All of my interests are niche, so this SHOULD happen to me all the time. The thing is, I have about 40,000,000 of them, so I usually get inspired to work on something else when I get bored

This seems paradoxical…

Well “final” for the current state of the project, but the project can always change :)

And that’s good; I’ll do that. I’m not sure what I was thinking, lol

I love it; it gives me some nice peace and quiet

Bean bag 😍

Agreed. I’ve thought about this as well as I am a programmer and could very well make something crude to get the job done. My caution, however, isn’t due to the process of deriving words, but to that of gathering accurate derivatives themselves.

Are you using some data source to determine commonality of some phones versus others?

Not at first, nope. That’s what I meant when I said I “eyeballed” it, lol. However, thanks to @lvxferre@mander.xyz, I have access to PHOIBLE’s list of the most common sound segments! As such, I have slightly modified the phonology since posting.

In the same vein, are you taking into account any metrics of difficulty in production?

Yes… if you count me pronouncing it and being like “Eh, no. That’s no good.” As I’ve only ever made artlangs, I wasn’t aware that such a thing existed. Is there a “standard,” or should I try to whip something up?

One objectively-derived thing I AM doing is trying to reduce sliding with sonorants and vowels. The phonotactics shown in the post are, like the phonology, now outdated.

but you could also simply make all stops voiced

That would force listeners to become familiar with distinguishing aspiration, no? The point was to allow for some variability. Sure, that might muddy the waters between speakers from vastly different phonological backgrounds, but it ensure the same language can be understood among those who speak similar languages. Now, that isn’t really the point of a global lingua franca, but the waters would’ve potentially already been muddied with just a voice or aspiration distinction.

have you considered, from an information theoretical perspective, how many phones should be in the inventory?

More than Toki Pona! I have no “objective” way of deciding this, but I think I’ve found a nice amount; it’s not too many, not too few.

And a final note: This may be strange, but I love your syntax, lol. Due to my constant reading of old literature, I, inordinately, love, say, a relative clause—or perhaps an aside—to break up the flow of a sentence.

Definitely! I applied much of my conlanging knowledge when learning German.

Es hat mir sehr geholfen!

If you don’t mind, could you share your onset rules? I’d like to see if I can complicate mine a tiny bit more without sliding down a slippery slope.

I have my list of the most spoken languages in the world, so I was going to pick the top 5–10 (maybe skipping a few here and there to represent a few more language families). Then, for each word, I would try to derive a word that is at least somewhat similar to that from each of those 5–10 languages. It seems ambitious but doable, especially if the vocabulary is kept small

Hm, that’s a good point. The whatever the fuck rhotic is gone 🫡

Never heard of it, I’ll give it a look! I just posted my first update about the project ;)

Spring is kicking my ass. I hate pollen so much

Hm. Interesting Lemmy community idea. I’ve dabbled with Cryptpad before, but I’m just not as comfortable with the tool as I am with the Google Suite or LibreOffice. Though, I’d be happy to learn it if people preferred :)

I’ve never heard of PolyGlot; I’ll look into it.

Please no Google. 🙁

I agree, lol. I dislike it but I’m not opposed to using it if others prefer it.

And yes, I find Esperanto very Eurocentric. Also, I recently conducted a study on Toki Pona as a lingua franca and found that, due to its utter simplicity, it worked very well for multi-national friend groups and communities but was an utter failure in more formal or political areas. I’d like to make something at least somewhat inspired by Toki Pona but more suited for both of these use-cases.

Interesting… I remember David J. Peterson gave a talk at Google a while back, and I believe he came to a very similar conclusion. I’ll definitely be using those!

Oh, and LibreOffice isn’t collaborative (yet); I just love the software, lol. It could be a bit of a hassle to use I suppose, but I’ve done it before for a worldbuilding project.

I recommend !artshare@lemmy.world