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18:00
and then some fundamental things like parts of speech and approximate idea behind the grammar (SVO? verb-end? etc)
@DLosc Let's just use y to represent that sound
I'm a programmer, not a linguist
we should probably agree on some things to ban
like gendered nouns because why would we do that
18:00
Idk, I kinda like gendered nouns
@Wezl-acautionarytale that's probably a good idea
@RedwolfPrograms If they're regular and it doesn't presume all humans are male
qu is 2 letters, compress it to ψ
eh. i suppose we could; i just think it's unnecessary complication
@hyper-neutrino do you mean grammatical gender, or literally all nouns referring to gender?
18:01
grammatical gender like french
@RedwolfPrograms I'm fine with just not having the sound at all. A four-vowel system with a o i u sounds interesting
i presume we are sticking to english phonetics
Ooh, I love aiou, I've tried using that in a conlang it was fun
I just want to make sure we have German's y sound (rounded u close to the front of the mouth with the toungue high up)
@hyper-neutrino jelly phonetics, because jelly totally has phonetics :P
18:02
@hyper-neutrino I'd hope so
@hyper-neutrino We could have a system analagous to genders, but not actually call them genders
base it on something else
@pxeger "person metaclasses"
Maybe aiouy with the german y like pxeger wants could work
@RedwolfPrograms It's a bit odd, but I'm down for that
For consonants, maybe just using english's without one of the ths and /x/ would work
18:03
@pxeger Animacy classes would be one possibility
Are we going to do digraphs or try to map every consonant to a single letter?
Can we disambiguate n and m though?
I like ancient greek phonetics
I kind of like how sh, th, etc. look, although that might be a bit of a controversial opinion idk
And do we really need q?
18:04
Can we repurpose q to be ng?
for writing system, I think Hangul is really cool but I don't know how to use it or anything so it's just an idea
make the language purely out of emoji
ng doesn't really look how it sounds, so using q for it seems like a possibly good idea
@Wezl-acautionarytale that would be pretty cool; i wouldn't be against using smth like hangul or kana or whatever
@RedwolfPrograms Not a big fan of that one TBH. Q is always some kind of a stop in my mind
18:05
@Wezl-acautionarytale If we use a non-ascii writing system, we should definitely have a standardized way to transcibe it to ASCII
But I wouldn't be against it
@DLosc We could just have it as another k, for aesthetic purposes, I guess
What about grammar? Are we going to try to be minimal like toki pona, or use endings like a romance language, or something in between?
restriction: all of the language development has to happen during the day using EST so I don't miss anything :P
Maybe we could each throw out a couple of grammar features we'd really like to play with, and (as long as there aren't any contradictions) we could try to fit them all together
I like having endings like caminar, camino, caminamos, etc., but when you add in past and future and all that sort of stuff I think the number of endings gets excessive
18:08
True
Ooh...what about endings purely for the subject, and we do tense with words like will?
Like if fut was for the future and pas for the past, pas camino would be "I walked", and fut caminamos would be "we will walk"
So what is the alphabet for this language?
@RedwolfPrograms Definitely an option. IIRC most verbs in Basque consist of two words, each of which inflects for different things.
18:09
words could be structured like [adjectives][noun][verbs]
kinda like german
@grandBagel Someone brought up using hangul, so possibly that but with a standardized ascii transcription
@RedwolfPrograms nee caminos is I am walking
words can be made shorter by adding accents to the first syllable for tenses
Will we do adjectives before or after nouns?
18:11
hmmm
@RedwolfPrograms I'm in favor of ASCII, just because it's a system we can all read. Hangul is cool, but I don't know it and so it's going to take me a long time to decipher anything written in it.
yeah that makes sense
@RedwolfPrograms before
purple moving house would be [purple][house][is moving]
eh?
so that would be [tense word] [adjectives][noun][verbs]
@GingerIndustries something like Çamino?
