The 7th Speedlang Challenge was held from October 11 to October 25, 2020.
The phonology had to include pitch accent and make some distinction in vowels other than frontness, height, and roundedness, that wasn’t just orthogonal to the other features. The grammar had to include converbs, differential object marking, and ablaut or apophony.
There was also an additional option, which I called the Diachronics DLC. If you chose this option, you could pick two other other requirements to ditch, but had to do three additional things related to historical development: include an influx of loanwords and discuss nativization, show some sort of grammatical development similar to Jespersen’s cycle, and add a section on the historical development of the language.
You can read the full requirements here.
- Romẹ̀pkọ by Tubendo: A conlang whose phonology features a rising/falling pitch distinction and asymmetrical oral/nasal vowels. There are four types of converb, inanimate objects are marked differently than animates, and there’s non-productive apophony to mark some plurals and verb forms. In addition, Tubendo completed the diachronics add-in, without taking the optional opt-out for the other requirements!
- Elashi by Formor: Formor focused on the diachronics for this one, creating a Semitic language set in modern-day Cyprus and even designing a Greek-script orthography to write it down.
- Lagá a.k.a. lang16 by Mareck: Number 16 in the marecklang series, and her third speed-lang submission, Lagá has an unofficial motif of five. In the spirit, here are five examples: five vowels (including three oral and two nasal), five light verbs which undergo apophony, five possible converb forms, five determiners and five pronouns.
- Taho by MatzahDog: Taho has phonemic length on several vowels and a lexical pitch accent system with two different sets of contours depending on the length of the root. The language has perfective and imperfective copulas and animate objects get raised to before the verb.
- Yajéé by Ratsawn: The only submission from off of Discord…glad I ran it multiplatform this time! Ratsawn documented their language’s history including the development of converbs and the replacement of the original negator by an erstwhile intensifier.
- Masnēlíkas by Kilenc: Kilenc submitted a gorgeously formatted sketch of Masnēlíkas, a ‘precategorical’ language which has a pitch accent system where stressed syllables get assigned leftward-spreading tone melodies, animacy-based differential object marking, and a base-eight number system.
- Kàama by Priscianic: Priscianic submitted a sketch for the language Kàama, which shows consonant gradation, movement of definite patients, and a very cool verb system. At the end of their documentation, they show some hints to suggest they’re plotting a con-syntax paper, which I’m very excited to read!