Ever hear the expression "serial monogamist"? It refers to a person who is seemingly always in a monogamous relationship, never cheating, but the relationships are short-lived and they're in a new one almost immediately after the previous one ended.
That's me, with conlangs. I usually work on one at a time, but my interest in one wanes pretty quickly, so I start another one.
My latest conlang, and hopefully one I can actually get to a usable state before putting on hold—i.e., fairly complete grammar and a lexicon big enough that there aren't too many holes left to fill while translating most non-technical texts—is called Aɣuma. It grew out of my idea in a thread a short while ago: to create a language in which almost all the phonemes where ones I couldn't pronounce. I didn't go quite as radical, but the language still has 43 phonemic consonants and 16 vowels (9 qualities + nasalization on 7). And especially the consonants, lots of them I can't pronounce. Pharyngealization for the win! Here is the phoneme inventory as it stands today. There is no further phonology, except CVC syllable structure and... Not much else. Laterz!
I started work on Aɣuma sometime in the last two weeks, so everything is new. The morphological idea I'm playing with is one I think is really cool: bipartite verbs. These occur a few places in the world. Bipartite means that the verb consists of two morphemes, both of which are bound morphemes. The main inspiration is Washo, a Native American language. In Washo, there are three kinds of "lexical prefixes." Lexical, because this feature is no longer productive. It is in Aɣuma, because that's more fun. The types in Washo are noun classifying, manner and instrument. My language adds purpose or intent. It's also topic-prominent, with topic agreement on the verb. So you have sentences like:
tomʔẽɣi ɑ̃m ʂuqˤɑlalɔɦefɑ omʔẽ= ɣi ɑ̃m ʂuqˤ- ɑl<alɔ>ɦe- fɑ wedding= top 2 for.ceremony- dress<3>- imp “Dress for the wedding!”
Goals for the next 2 weeks, assuming I have adequate time for conlanging:
