pe'el!
Welcome to the first weekly c/conlangs post!
Conlang of the week
This week's conlang of the week is: Klingon! The constructed language devised for the strict warrior aliens of the same name, Klingon was first heard spoken in 1979. Klingon is one of the first conlangs to be widely recognised in popular culture, with there even being groups of people learning and speaking the language.
What do you think of the language Klingon? Does it succeed at its goals? Do you speak some Klingon? Was it what first got you into the wonderful world of constructed languages? Tell us about your thoughts in the thread!
Linguistic feature of the week
Keeping in the theme of Klingon, which was designed to sound extremely alien to the audience, the linguistic feature of the week is any feature not existing in a natural, human language.
Klingon was meant to sound extremely alien. This was mostly achieved by picking features and sounds that were exotic to English speakers. The most alien thing I could find in Klingon is the fact that it uses OVS word order, the rarest of all word orders. Some people say Klingon has not really succeeded at being "alien", because pretty much all features it has exist in some human language.
What cool and interesting "alien" features does your conlang have? Or which features do you think are super cool and would you love to see in a conlang one day? Please share it with us in the comments!
Post of the week
There will be no post of the week this week yet, as all posts so far have been made by us, the moderators. Maybe your post can be here next week?
Happy conlanging everyone and thanks for being apart of the c/conlangs community!
Qapla'!
While I don't consider it "alien" because it's built upon features found in real languages, Tarune's phonemic inventory is really weird in comparison with your typical European language:
No, I'm not forgetting about /m n/ and the likes - Tarune doesn't have phonemic nasal consonants at all. The associated sounds only surface allophonically, for voiced stops "sandwiched" between nasal vowels. Nasalisation is primarily a vowel contrast in the conlang.
Same deal with velars - you get some velar allophones for the palatal and uvular series, like /qi/ and /cu/ being realised as [ke] and [kʊ], but you don't really have a */k g x/ series.
Oh, I've never heard about this conlang. Is it yours?
Yup, it's mine. Sorry for not clarifying. It's a 10yo or so project, part of a rather large language family, but still incomplete.