Yeah you got that

@WavesWashSands where do you study though

In Hong Kong, why?

Curiosity (and I am not a 🐈)

HAKI?

*HKU?

Heh, yeah

Well, @WiccanKarnak, are you excited for 2018? You've only got like 4 hours to go

Yeah all pumped up with application stuff to do

:)

I'll be here to shout "happy new year"

(since it will be 1:30 in my time, I think)

I will try to too

Oh ok

T minus 13min before new year here ><

12min as I posted this

HAPPY NEW YEAR @WavesWashSands !

Thanks Zach :D

Happy New Year

He's got ~30 minutes, and I've still got about 11 hours to go

Currently we have 19 species of ĥâtŝ, one hat more and there will be a lot of hats more.

There's a hat if you do something today

... and now you got it (it has something to do with starts in the chat ;-)

@WiccanKarnak, HAPPY NEW YEAR!

I've already got one form The Nineteenth Byte

A happy new year to y'all (although it is a little early right now here.

Same here, I've got 10.5 hours to go

Just on the leaderboard: A jump from 191 ĥâtŝ to 296 ĥâtŝ. Congratulations to the community!

I prefer háček over circumflex, even though circumflex ĥâtŝ look more like hats then háček ȟǎťš

And hat is IN háček: / ha:t ... /

Well. the circumflex is THE HAT, at least in TeX $\hat{H}\hat{A}\hat{T}$

I know, but I don't CARON bit, because the HATšek looks like an upsidedown hat

(I just wanted to say t-HAT for the puns)

:-)

How much longer do you have until 2018?

What's a worldbuilding guy doing here?

@AngelPray

@Zacharý Oh, haha, are we rare around these parts? I'm designing a conlang for my world and I needed some help and this naturally seemed like the best place to come to.

People are rare around these parts

How does 2018 fell @WiccanKarnak

So, what do you need help with @AngelPray ?

Thanks everyone and @Zacharý . Happy new year to everyone

It's nice around here, like five minutes of firecrackers

And then silence

@Zacharý It's rather simple, I'm trying to find out if there are any real languages without the verb 'to love'.

I believe New Year mornings are something to cherish rather than the midnights

@AngelPray Define "real", as in natural?

I'm just going to shoot in the dark and say Pirahã, because let's be honest, you don't know what to expect from a language without numbers

@Zacharý Oh right, I should have known I would have to use precise linguistic terms, here of all places. Yes I do mean natural.

It's fine, because previously @WiccanKarnak posted a video somewhat on this subject

Why are you wondering if there's a language without the word "to love"

@AngelPray ^

Because I'd like my conlang to be without it. And I'd feel more comfortable doing so if I knew atleast one natural language didn't either. You might think that's silly, but it's the only method I have to try to keep my conlang "plausible".

What's the situation of the conlang?

Is it going to be like Newspeak's situation where language influences thought?

@Zacharý It's going to be the natural language of a civilisation in the context of my fictional world so not really. But the lack of a verb for love does show an important facet of their culture/how the people of the civilisation think.

So, they have the inability to love? Or is it just alexithymia where they are unable to describe it?

Oh, no, they can love and they can describe it. They just don't have a verb for it. So instead of saying something akin to "I love you.", they might say the equivalent of "You are my love."

Oh, then A BUNCH of natural languages probably have that.

But what would that say about their culture? My guess is that they have an emphasis on loving only one person.

The culture is very object/state oriented. Destiny plays a huge part of there culture for example. So the idea of the love of someone having temporality doesn't make sense to them. They wouldn't understand the idea of starting to love someone. Because in their view that person always was "your love". It's just that you didn't know it.

Maybe have a verb to love, but have a separate tense for all-encompassing times, and have the verb be defective and ONLY include that time?

Hmm, that's interesting. It does better help convey their view of love as something unchanging and atemporal. But I'm trying to make it clear that they don't view love as simply something within the mind. They see it more like a property of the person at the recieving end than something within the person who is actively loving. Also I wonder which is more likely to have developed into being a part of the language?

