this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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what’s your favorite constructed language? any of you created your own? (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
submitted 2 months ago by drbollocks@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
29 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

i love the idea of creating conlangs. i’ve experimented with the idea of them in years past but have never done anything with them, let alone created one.

i did create some toki pona-based ones as they consist of few words (~100) but i want to create ones that aren’t just based off toki pona.

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[–] lemon@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 months ago

https://minilanguage.com/ is an interesting one to look at. There are exactly 1000 words in the total vocabulary. That’s Mini Mundo though. A second, smaller variant also exists: Mini Kore, with 100 words.

I started learning it too soon after learning Toki Pona and lost steam. But I agree with the design principles. They stem from the observation that Toki Pona, as fun as it is, is just too damn ambiguous for anything non-superficial. All too often speakers need to clarify what they said by switching to a natural language. Even my own Toki notes become indecipherable after a few days.

Toki Pona: fun, therapeutic mental exercise, made even better with sitelen pona. Feels like writing poetry. Never meant to be a useful language. Easy to learn, hard to use.

Mini: useful as a language for general purpose communication. Small, primarily latinate vocabulary. Harder to learn, easier to use.

[–] mholiv@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

+1 for Toki Pona!

It’s a very small language (< 200 words) that forces you to think about how you think. It’s not hard to learn and quite wholesome. The name means “The Language of Good”

Also there is an amazing art scene around the language. Being able to listen to the music keeps me going.

https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqCH2JzaHCjZ84qxUQXrwAjpKQEowGsn9

[–] lemon@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 months ago

Kalama Sin podcast is a good one for listening comprehension. No new episodes since July though

[–] Anissem@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

North Jersey Gutter Mouth

[–] tkk13909@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 months ago (3 children)

Esperanto!

[–] deathbird@mander.xyz 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Esperanto ne estas perfekta, sed ĝi estas la plu populara planlingvo en tuta la mondo, kaj ĝi estas sufiĉe bona.

[–] Karl@programming.dev 1 points 4 weeks ago

Was that Esperanto? what did you say?

[–] sunbrrnslapper@lemmy.world 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I lost several hours to Esperanto on Friday: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

[–] lordnikon@lemmy.world 1 points 2 months ago

Martin knew he should learn Esperanto to cast magic spells.

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Esparanto is such a garbage language. Instead of developing an easy to speak and efficient language, the creators wasted the opportunity and made Spanish 2.

[–] tkk13909@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

How exactly is Esperanto "Spanish 2"? I'm genuinely not sure how you could come to that conclusion

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

Have you read Esparanto?

The Spanish word for hope is "Esparanza" by the way.

[–] tkk13909@sopuli.xyz 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I've been speaking Esperanto for three years so yes. Esperanza, or a word like it, also happens to be the word for hope in most Romance languages (one of the language families that Dr. L.L. Zamenhof was pulling from so that the vocabulary would be familiar to large groups of people).

If you're gonna come here and say Esperanto sucks because it's too similar to Spanish then give me examples of say, grammar that Zamenhof took from Spanish that doesn't appear in other Romance languages.

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The point of a new universal language is to be extremely easy to learn, short and efficient. Esparanto is very clear in ripping off Spanish. Everything is long winded, inefficient ends with with an A.

[–] tkk13909@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I will admit that Esperanto is long-winded at times but I can't take you seriously when the only example of copying Spanish that you put forward is a word that is shared across languages. I'm willing to bet that you don't even know what the 'a' suffix means in Esperanto seeing as you think every word ends with it.

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The word to be in Esparanto is "estas"

The you form of "to be" in Spanish is "estas".

You can paste any Esparanto sentence and it will 100% sound Spanish to someone who does not know Esparanto.

Do you know any Spanish?

[–] tkk13909@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 months ago (2 children)
  1. The Esperanto word for "to be" is "esti". "Estas" means "is". The Spanish equivalent would be "ser" which is not even close to the same word.
  2. Just because Esperanto shares some vocabulary and phonemes with Spanish doesn't make it a knockoff. I guarantee if you speak Portuguese to an English person they'll think it sounds like Spanish but that doesn't make Portuguese a copy of Spanish.
  3. I don't speak Spanish but I live around enough Spanish-speakers, and speak enough Brazilian Portuguese that I can tell the difference between Spanish and a conlang made by a Polish man.
[–] digitalpeasant@chinese.lol 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

To be fair, "estar" in Spanish means "to be (something-ing, something-ed, someplace, or in a temporary state)". That said, estas (Esperanto) and estás (Spanish) are not homophones because their stress patterns are different.

