This is an example of something in my conlang palliwakiua

Hello folks. Today I put some effort into learning syntax trees*, because I got stuck with my grammar*, although I haven't gone through the more recent theories yet, so the way I illustrated these trees might be wrong or even outdated in fashion. I provided some glosses to help you out with the morphology. Now you might ask, why this specific look? I think my conlang is meant to be an a priori, but inspired from Romanian, Ancient Greek and with a funny twist, some active-stative alignment.

To be more specific, we are talking about an agentive-default fluid-s typology. I believe this means that the agentive case is the default unmarked one, whereas the patientive case is marked. In most cases, Konehian behaves like a Nominative-Accusative language I'd say. Verbs may have the active voice, the passive voice. But also, an antipassive, or at least, that is my goal. I would say that the S argument, the subject of an intransitive clause, can be either agentive or patientive, depending on volition (Sa and Sp). If A is the subject of the transitive clause, also known as an agent, and if P is the object of the transitive clause, the patient, I might just say that Sa = A and Sp = P, when it comes to case morphology. For these reasons, I dropped entirely labels such as NOM, ACC, ERG, ABS and just went with A (agentive case) and P (patientive case).

I believe the antipassive voice is used in Konehian to express a lack of volition, for a transitive clause. I would think that:

1SG.A pour-PRS.ACT.1SG water-DEF-P
"I pour the water."

would turn into:

1SG.P pour-PRET.ANTIP.1SG water-INS
"I spilled with water."

I am not sure 100% if this is how an antipassive may work, but that is what I concluded from my discussions with fellow conlangers. Word order is indeed SVO mostly. Konehian is not afraid of obliques. You can see what happens to "water" above. Also, the active voice is yet again, unmarked I'd say.

Now onto infinitives. I am not sure yet how bare infinitives work in Konehian, but "articular" infinitives are surely funky. They introduce an infinitive clause. In the main clause, these may function as nouns, they can be agents, patients, maybe even oblique. But within their own clause, they function as verbs. They decline for tense, which is really just aspect, voice but not number nor person! How are articular infinitives made? You just add the DEF.ABST article? -or, after the stem. Konehian definiteness works like in Romanian most likely, you do not have a separate determiner or article that precedes the noun, you just glue it to the end of the stem. Metasti (people) becomes metastia (the people). Mozu (zombie) becomes mozur (the zombie). Ruz (war) becomes ruzor (the war). Ditas (station) becomes ditaste (the station). You get it. Different articles, I suppose depending on the gender. Konehian has three genders: abstractive, animate and inanimate. You can see some of these featured in the given glosses. So I suppose that the articular infinitive uses an abstractive definiteness marker. Much like other abstract nouns. This makes sense, after all, if ubrèq means "to liberate", ubrèqor means "the deed of liberating", this deed being an abstract concept.

Funny thing, infinitive clauses, whose verb is the articular infinitive itself, accept both a non-overt subject and an object. The case marker on the articular infinitive is actually the case function of the NP of the infinitive clause, as governed by the matrix verb. In gloss 2.1.1, you can see that Ubrèqor Eyzenlomon functions as the NP, and it is the subject of the main clause. But in 2.1.2 example, ubrèqoron Eyzenlomon is the object of the main clause, as such, the infinitive shows that. In both instances, Eyzenlom is the direct object within the infinitive clause. Hence the -on ending.

In 2.2.1 example, I tested how a reflexive aorist agentive articular infinitive may work (weird naming convention, I know). By reflexive, I think I mostly mean the middle voice, although there is also a mediopassive voice when I tried to use the reflexive as an intransitive (but this happened in indicative verbs). See Romanian "Se moare mult." as such an example. The verb is reflexive and it accepts an adverb, but otherwise it has no object I'd say. Mediopassive in Konehian also happens only for 3SG. Anyways, since the subject is implied in infinitive clauses, and since the reflexive voice implies that the agent is also the patient of the clause, I tend to believe that the object of the clause is simply dropped, as it is equated to the implied subject. The focus is not on Thirinda (see the gloss for 2.2.1.) but on the deed of self-liberation itself. This also might imply that Thirindae (genitive of Thirinda) is not part of the infinitive clause. You could switch the articular reflexive aorist infinitive ubrèdàtor for something like english "cat". You can totally say "Thirinda's cat encouraged people further.", according to Konehian grammar, which could further be simplified to "The cat encouraged people further."