Have it mean the passive of to love?

Thus it would be to be (continuously) loved by

So they'd say something like "I am the one who you are loved by."?

That actually really works...

Hey, it's better than my two conlangs: just Esperanto with modifications, and a creole of French and English. They don't really have backstory behind them, except the former I might make into a programming language.

Here's a random suggestion:

For comedy purposes, make the language OSV (Yoda, this is)

Hahaha, well it puts the object first so it works with the ideological framework I'm going for. Sure, why not then.

That was mainly a joke

He is loved by me => ME - HE - LOVE-LIKE-VERB

THat wouldn't work with the passive voice construction

SVO seems to fit nicely with the passive-voice thing

Couldn't I use declension?

Oh, of course

I was originally thinking it would be similar to latin (and many other languages I'm sure) where word order isn't essential to transmit meaning even though a specific one is more common depending on the sentence structure.

Which would develop in what we see today in Romance languages (that aren't Romanian)

Speaking of romance, would it be strange if there were two "types of love", one for the visceral emotion and the other for communicating appreciation for things. In french for example there is the verb "aimer", which you can use to say you love someone, as in "je t'aime" or for more mundane usages like "j'aime le chocolat". I'd like my language to have a verb for the latter use which cannot be used to express the former.

So basically loving people (and things occasionally, ew) vs. loving things (and people occasionally)

Exactly! Where the latter has a verb associated with it while the former does not. Is that someone that might develop?

Or rather it has a verb, but a verb with only one tense.

"Is that someone that might develop?" I'm having trouble comprehending what you're trying to say there

Well I'm no linguist. What would be condusive to this arrangement occuring? Would two previous languages have to merge for example?

We could say that a usage died out a long time ago, due to a preferred usage of a word within a sentence (i.e., losing the different tense forms except the timeless one for the to be loved by verb)

Which would be caused by the thoughts and culture of the people

That makes sense. In fact now that I can think about it, it's not too unusual to have two different words to express the same basic idea about different classes of thing. The german "essen" and "fressen" for instance. The first meaning "to eat" for (usually) humans, and the second meaning "to eat" but for animals.

Dude, how many languages do you know? The only natural languages speak are English, and some French.

Oh, I'm just bilingual, haha. I speak french and english fluently. But I'm learning to speak german atm.

I tried learning Ancient Greek and German at one point, but I'm too unfocused

Now programming languages on the other hand, are relatively easy to pick up for me. I listed them some time in this chat

Well you've got me beat there. I really only know the rudiments of java.

On a related note, I'm seeing how easy the constructed language Lojban is to pick up, given its nature

Oh, I thought I'd try and learn lojban but I got pretty discouranged when I found out about the weird subtle pronunciation quirks.

Like what?

.

Yeah, forgot about that for a second ^

Oh I can't remember, I watched a youtube video a while ago, maybe it was something about fricative sounds or something?

It does have variant pronunciations: English phonemes should work for all sounds except that glottal stop

So, when is your new year?

In about an hour and a half.

You?

7.5

Any plans? As you've probably noticed by the fact that it's almost midnight for me, and that I'm talking about the subtleties of conlang creation on the internet, I don't.

Just going to watch the ball drop on television and hopefully stay up. Probably reading up on Lojban

So, have you designed a orthography and phonology?

I have some ideas, but nothing concrete yet.

There are some ideas: don't beat Danish with your vowels, and don't beat Ubykh with your consonants.

Haha, I'll keep that in mind.

I'm assuming they're humans?

Mostly human. They've had contact/small amounts of interbreeding with a race of eldritch abominations throughout most of the their history so the population are all technically hybrids.

So maybe you could fool around with small anatomy changes that make different sounds possible/practical? (Namely palatal and uvular taps/flaps and trills)

Yeah, you're right, I'll have to think about that.

