? [nd`_<_e_w:] or something? ;)

> After I translated the first sentence, 'I think, therefore I am', I
> gave up, because it was impossible to pronounce (which should not
> really be a reason...):
>
>    Akkqhuokqa okkuctea ctjkancdabra okkuctea.
One of the things from my teenage years that led me to create my Frankenlang
was the need to come up with "unpronounceable names" like Dzuqmirshtlakh or
whatever. I really was playing a lot of computer RPGs back and listening to
heavy metal. I wasn't a Satanist or anything (very much a Christian,
somehow); I just like scary, ghoulish things. Still do.

My discovery in adulthood of languages like Tashelhit and Georgian made me
realize I was a lightweight then it came to unpronounceability.

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