Ani Language

Ah ok that makes sense now;)

Cool. Wouldn’t it be “make 3pl machine” though? Or I have that wrong

I recently read (ok, mostly skimmed) a pretty dense book called “Classifiers” by Alexandra Aikhenvald. If I took one thing away, it’s that there are many ways to do classifier systems. I think if it’s fun and makes sense to you, and you can stress test it and it holds up, then it’s probably good!

I think it would also depend on the way plant words are constructed. Like if rose is plantClass-blood, then swapping the affix would be confusing. So maybe if someone is called “Rose”, maybe just the grammatical agreement around it changes to animate, but the word itself keeps the plant affix.

Good question. I only know one language with classes (Kunwinjku), and I’ve not heard of people being named after plants. I feel like nicknames based on doing things with plants would be more common. Eg plantClass-bla = log, femaleClass-foot-plantClass-bla, “that woman who stubbed her toe on a log” 🤷

Yes I think you can probably allow wild allophonic variation of vowels, or consonants, but not both, otherwise you reduce your available sounds drastically 😅 Sounds like a good idea with the letters. I’m thinking of just doing little diacritic for voicing like Japanese, since it’s not phonemic.

Interesting:) I was thinking actually to have no voiced/unvoiced distinction in consonants, so people could freely express with that. Eg if “tek” is “tap”, then teg/dek/deg could be onomatopoeic variations depending on the force of tapping. Maybe more free expression in languages is the zeitgeist.

Pentagonal tile pattern on the Ulugbek Madrasa, Samarkand. Photo by the author

I tried coming up with words for a while, and I can’t help thinking in patterns. It’s very hard to believe that “kish” and “kash” for example would not be different apophonic grades of the same word. E.g. blood/bleed, sit/seat in English. With 5 vowels and monosyllabic roots that’s 5 grades per set?

How many options-ish are you thinking for the options created by the vowels? If that makes sense. I’m thinking something similar, but I’m only doing (C)V(C) with 5 vowels, so there are only 5 possibilities there

Nice. It looks like the city that shares my name

Floral tilework on a madrasa in Samarkand

I like the idea of having a limited vocabulary, which forces metaphor. #TokiPona is a little extreme for me, but something like ~500 base words? An approximately (C)V(C) structure with 10 consonants & 5 vowels gives around that number, a neat 10*5*10. I’ve heard the grid shouldn’t be full, but… 🫣

Ani is back, coming to you from the ancient city of Khiva. New version in development.

This new version will be a real #conlang, not only a script. I’m thinking the back story might be a kind of ancient Silk Road auxlang.

Mostly apriori, but of mysterious origin?