18:12
I don't know hangul either, I see it as a bit of a learning opportunity though as long as we're all willing to provide the ASCII transcriptions too until we're all pretty familiar with both
@grandBagel yes
accents for the first letter for tenses
in speaking you would pronounce that like a word
@GingerIndustries But does that restrict every noun to a single adjective? Lots of times you need zero or two adjectives
so Çamino would be pronounced "nee camino" like above
@RedwolfPrograms no, multiple. typo
How about we start with an ASCII/vaguely IPA orthography, and then anybody who wants to make an orthography in a different writing system can do so?
2
Sure
That sounds good
18:14
alr
it just needs accent mark capabilities
Let's brainstorm more grammar stuff
what tenses are there going to be?
How should direct/indirect objects be handled
@RedwolfPrograms ???
In the grammar
18:15
ḿlky heesply ploo is monkey happily played
For tenses, I think it'd be cool if we included some of the less common ones
past tense: pas
present: pes
future: fue
@GingerIndustries I'm open to anything, but my thought would be either past/present/future or past/non-past. Keep it simple.
@RedwolfPrograms Or that, lol
each one needs a corresponding accent mark
Yeah we should either go minimal or add a whole bunch of cool ones lol
@GingerIndustries Not a fan of accent marks
18:16
@RedwolfPrograms cool ones! This is a golfing language
We should keep this ASCII for now IMO
@RedwolfPrograms just in writing
@GingerIndustries Wait what
I thought we were doing a normal conlang
in speaking they're pronounced as word
With no conciseness as a goal
18:17
@RedwolfPrograms I'm kidding, somewhat
4 mins ago, by Ginger Industries
so Çamino would be pronounced "nee camino" like above
like that
How is "nee" pronounced?
Wasn't our vowel list aiouy?
"nee" was an example one I think
So ni
pas/ni/fui maybe?
18:18
(obligatory Monty Python joke :P)
@RedwolfPrograms I suggested pas, pes, and fu for tense pronunciations
So is this like Toki Pona, where every verb always has a particle?
nvm i like ni better then pes
Even in present tense?
present can be assumed to be nothing
18:19
Maybe no particle for present
Because I would personally say no particle in present
so no accent = present
unless verbs are just nouns, in which case we'd need it
I suggest tespas, tespres, tesfut
18:19
@pxeger Okay with me
@RedwolfPrograms That'd get tedious fast
@grandBagel too much syllable
is anyone writing this down
We have the transcript :p
can we have noun cases? What i liked most about German was being able to omit prepositions
4
18:20
so far (i think):
* tenses: pas, ni, fu (ni optional)
* word structure: [tense word] [adjectives][noun][verbs]
So pas, ni, fu for the tenses (ni being optional)?
2
@RedwolfPrograms English has will be going to, so...
pres, curr, furr
@RedwolfPrograms Sounds good to me
@RedwolfPrograms +1
18:20
@pxeger can you elaborate what this means?
Every time you use a noun, it (or its determiner) gets a marker of what case it's in
@RedwolfPrograms +1
I'm reserving the word o as the noun for cat
The case encodes some information about that noun's grammatical purpose in the sentence
to simplify things I will use "kuy" as an example noun, "fe" as an adjective, and "go" as a verb
18:21
and i as plural cats
@Wezl-acautionarytale cto?
@Wezl-acautionarytale scto?
so example word (pronunciation): "ni fekuygo"
@RedwolfPrograms If we go with this, what's u gonna be? We might not want it to be too similar to y
@GingerIndustries I'm not a fan of this syntheticity
can't we keep sentences as multiple words?
@pxeger Isn't it just the back rounded vowel in "hoot"?
spelling: ̩fekuygo or just "fekuygo"
@pxeger yes, they are
I'm just using example words to illustrate grammar
18:24
@DLosc that's not a back vowel in my dialect of english, but yeah sure
actually f̱ is a better accent for present tense
@GingerIndustries What is the purpose of the verb in the word then?
I prefer no accents
@pxeger Oh, whoops X^D
What's your pronunciation of it?