That's just an idea I've had, you don't need to. Especially since it'd make your language unpronouncable

I could simply emphisize some more exotic phonemes. So it could still seem sort of alien but still be pronouncable (if a bit difficult for the speakers of most languages).

So like Klingon then?

(Throw the english r in there, it's actually quite rare)

Oh, that's pretty interesting. As for klingon, I think I'll try making my language sound a bit less rough. It's a bit too bloodthirsty for my liking.

Fricatives galore! Bilabial v Labiodental v Dental v Alveolar v Postalveolar ! (Don't, that'd be confusing)

:0 Yeah, don't worry, I'd like to be able to pronounce my own conlang, haha.

My creole has a lateral fricative ... for some reason thought that was a good idea

And seeing as I'm pretty terrible at pronounciation..

I just listened to a pronounciation guide for lateral fricatives on youtube. It's almost like a /ð/ sound like in 'the'.

HEY!

Hmm?

The most common occurrence is in the definite article

Ŀe/Ŀes (imagine that's an L with a stroke)

Good to know it sounds like /ð/

~1hr left for you

So it wasn't intentional? It makes a lot of sense since it's an english - french creole.

No, it was

I just that that was a bad idea, considering it's found in NEITHER language

Happy accident then, that I atleast think they sound very similar (though indeed noticeably different).

And yeah, 1 hour left. I'm surprised I managed to stay up this long.

It has a bunch of random features

Length distinctions, palatal lateral, gemination of /s/

And how I come up with words is Lojban-y honestly, at least for some words:the word for of is dev, pronounced like /d@v/ (@ is schwa)

Yeah, that is pretty strange.

There's also Ð and Þ in the orthography!

It's not designed like a creole, it's supposed to be somewhat understandable by both French and English speakers

Oh right. And the little bit of randomness is there to keep people on their toes, haha?

Can you show me an example sentence?

"Què ðe désir visir oùn phrase qè ést oùn èxãmple?"

Oh, and labialized k in every interrogative word.

"Do you desire(want) to see a phrase that is an example?"

It's mostly based on french though, right?

Not really

Hmm alright. You really went ham on the accents though.

The french words just so happen to be somewhat understandable by English speakers. Visir like vision, désirir like desire

Oh, yeah, that makes sense.

I have a second less insane (and less comprehensible) version: "Kwé vú désir te visir un frase ké ést un éksample?"

My friend is trying to do the same thing with English and Japanese ....

And I'll put the IPA up

/kʷɛ ðə desiʀ visiʀ un fʀasə kɛ est un ɛksɑ~mpl./

Imagine ~ is nasalization, and . is the syllabic diacritic

How long did it take you to make your conlang? And for that matter, does it have a name?

It's mostly an incomplete project I do in spare time, and it's called Frẽnglîch

/fʀæ~ŋli:ʃ/ (~ is nasalization, : is lengthening)

Is there a rule to the length changes? Or do you just have to learn them?

They're infrequent, and they're all notated with the circumflex. The orthography has no exceptions

It's just a complicated orthography: middle dot is a thing, to separate symbols when the " symbol doesn't work.

Like my name would be like this: Zac<middle-dot>hary

Mmm.

/zakhaʀi/

Some concepts are just ad-hoc entirely, Oùndjé for Monday

Well you've got to have a bit of spontaneity, I guess. :)

Yeah, it's just a project I work on in my spare time

Literally Oùn (one) djé (from djéur, meaning day) . Tuesday is Teudjé, like Monday, but withTeu with 2

Oh that's really cool! But shouldn't sunday be Oùndjé and monday be Teudjé, and so on?

Nah, I decided it on that way because Teusday's name... and I start weeks with Monday

Yeah, I guess that makes sense. The whole, sunday is the first day of the week thing, is pretty archaic at this point.

And it ends up looking like Catalan sometimes because elision happens

Like: Ŀ'alphabèt

JOLI NOUVÈL ÃN!!!! (Happy new year)

(Nouvèl like french, and new is the first syllable; and the rest are self-explanatory)

*The french like words, I know the French words are voir and désirer.