Speedlang 8: Spring 2021

The 8th Speedlang Challenge took place from March 1, 2021 to March 14, 2021. I hosted it on r/conlangs, the CDN, and a couple other Discord servers.

 

The phonological requirements were to make some sort of length distinction, to include a non-stress, non-tone prosodic feature, and not to distinguish between semivowels. The grammatical requirements were an open pronoun class, marked indefinites, asymmetrical negation, and the use of insubordination. You can read the full requirements here. 

 

I received twenty-one submissions! I think that’s around equal to the sum of all the other speedlang challenges I’ve run. Good work everyone! Here are each of the submissions, roughly in the order that I received them. I’ve set it up so that along with the PDFs I received, there’s a comments page for each submission. Go ahead and ask questions! Let us know what you think!

I’m adding short descriptions as I work through the 425 pages of submissions! Bear with me.

  • Korshallese by Manticr0n: wouldn’t be a mantilang without /h/, but this time it’s suprasegmental. Also check out his pronoun system including ones borrowed from neighboring languages to refer to their speakers!
  • Sahbę by Christian Evans: Chris’s entry doubles as his entry for the Segments phono challenge. One thing that stood out to me was how the cultural associations help determine noun class, like with quenchings and judges.
  • Ŋmolõ by Meadow (dictionary here): Ŋmolõ has a morphology. Ŋmolõ has a verbs. Brave the Americanist phonetic notation to find out that I’m not joking! Okay maybe I am a little.
  • Syb by Awopcxet: Syb shows lots of interesting considerations for register including insubordination for requests and animal names as military titles.
  • Siine’o Tlaňa by Lichen: Lichen satisfied the requirement for suprasegmental features using an unusual glottalization prosody system which he documented using some nice autosegmental diagrams. Try and figure out the meaning of the language name!
  • Bakóy (lang20) by Mareck: a joy to read from the mysterious dedication at the beginning to the talk of piblings and chiblings at the very end.
  • Lxrhuitsb by MatzahDog: this language packs an inspiring amount of information into a single syllable with its unusual morphological patterns.
  • Daluw by Akam Chinjir: Akam cleverly argues his way into compliance with the restriction on semivowels, has some fun with adjectives and syntax, and closes with a coda tying his speedlang Daluw to the Vasi language he constructed for the simultaneous Segments challenge.
  • Tagwoqti by Tim Foster: Tagwoqti shows rounding harmony that affects both consonants and vowels. Check out the dialogue he wrote at the end to show off some of the pronoun uses!
  • Se’mat by Formor: Se’mat (sorry I’m missing the glottal stop in the filename!) is set in this world in NE India and uses the Bengali script. It’s got a small inventory but enough other phonology to make up for it.