@pxeger the verb is still a verb, the tense just changes the tense of it
i.e. walking vs walked
18:25
@GingerIndustries accents need to represent some kind of pronunciation difference
idea: no verb conjugations
@pxeger but seperate words in spelling is clunky
@GingerIndustries ok but "fekuygo" contains a verb, which is still pretty synthetic
synthetic meaning what?
all these words are going over my head
18:26
I prefer ni fe-kuy go
instead of shorter function words making a sentence, you combine little bits of inflection to make one long word with the meaning of a sentence
@hyper-neutrino Like particles for the subject too?
@grandBagel that's good but I still don't like the tense being its own word
remind me what the difference between synthetic and the other thing is again
Like instead of "I went to the shop", "shop[-]go[-]pasttensemarker[-]I"
18:27
@RedwolfPrograms yes :P
@GingerIndustries nife-kuy go
@pxeger that was what I was thinking
but I really don't like that
@hyper-neutrino I'd be fine with that too
18:27
I'm ok with synthesising (?) the adjectives and the nouns into single words, but can we please separate verbs
@grandBagel I want the accent marks because it's simpler to write that way
@hyper-neutrino Synthetic = putting morphemes together into bigger words; analytic = keeping morphemes as separate words (very roughly)
@pxeger seperate verbs are yes
@DLosc just middle, not back
18:28
okay I prefer analytic too
fe-kuy ni go
so now we're at [adjectives]-[noun] [verbs]
this setup does allow multiple verbs, which is interesting
I'm fine with synthesizing adjectives and nouns fully, although I'm also fine with going fully analytic :p
[adjectives]-[noun] [tense] [verbs]
I don't like a-n though
18:29
so now it'd be f̱e-kuy go
I like that
anyway have we decided on the verb ordering
like SVO, verb-last, etc
let's try with multiple adjectives (ri can be an adjective)
f̱eri-kuy go
seems good
@hyper-neutrino Nope, I don't even think there's been much discussion of it
I really don't like this adj-noun thing with the dash
I think the dash is just for explanation here
18:31
@pxeger yup
@hyper-neutrino if we go with noun cases, we don't need one
@pxeger what is that
I really don't like this diacritics thing though
Noun cases sound cool
10 mins ago, by pxeger
Every time you use a noun, it (or its determiner) gets a marker of what case it's in
18:31
@pxeger It removes the need for an extra tense word in writing
Should we allow multiple verbs?
I think we need to have a bit of "session zero"
@pxeger (I never finished this explanation; let me continue:)
To decide on things like diacritics, golfiness, etc.
18:32
so basically, particles for marking if a noun is a subject or object like JP?
@GingerIndustries like the difference between they and them and their I think
@hyper-neutrino Yeah, except not necessarily with particles
interesting
@Wezl-acautionarytale hmmmmm
I'd +1 noun casing
18:32
And they can also mark things like "to <noun>" or "of <noun>"
yes noun casing
Starred it
I'll agree to having tenses not use diacritics if noun cases can use them
diacritics bad
actually that makes more sense
18:33
I'm really against diacritics
then what do we use for cases/tenses?
f̱e-kuy go rao playground with rao being to <noun>
Fully ASCII, or something interesting. Diacritics are boring and hard to type.
1. they're too hard to type, 2. they aren't compatible with all letters because Unicode, 3. they NEED to have some representation in pronunciation, otherwise they're totally stupid
@GingerIndustries small particle function words
* Wezl is learning grammar instead of attending school yay
18:34
@RedwolfPrograms can we keep just the latin alphabet actually?
@pxeger like 2 letters?
For me, the diacritics fall under:
21 mins ago, by DLosc
How about we start with an ASCII/vaguely IPA orthography, and then anybody who wants to make an orthography in a different writing system can do so?
@GingerIndustries single-syllable
@pxeger Yeah, that's what I meant by "full[y] ASCII"
so probably 2 or 3 letters
18:34
+1
@pxeger that sounds okay
@RedwolfPrograms oh ok, I thought you meant GolfScript-style :P
RIP diacritics
@pxeger $%*b}nY^u?
:p
sy!
