Skip to main content

6 Key Phrases for Testing/Creating Your Conlang

He doesn't want dem apples.
I got some cool ideas last week from Tim Ferriss. For any readers who haven't heard of him, look him up - he is an amazing guy who likes to find ways to beat the game, rather than play the game. I was watching this video and I wondered if I could apply any of his ideas to conlanging. Hestarts talking at the 6:35 mark about learning languages and he mentioned that using the following phrases helped one better understand the grammar and mechanics of a language (10:02 mark):

The apple is red.

 It is John's apple.

 I give John the apple.

 We want to give him the apple.

 He gives it to John.

 She gives it to him.

I thought that it makes sense that the reverse must be true as well - that you should be able to use these as a way of testing out/creating the grammar and mechanics of your conlang! I wanted to try this out in a couple of simple ways to illustrate the concept, but we'll just do one per post.

First, let's use the "English as a conlang" concept I used once before.
Phonology: b, d, g, k, l, v, z, th (as in "the"), zh (as in "mirage"), w, ee, ay, aw, o, oo.
Morphology: (VC)CVC(I) (V=vowel C=consonant I=inflection, and parentheses means "optional") for nouns, verbs, and adjectives; (V)V(C) for everything else.
Syntax & grammar: OSV (Yoda syntax). Inflection is -ee: future tense (will be doing), -ay:  plural , -aw: descriptive/adjective, -o: past tense (was doing), -oo: present tense (is doing).
Vocabulary: the = ayth, apple = awbbul, red = wayd, John = Zhawn, give = geev, want = wawn, I = Eeawt, we = eezh, he = eeoz, him = ayoz, she = eeov, her = ayov. Is/be doesn't work in this morphology so I'm changing it to "bawz."

Red the apple is-being. = Waydaw ayth awbbul bawzoo. (add the -aw inflection to make red/wayd an adjective)
John's apple it is-being. = Zhawnaw awbbul eed bawzoo. (Rather than using apostrophe s to connote ownership as in English, John's name becomes an adjective here)
The apple to John I am-giving. = Ayth awbbul od Zhawn Eeawt geevoo. (I becomes Eeawt - pronounced like "yacht")
The apple to him we are-wanting to be-giving. = Ayth awbbul od ayoz eezh wanaw geevay. ("want to give" is shown by the current tense wanting and future tense giving)
It to John he is-giving. = Eed od Zhawn eeoz geevoo.
It to him she is-giving. = Eed od ayoz eeov geevoo.

As I was generating these translations I learned things. For example, I originally made the morphology (C)V(V) for everything else, but realized that with the inflections I noted, the last vowel of every word becomes important. So I reversed it to make the rest of it work. Look out for things like this as you test your conlang rules with these phrases.

And now you're a Four Hour Conlanger.

Labels:

Comments

vidhatanand said…
Learning any language is hard. The main tedium is to learn Vocabulary and Grammar of Conlang. The words are many and to understand the context, meaning should be understood. For that one should have a strong hand over one's Vocabulary.
October 31, 2014 at 6:37 AM
Scott Harrington said…
The apple is red. Hanaszanko conlang. Ta se h-ar- Omenat russsziainen.
June 25, 2026 at 2:47 PM
Anonymous said…
Hanaszanko conlang. 1. The apple is red. H-ar- Umena ta se ruz. 2. It is John's apple. Ta se Seanko h-ar u.menat. 3.I give John the apple. En dunnak Seant h-ar- umen.at. 4. We give it to John. Mi dun.nunk h-il ri Seant. 5. She gives it to him. Száma dunn.a h-il ri Er.
July 14, 2026 at 7:20 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

My Top Six Conlanging Tools in 2025

Hello! I'm still alive. And I'm still conlanging. A brief summary of the decade-long hiatus: we moved from California to Texas at the beginning of 2013, and I was really busy with work and starting a lightsaber group, cosplaying, gaming and other geeky things after the move. I wasn't sure what else I had to add to the conlanging space while all these movies and TV shows with amazing conlangs were dropping left and right. In 2009, we got Avatar with the Na'avi conlang by Paul Frommer. In 2011, we got Game of Thrones with Dothraki fleshed out by the very awesome David Peterson. In 2013 we got Defiance, Syfy's TV series with multiple conlangs by the still very awesome David Peterson. Maybe I wanted to sit back and let the pros teach me for awhile, but I kept playing with conlanging here and there. Whenever I thought about MakeALAng, I couldn't get into the same headspace and come up with anything that I thought would be of broad interest.  In 2022, I was amazed to...
Post a Comment
Read more

How to Make a Conlang out of English

Ok.  My experience has been that some conlangers out there do not like it when your conlang is too... Englishey . This generally means your conlang has basically the same syntax and grammar as English, and the same sounds, too.  There might be a few twists in there - an extra case, some extra phonemes, a different alphabet, but overall, pretty close to English. And really, who can blame them?  For those that take the time to learn and understand linguistics and all the concepts behind it, it looks and feels lazy and uninspired. For the record, I do not encourage conlanging snobbery, I'm just saying that I understand where it comes from. But... if you DON'T know lots of linguistics, and don't care to study all the principles and so forth, what else can you do?  If you know a second language you can mash up the two languages you know.  But aside from that, how else can you build a language? Being the conlang contrarian I am, I think you can transform English...
24 comments
Read more

Orthography - Making Your Own Alphabet

This is Part One, Part Two , Part Three The idea of making up my own alphabet was probably the first thing that attracted me to conlanging. After I learned Bulgarian, I made up a code that was based on Cirth and Bulgarian . I sent my brother the code and would mail him letters using it, just for fun. I started thinking about developing a new alphabet later, when I was playing the Myst games, and I saw the flowing script of D'Ni  (D'Ni is a conlang Cyan/Richard Watson developed for their games and books). First things to consider as you start developing your alphabet - What do you want? a phonetic alphabet a non-phonetic alphabet (like English) or a syllable-based alphabet (meaning one character per syllable, like po, kee, ot, or kel, would be represented by one character/Tibetan is syllabic) or an abjad, which would be a consonant-only-alphabet, and all vowels would be represented by diacritic marks (Hebrew and Arabic are examples) A little research on Omniglot will...
20 comments
Read more