Edit: /r/konna

If you're interested, please comment! I'd like to get as many people involved as interested, since this would be a community effort.

Motivation

Lots of collaborative languages have come and gone, but none of them have had a focus on simplicity, regularity, precision, and such. I see all those things as facets of a goal that will unify the language's design, and hopefully extend its lifespan.

A language with goals should be more interesting to work on since there's a clear(er) standard to hold everything to, and there could be meaningful debate on changes.

Proposal

We'd have a subreddit where anyone can propose ideas to be discussed and (hopefully) we'd get a consensus out of that. There'd also be a restricted wiki on the subreddit where the current features are documented so that things stay organized.

Changes may continue indefinitely, as ways to improve the language are discovered, but maybe a formal standard can be updated as things move along.

Core ideas

While I'm open to changing things (I don't think any aspect of the language should be locked down from a compelling reason to change it), here's a tentative base to start from.

Phonology

/ieaou pbtdkg mnŋ ⱱrʀ fvszɕʑxɣ/

<ieaou pbtdkg mnŋ/q wrl fvszcjhx>

Note that velar consonants are in free variation with uvular, /ɕʑx ~ ʃʒh/, and probably other simplifications.

Phonemically, syllables are (C)V, though Cu may be realized as just a consonant "when convenient" (e.g. /nu/ as [n]) and maybe merge into the next syllable (e.g. /tuʃa/ as [tʃa]); this ensures that clusters don't get out of hand, since they can always be broken down.

Syntax

A fully formed sentence is the same as a noun phrase, though incomplete phrases can be used with missing parts inferred from context..

Fully head-final. Parts of speech are determined by the number of phrases a word requires to form a noun phrase, and the number of noun phrases that result; the common ones are noun (0:1) (like u), modifier (1:1) (used like u a, u a a etc.), and conjunction (2:1) (used like u u re, u a u re, u u re u re etc.).

Anything that can't work out within this kind of syntax is done through agglutinative morphology, unless it won't work that way either, in which case we could make an exception in the syntax.

Some words

Here are some essentials:

• u 0:1 it (noun that takes whatever meaning is convenient; useful when ambiguity is desired)
• o 1:2 copy (works as if the prior noun phrase were said twice)
• a 1:1 of (like u, but related to its input)
• e 2:2 swap (works as if the prior two noun phrases were said in reverse)
• i 1:0 is (turns the given noun phrase into an assertion as if it were said at the end of the statement; works kind of like "though")
• ro 2:1 or, either (inclusive)
• re 2:1 and, both
• ri 1:1 not, other than

We should probably use a lot of loanwords at least initially to get things moving; they should be around 3 syllables long, since the smaller words should be reserved for the core.

Name

In the theme of using loanwords initially, I'm thinking a good name would be an amortized variant of "conlang":

"conlang" > konraŋ (konuraŋu) > konra > konna

I think it sounds really nice, but if you have a better idea, feel free to share. This is something that'd be good to sort out first since we need to name the subreddit something. Once that's sorted out I'll make the subreddit and mod people who want to be more active contributors.

Please comment!