Grammar and Sound

[Tesar Eshne]

When making conlangs that are supposed to sound unconnected to real world languages, I have found that the easiest thing to do is to have a grammar based on one source and a sound based on another, or made up entirely.

So Pilael has a grammar that's heavily influenced by Latin, but a sound that's much more harsh and guttural. The result is that it doesn't sound Romantic.

Do any of you pull your grammar and sound from different places? If you do, from where and what's the result?  

[Homurakitsune]

Are you kidding, I pull crap from everywhere! xD

If I don't, I get bored. 3nodding

Hmm let's see. In Niora I took sound from Japanese and made up the grammar from wherever I thought was fitting, really. It turned out sounding well... to me it sounds like Niora and nothing else. So just do whatever you feel you need to. =)  

[Eccentric Iconoclast]

I've never really stolen the grammar or phonology of any of my languages from any real language. I don't really know why you would -- isn't conlanging supposed to be developing your own original ideas?

That being said, I did take a bit of inspiration for the Aquénandi case system from that of Russian and I gave T'ant'api a phonology that sounds Amerindish. I've also noticed that my Arbitian language sounds very similar to Basque.  

[Tesar Eshne]

Eccentric Iconoclast

I've never really stolen the grammar or phonology of any of my languages from any real language. I don't really know why you would -- isn't conlanging supposed to be developing your own original ideas?

That being said, I did take a bit of inspiration for the Aquénandi case system from that of Russian and I gave T'ant'api a phonology that sounds Amerindish. I've also noticed that my Arbitian language sounds very similar to Basque.

Okay, perhaps I phrased the opening post wrong. "Inspired" is really what I meant. I guess I was just trying to get something down quickly.

What I'm really talking about is what different types of inspiration do you use, and how do you moderate the amount of different concepts you have in common with a language. One example is differing the phonology from the basic grammar.

Pilael is a VSO language, with many elements that I have pulled out of the air, but since I've only really studied romantic languages (And English) in school, I was worried that it would tend to sound romantic. One thing I did was to limit my sound set to something completely unlike the romantic languages, in order to distance myself. I've taken other steps since then also.  

[Song Wei]

Most of my Conlangs are developed from scratch, being taken from the surrounding areas in the world which they are made for.

Like I have a few hundred languages, all following a language tree and what not, all branching off into new languages or dialects depending on where the people break and travel in their worlds (I have about seven worlds I think, maybe nine including moons) and the languages evolve depending on what is being spoken about and how that would affect the sounds and what not.

Mostly the sounds I use are from easy language sounds, like Hawaiian and other languages similar (maybe some Indonesian and Chinese) but all in all I just take what sounds I like and think sound good.

Then words and grammar come with the development process, whatever happens , happens, I think this is the best way for it.  

[Henneth Annun]

If I notice that one of my conlangs is getting too close grammar/phonology wise to a language that I know about, I'll go and change it a bit to make it less similar so that it doesn't start to become even more like that language than it already is.  

[priana musht th der must]

this here is the Internation Phonetic Alphabet
http://www.paulmeier.com/ipa/charts.html
it tells you how to pronounced different sounds, lets you listen to them, and tells you what the international symbol is
this is how I find my sounds.
as for vowels, all real languages have at least three vowels, from as far away from each other on the vowel chart as possible
most of my languages for SVO, accept in questions. The Subject always comes before the Verb and Object in over 90% of the worlds langauges, and the Obecject and the verb reverse roles an equal amount of time  

[Eccentric Iconoclast]

It's not over 90% of the world's languages in which the subject precedes the verb and object; it's close to 90%, but not over. And if you look at the linked chart, it becomes apparent that the tendency isn't even that strong; different constituent orders are dominant in different areas, which is an extremely strong indication that the tendencies seen are much more dependent on areal and familial features than any overarching tendency in languages for the subject to precede the other constituents in the phrase. The Pacific Northwest of North America, for instance, clearly has a strong tendency towards a VSO constituent order, whereas the northeast US shows languages with no predominant order and central Africa is strongly SVO.

It is also necessary to recognize that the linked chart is incomplete and as such displays information disproportionately, in favor of areas that are more likely to have had data inputted to the atlas in the first place.

There is a clear tendency for the subject to precede the object, but the tendency to precede the verb is not nearly so clear-cut or universal.

Also, it is untrue that all real languages have at least three vowels, at least if you mean vowels in the phonemic sense (which I assume you do). Abkhaz seems to exist quite happily with two, as did Ubykh and almost certainly a number of other Caucasian languages. They are also not necessarily "as far away in the vowel chart as possible;" if this were the case, for instance, Nahuatl and many other Amerind languages would not have the inventory of /a e i o/ but /a e i u/, as /u/ is farther from /e/ and /a/ than /o/.  

[Layra-chan]

I never bothered to devise a phonology for nerurav; I've given myself a set of representative characters to work with, but as for what they sound like I don't know and don't particularly care at the moment.

I do know that the grammar is certainly not inspired by any natural or constructed language that I know of, with the lack of word order and completely analogous formation rules for subject, object and verb.

Trying to find inspiration for any part of a language from a single natural language is boring, in my opinion, although I'm firmly biased toward experimental grammars. A more interesting source of grammar would be esoteric programming languages. While the more despotic ones are fairly useless as languages, and the simple translators are mostly orthographic tricks, there are some interesting ideas, like the funges and the functional languages, off of which the recursive modifier system of nerurav is partially inspired.  

[priana musht th der must]

i use the parameters of language development/uinversal grammar.
languages that are SVO tend to have their adjectives come after the noun. english is reversed because english started off as an SOV language, but while it was changing, the printing press was invented so the adjectives stayed at the beginning.
there are also hierarchies of language.
i took a class on all of this  

[The Archer12]

priana musht th der must

this here is the Internation Phonetic Alphabet
http://www.paulmeier.com/ipa/charts.html
it tells you how to pronounced different sounds, lets you listen to them, and tells you what the international symbol is
this is how I find my sounds.
as for vowels, all real languages have at least three vowels, from as far away from each other on the vowel chart as possible
most of my languages for SVO, accept in questions. The Subject always comes before the Verb and Object in over 90% of the worlds langauges, and the Obecject and the verb reverse roles an equal amount of time

Now THIS is cool!! Thanks for posting that!!! mrgreen  

[Lokaagali]

everywhere, but i use the nominative-accusative as opposed to ergative-absolutive, because i don't speak any ergative-absolutive languages to understand it entirely.
i usually use subject-verb-object, because i'm used to it, but over 90% of the worlds' langauges start with subject.