I would say that the aorist form of the infinitive is the least marked of all forms. I am really curious to see how this will work for the antipassive voice. An antipassive infinitive? That sounds fun. I could imagine the object of the infinitive clause to be put into an oblique case, or perhaps entirely dropped, but not so sure what happens to the implied subject. Overall, I am not sure if my reasoning for all of this is proper, nor how naturalistic any of this may seem, but I tried my best, it isn't perfect and there is plenty of work to do, but I was wondering what you think about this, overall. If you got some advice, it is welcomed.

Created an interesting diagram to display the lexical overlap with percentages between 4 variations of the Yherchian language, including the proto-clong (Modern Proto Yherchian), and Northern, Southern, and Standard Yherchian. There are also 651 core vocab shared between the 4 variaties here.

Some other interesting facts are:

• Northern Yherchian: underwent vowel simplification (ü→u, ö→o, ä→a) - Natural phonological drift
• Southern Yherchian: f emerged (485 words) - Phonological innovation
• Southern Yherchian: a more intimate register emerged as a result of reduplication (sasa, gaga, fufu, shosho)
• Standard Yherchian: zh (271 words, most of any variety) - Retention or expansion of palatal fricatives and also hk (332 words, most of any variety) - Complex clusters preserved/expanded
• Standard Yherchian: underwent literary standardisation as a result of the writing system reform from the traditional script Hkan Xiya Txolun. Also reformed more as a Urban koine; a city dialect that absorbed features from migrating populations.

Hi everyone,

About two weeks ago I fell down the rabbit hole of constructed languages. What started as an experiment quickly turned into an obsession, and I've spent most of my free time building an open-source project called Fonora.

The project explores a simple question:

>Could a language designed from first principles be learned quickly enough that two people with no shared native language could communicate after only a short period of study?

Rather than trying to imitate natural languages, I've been experimenting with:

• a small semantic root vocabulary that builds larger concepts through composition
• a regular, highly predictable grammar
• a phonetic writing system based on how sounds are physically produced
• interactive tools including a translator, dictionary, word builder, and learning exercises

The entire project is open source, including the website, translator, language data, and tooling.

I'm not a linguist, and I'm definitely not claiming this is "the future of language." This is simply a research project I've become deeply interested in, and I'd value feedback from people with more experience than I have.

In particular, I'd be curious to learn:

• Does the overall design philosophy make sense?
• Are there obvious linguistic problems I'm overlooking?
• Does the semantic composition system seem intuitive, or does it become too dense?
• If you spend a few minutes exploring the site, what feels confusing or unnecessary?

The project is still evolving, so I'm much more interested in criticism than praise.

https://fonora.org/

Thanks for taking a look.

The exonym for my conlang is "Veilese" and the endonym is "Parallel People's Hand Speak." :)

My main inspiration for the script was SignWriting.

I would like to present you Reconstructor, a web app I have been working on. It is an emulation engine for sound changes in language, and features a puzzle and a sandbox mode.

Puzzle

In the puzzle, you are presented with a series of cognate sets across related (fictional) languages, and have to find out what were the proto forms.

Five different proto languages are available. Words are generated randomly according to their phonotactics, and then transformation rules are sampled from an internal database to produce different daughter languages.

Sandbox

In the sandbox, you can write your own sound transformation rules and apply them to a vocabulary of your choice. This is great for checking some linguistic hypothesis or evolving a conlang.

Rules are written as text, according to a custom format. This is a lot faster than clicking on UI components.

The app comes with an example set of rules simulating the change from Latin to Italian. It's by no means complete but illustrates the process well.

That's it!

I'm the single developer doing this out of a language hobby, and it's free, there's no registration or anything. There definitely is a lot of room for improvement and I would love to hear your feedback!

I've been reading comments about my Word Aligner https://aligner.tinygods.dev app and identified some problems that users experience. So I've made some changes to (hopefully) solve them.

Now:

- added auto-fit. long phrases are automatically shrinked to fit the canvas. the phase is never broken into multiple lines. auto-fit can be disabled in style settings if you prefer old behavior (full manual control).

- the canvas is bigger now and supports zoom (ctrl + scroll on desktop, pinch on mobile)

- added mobile menu to avoid scroll to access controls

- interface layout is reworked

- token separators config is now more visible, also buy default only "|" is a separator

Also some new features:

- style presets with different visual effects

- more fonts and color palettes

- optional custom color selections for each group (from a palette)

- API, MCP and agent skill - you can install it using the guide from https://aligner.tinygods.dev/skill and ask you agent to create alignments.

As always, I'm open to your feedback in any relevant form and will continue to work to improve the app's usability.

