Thursday, October 2, 2008

I don't know anything about linguistics

But I like to think about it anyways.

One of the ways in which I've noticed that languages differ is in how 'interlocked' their utterances are. For example, if you take the English sentence "My car is red.", and interchange 'red' with any other adjective, without changing the rest sentence. However, if you wanted to change 'car' to something plural, 'are' would have to become 'is'.

However, in Swedish (you know, for instance) "My car is red." would be "Min bil är röd." and if you wanted to change 'bil' to 'hus', an neutral-gender word, you would have to change 'röd' to 'rött' and 'min' to 'mitt'. To change 'bil' to a something plural, you would use 'röda' and 'Mina'.

There are also other good examples, like noun cases. One of the hardest features of icelandic is that it possesses a complex system of noun declination for many cases that don't exist in English, like the dative and ablative.

So, I've been thinking that it might be a good idea to just fuck all this Esperanto shit where we try to create new languages that are as simple as possible. Why not just create a language of complete and utter jaw-dropping complexity? So, that's what I'm going to do.

Of course, every good language needs a name, so it will be called Rezignanto, which means "one who gives up" in Esperanto. You're welcome to help out!

I think that the eventual goal should be that, given an utterance, one must change nearly every syllable in the utterance to swap a single morpheme.

Some ideas:
• complex vowel and consonant harmony rules -- like in Finnish or Turkish
• a baffling variety of cases -- we should integrate at least every one found at the bottom of this • wikipedia article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_case)
• rampant agglutination
• at least a dozen tones
• 5 completely arbitrary genders
• nouns declined for number, case, definiteness, gender
• number declinations include one, one or more, zero, zero or more, and more than one
• variations of the relative speed of syllables can change the meaning of an utterance

Do you have any other ideas for good language features that would make it wor... better?

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