(I would like "sy" to mean "yes", because Ronaldo)
18:35
@GingerIndustries We can always add in a diacritics-based writing system later on
ASCII does include È and stuff, right?
i may be wrong
We'll just stick with DLosc's suggestion of ASCII until we have the grammar figured out
@GingerIndustries No, just the latin alphabet
@GingerIndustries i think the extended version does
ah
alright, good enough ig
Okay, so should we decide on some basic words for the purposes of examples?
18:36
perhaps diacritics can just be another way to represent particles for tenses/cases
@RedwolfPrograms yes
hmmmmm
@RedwolfPrograms Do we want to decide on consonants first?
@DLosc Yeah probably
well, let's start with hello world
@RedwolfPrograms yes
18:36
I recommend pressing . on your keyboard to edit quickly and interactively
@pxeger wow
I didn't even know that existed
Maybe f̱e-monkey rao playground could mean The monkey went to the playground
I'm in favor of starting with English's consonants, and adding/removing what we don't need
@RedwolfPrograms sounds good
@RedwolfPrograms sounds good
18:37
the github repo is owned by pxeger and the tnb room by redwolf.
I'll make an org, one sec
@RedwolfPrograms first, do we keep qu, give it its own symbol, or drop it?
I'll add some ROs
I suggest folbar for monkey
redwolf is fine as RO because they're a RO for the TNB and this project is connected to the TNB
I added pxeger since they own the repo
Who else?
@GingerIndustries I say drop it. If we need that sound, we can represent it in terms of other letters.
@DLosc okay, that removes q
18:39
also, "Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International"
this is an OK license ig
current alphabet: abcdfghijklmnoprstuvwxyz
Should we have zero, one, or both ths?
I'm a fan of just having an undefined th, and you can pick voiced or unvoiced based on personal preference
maybe we should use whatever license SE already places our content under
@RedwolfPrograms +1
@RedwolfPrograms I vote zero, both because it needs a digraph if we use ASCII and because it's hard to pronounce for speakers of many other languages
18:40
@RedwolfPrograms example?
@RedwolfPrograms honestly personally I'd go zero just because it's hard for almost all non-English-speakers to produce
as in "thought"?
@RedwolfPrograms zero
@GingerIndustries Voiced th is the one in "though", unvoiced is the one in "thick"
th isn't very far from f, do we drop that too?
18:41
We can keep f, that's pretty common I think
@GingerIndustries thi (example word) can be pronounced like thy (voiced, "hard" th) or thigh (unvoiced, "soft" th), and you can just choose which
:60107668 Some people say "with" with a voiced th, I think
the emphasis is a bit different ig
18:42
@DLosc wtf, who doesn't?
o/
do Americans really not do that?
@DLosc ಠ_ಠ
@pxeger It's unvoiced for me
18:42
Lol
how have I never noticed that
i usually say it with an unvoiced th...
depends on how fast you're speaking
pxeger: wtf who doesn't
basically everyone else here: o/
18:43
wait you're right
;-;/
So we probably want to keep all of n, m, t, k, p, b, d, and g, right?
I'd still advocate for only having one of m and n
@RedwolfPrograms n and m sound very similar
(and I'd vote m there)
18:44
I like n a lot more
drop m
@pxeger Imteresting
i vote in favor of keeping n personally
But n/m is almost universal, isn't it?
Why would we drop the distinction when a lot of languages have it?
18:45
@RedwolfPrograms Japanese just has one, IIRC
is there a difference in ease of pronunciation or accessibility between the two?
