Conlang Directory: Experimental

AllNoun

Tom Breton's attempt to make a language with the simplest possible grammar. He's working on a programming language and a variety of HTML based on AllNoun, and claims to have had some success with it so far.

Bogomol

A musical 'quantum language' -- the meaning of each utterance is established by the hearer's recognition of a 'ranking syllable' at the end of the utterance. A brilliant concept, with the transcription technique used to describe the language woven into the history of how this alien bug's language became known to humanity. Definitely check this one out. The web page is even well-designed. [Terry Donnelly]

Eaiea

A language in which all the words are sequences of notes. Last I checked this page had an extensive vocabulary and some morphology information. [Bruce Koestner]

The Elephant's Memory

According to the author, "It's an embryonic system. A kind of pictoral version of Cyberyak/Earth-Minimal" [Kapitano Eglefino]

Láadan

Invented by Suzette Haden Elgin, Láadan reverses some of the gender biases English has. Its vocabulary contains a lot of interesting words which are very hard to explain in English. This and the loglans (TLI Loglan, Lojban, -gua!spi) are probably the best ones to learn if you're interested in experimenting with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (the idea that language affects thought, in one way or another) [Suzette Haden Elgin]

Machi

Whistled by intelligent insects. Influenced by AllNoun. Related ideas to Donnelly's other language, Bogomol. [Terry Donnelly]

Nova

Inspired by a Heinlein story about a very compact language for geniuses. The language has 46 consonants and 10 vowels, and looks fairly difficult to pronounce, but with a resulting larger number of available syllables. It has a really huge number of cases/tenses/aspects/what have you that can be tacked on to a word to indicate just exactly how it relates to the rest of the sentence. (See also Speedtalk) [Brad Coon]

Plan B

A rigorous mathematical look at how to create words and morphology that are simple, efficient, and self-isolating. [Jeff Prothero][archivist: Rick Harrison]

Sevorian

An small, experimental, agglutanitive language, borrowing from Slavic languages, by the same conlanger as Jameld. Very little info available yet. [James Campbell and Alexis Hansen]

Speedtalk

In a short story by the same name, Robert Heinlein describes an invented language with a huge number of different sounds available, so that each sound is a word and users can therefore talk and think very quickly. Sandler comments and expands on the idea on this page. No vocabulary or grammar have been developed. [Ben Sandler, Robert Heinlein]

Tamarian

This page attempts to document the Tamarian langauge which was the subject of a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode entitled "Darmok". The language describes situtations and events by referring to similar situations in myths and history.

Tupik

According to its author, "just a wee-bit useless, especially in commerce". Tupik is the Russian word for "blind alley". [Jon Walters (Ivan)]