Every language uses only a sliver of the syllables its own rules would permit. English could have *blick* or *sprang* and simply doesn't — but it couldn't have *bnick* or *ngat*, because those break its phonotactics. I wanted to see that whole space at once: not the dictionary, but the full set of monosyllables a given rule system allows. And I wanted to reach in and change the rules.

So (with a lot of help — see the bottom) I built **the Monosyllable Space**: a phonotactic enumerator. You hand it a phoneme inventory and a set of constraints, and it generates every legal monosyllable those rules imply — then lets you toggle any rule and watch the count and the contents move in real time. It's currently loaded with an English inventory, because I'm using English as a testbed. I'm poking at what a "perfected" conlang might look like, and the most concrete way in is to take a language everyone knows and start pulling levers.

**What's in it:**

- **Editable onset / nucleus / coda rules** — max cluster lengths, rising/falling sonority with an adjustable minimum distance, the /s/-cluster exception (the thing that lets *sp st sk* violate sonority), and specific gaps you can switch on and off (no /tl dl/, no labial+/w/, no /sr/).

- **An editable sonority scale** — the deep lever. Reorder the hierarchy and every cluster rule recomputes; a language's whole "texture" shifts.

- **Nucleus-conditioned rules** — the constraints that cross constituent boundaries: checked vowels needing a coda, /ŋ/ restricted to certain vowels, Cj-clusters only before /uː/. (This turned the syllable count from a clean product into a sum over vowels — a fun refactor.)

- **An attested-English overlay** — every generated syllable is checked against the CMU Pronouncing Dictionary. Under English-like defaults it generates **~4.4 million legal monosyllables**, of which only **~9,300 are attested English words**. You can browse three ways: everything, just real words, or just the *gaps* (legal but unused — the *blick* zone).

- **A "words your rules shut out" panel** — the real English words the current ruleset rejects (224 of them at default). It's become a catalogue of English's own weird edges: the /rl/ words (*girl, world, curl*), the loans (*fjord, bjork, nyet*), the interjections (*huh, yeah, eh*). Genuinely useful for sorting "my rule is wrong" from "this exclusion is correct."

- **Read-aloud + IPA/ARPABET** — tap any syllable to hear it, via either a parametric synthesizer that builds each phoneme from formant/burst/frication parameters (faithful, robotic) or your system TTS reading a respelling (natural, approximate). Every syllable also renders as a little **sonority silhouette** so you can see the rise-peak-fall shape.

**What it's for:** instead of inheriting some database's inventory and dialect, you generate the possible-syllable space from *your* inventory and *your* rules, from first principles. The gaps mode is a root quarry — legal-but-unattested syllables are collision-free candidates still guaranteed pronounceable to speakers of the source language. And every toggle has a visible cost in syllables, which turns "what are my phonotactics" into a design conversation you can actually watch happen.

**What else is being worked on:** this is one piece of a larger project — a systematic rework of English (its phoneme inventory, a unicase writing system where letter shapes encode phonetic features, and a semantic/ontological layer), plus a couple of parallel threads: a "bridge tongue" universal phonetic script spanning Indo-European and Semitic, and a scheme for mapping punctuation and operators to minimal vocalizations for voice-driven computing. Next up for *this* tool: an **ablaut audit** (the conlang uses voicing alternation to carry meaning, so I want to compute which roots even *have* a pronounceable voiced/unvoiced partner — I expect it'll show that *sp/st/sk* onsets are grammatically sterile, since there's no *zb/zd/zg*), and making the **phoneme inventory itself editable** so it stops being English-only.

**Disclosure:** I designed and directed this, but the actual build — the code, the synthesis engine, the data pipeline — was done in collaboration with Claude, specifically Anthropic's **Opus 4.8 and Fable 5**. I'm a hobbyist pulling levers; the models did the implementation heavy lifting (and caught a fair number of my mistakes on the way).

**Feedback very welcome**, especially from people who know more phonology than I do:

- Which of the "shut out" exclusions are actually correct, and which mean a rule is wrong?

- Is a sonority-only model too permissive to be useful, or is the gap between it and attested English the whole point?

- Has anyone modeled nucleus–coda co-occurrence more rigorously than "checked vowels need a coda"? That's my weakest layer.

- Bigger picture: if you were reaching for a "perfected" phonotactics, what would you actually optimize for — channel capacity, articulatory ease, cross-linguistic learnability, something else?

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d4fa4103-0807-47cf-bc0a-874eaa2bd75f