inp and imt are both hard to pronounce (at least for me)
practically, it's too hard to tell which one you're talking about when you're talking about the letters per se
@hyper-neutrino n requires teeth
let's remove both so there's no ambiguity
18:45
How about we keep both, but make sure not to make it ambiguous in any situations
I vote for no n
E.g., no words where n/m is the only thing distinguishing them
@Wezl-acautionarytale imt is harder for me
I vote for keeping both
We can just define good phonotactics
star for both
6
star for n
star for m
alternatively, just have one letter that changes its pronunciation between the two depending on context /s
we'll vote
I vote for either keeping both, or having one nasal sound that can be pronounced either way depending on context
(not /s)
looks like it's both
18:47
I think we have decided lol
the thing is the n/m distinction only ever matters when i am trying to spell something out to someone lol
because "en" and "em" sound similiar
i vote for drop n
so apparently n is the new glare
but i don't think i've ever run into issues with words themselves
we can create a different (idk what it's called) way to say the alphabet
18:48
Let's make the pronounciation of the letters in the alphabet song of n and m different. E.g., in and om or something
@hyper-neutrino tbh this sounds cool
i likey
where n is for example annie and m is for example emily
@RedwolfPrograms Mike and November
18:48
@RedwolfPrograms that's an elegant solution
i'd like vowels and consonants to have consistent pronunciation
so we don't have stupid things like
Narch and Movember
through tough thorough thought
^ lol
So we're keeping both nasals, any objection to a voicedness distinction for plosives?
read is pronounced like lead, and read is pronounced like lead, but read and lead aren't the same, and read and lead aren't the same
18:49
@RedwolfPrograms We can try to keep them unambiguous in the phonotactics/vocabulary either way
@hyper-neutrino Yeah, a close correspondence between spelling and pronunciation is a very good thing
"Mnemonic" and "Myrrh"
read/lead/read/lead
So, on to approximants
18:50
we're removing short e right?
And fricatives
just use smth like hangul/kana that's literally just writing out the pronunciation :P
remember that crazy day when TNB created a language because they could
@Wezl-acautionarytale Our vowels were aiouy IIRC
@RedwolfPrograms f, v, s, l, r, and arguably w and y are English's approximants and fricatives
18:51
but we can use an english-like alphabet/ascii to make it easier ig
w NO W is NO W bad
it's literally the first letter of your name
@Wezl-acautionarytale ah yes, ezl
@pxeger ninja'd
it NO W must NO W be NO W removed
18:52
Hang on, why are we removing e and x? My name has been Thanos-snapped :(
LOL
that's half of my irl name :sadge:
I'm actually VVEZL
let's remove l because it looks like I
which now?
Imao
@pxeger Don't forget th (removed already), sh, y, j, s in measure, ch, x in loch, and some others
18:54
^
@pxeger please let me know your github usernames to get an invite
5
English is fricative-rich
We should definitely keep s, f, and v IMO
let's remove A because some people use it to write bad things
@RedwolfPrograms ah, I was only going down the alphabet and forgot about all other sounds lol
18:54
@RedwolfPrograms Agreed
Probably sh too
and j is two sounds, a plosive and a fricative
I like sh!
Same, I was suggesting keeping it
We probably don't need ch since it's ambiguous with loch's ch, to tsh will probably work for that sound
What about l?
I could see l and y being where it starts to get controversial
2 mins ago, by Wezl - a cautionary tale
let's remove l because it looks like I
18:56
(We'd have to change y to j since y's a vowel now)
That might be reason enough to discard the y consonant entirely, onions?
Okay onion (oh-nee-own or oh-nyohn) definitely needs to be the conlang's word for opinion :p
I'd be ok with that, but I think j shouldn't be the same as dzh either so we might as well remove it
@RedwolfPrograms nobody will get the reference except us
i like it
18:57
Yeah, any opposition to removing j and the y consonant?
thoughts on removing p so we have a reason to use onion for opinion?
@RedwolfPrograms +1
p is the best letter in the alphabet
@GingerIndustries That makes our plosives kinda asymmetrical
so definitely not
18:58
I am now Z
@RedwolfPrograms Fine with me.
Okay, what fricatives/approximants did we have left?
Are we removing l then? I'd vote no personally, but I don't feel that strongly
We need to get rid of at least one of l, w, r
18:59
yes remove everything except aiouyz
Gngr Ndustrs
that's me
Ooh, forgot z
Duster of the N
Should we distinguish between s and z?
Another thought is that i and u could be pronounced as semivowels in some contexts, like in Latin and (sort of) Greek. If we want to keep those sounds.

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