Also, I don't think Spanish has a one-word translation for "esperanto". "Esperanza" means "hope" in Spanish, not "one who hopes". I think "esperador" means "one who waits", "esperanzado" means "hopeful", and "esperanzador" means "encouraging".

As for me, I know enough Spanish that Esperanto doesn't sound like Spanish to me (though I'm not a native speaker). The sounds of Esperanto and Spanish are kind of similar, but not identical. For example, the voiced stops in Spanish are fricatives a lot of the time, and /j/ can become a fricative in Spanish but not Esperanto. Also, the stress in Esperanto is completely regular and the stress in Spanish isn't.

I'm actually kind of curious how much Spanish geneva_convenience knows. Maybe I've actually underestimated them, just because they made some spelling errors.

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I know enough Spanish to understand many words in Esperanto without having learned those words in Esperanto. Guess why.

[–] digitalpeasant@chinese.lol 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think it's because Esperanto uses many word roots which have a similar shape among various descendants of Latin, so people who speak those languages have an easier time intuitively understanding those words. I think this occurs for some Germanic and Slavic languages as well.

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 0 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

For sure, but the intonation is very Spanish. Comparing it to other Latin languages it also appears to have most words based in Spanish or straight up ripped from Spanish.

Esparanto is not so much a new language as it is ripping words out of other languages. But most of it is Spanish.

What bothers me most is that it is not an efficient or easy language to learn for people who do not already speak a Latin langage. Might as well teach them English at that point.

[–] digitalpeasant@chinese.lol 0 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I'm going to be honest. I think every sentence in this post is provably wrong, and I know this because I actually looked up the intonation patterns of Esperanto and Spanish, compared it to other Romance languages, etc.

However, I want to believe you dislike Esperanto because its words and word roots basically all come from European languages. That is a valid reason to dislike Esperanto, and I don't think you're wrong for disliking Esperanto.

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I will die on this hill: Esperanto is a Spanish ripoff.

If it was French the word would be akin to "Espoiro" (Espoir is hope in French)

The only way I can be wrong is if it is actually Italian because my Italian is worse than my Spanish which is already bad.

Esperanto is primarily Spanish words with one vowel changed.

[–] digitalpeasant@chinese.lol 1 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

If it was French the word would be akin to “Espoiro” (Espoir is hope in French)

To be fair, many words in Esperanto can be linked to Spanish, such as the word "esperi". However, you could argue "esperi" is influenced by the French verb "espérer" (to hope).

The only way I can be wrong is if it is actually Italian because my Italian is worse than my Spanish which is already bad.

Italian definitely has a stronger influence on the language than Spanish, looking by word roots. However, French actually has an even stronger influence on the language by that metric.

I think the "Spanish" influence you are seeing is primarily from terms which both Spanish and Esperanto borrowed from other languages, especially Latin. It could also be from terms derived from French which you are mistaking for terms derived from Spanish due to the fact they are pronounced with 5 vowels, despite the fact that the relevant words don't actually exist in Spanish.

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Wait you are right. It is even worse. Both the words mean are

My benchmark for Spanish is whether someone can sing the word "Volare" after it without the sentence feeling out of place. https://youtu.be/qmbx4_TQbkA

[–] tkk13909@sopuli.xyz 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Thanks for wasting my time with your clueless ramblings about a topic you have no idea about. I think I'm gonna end this argument here.

[–] geneva_convenience@lemmy.ml -1 points 2 months ago

Take the L and leave.

[–] xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 2 months ago (1 children)

I think Globasa is one of the best attempts at creating an international language without bias toward any natural language family (looking at you Esperanto).

[–] dessalines@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 months ago

If I were to learn another besides toki pona, I'd def go with this one. The way globasa adds words makes it much more international than nearly every other conlang.