Why Sekany is not a Conlang

The ongoing Conlang Comparison project run by Lucas Campos of St. Charlie is a major event for the conlanging community of Microwiki, and I congratulate him and all valid participants on making this happen. However, some in the community misunderstand what our collective hobby entails, and with hard-headed stubbornness they force their uneducated ideas onto the rest of us, branding any who point out flaws in their logic as disrespectful bullies. This article is intended to clear up any misconceptions about the definition of a conlang.

Anybody who has been outside of a rock in recent times knows of a certain David Salapa, President of Ultamiya and creator of a project known as “Sekany“. This project is our topic of discussion today.

Salapa, and others including James Wilary of Prsanea, seem to think that Sekany is a conlang. However, their view is based on personal opinion rather than on hard fact, as we shall see.

Sekany is what is known in conlanging circles as a relex – that is, a relexification of an existing language. In this case, the base language is Salapa’s native English. Many conlangers do start out by creating a relex of their native language before learning more about linguistics and making decent conlangs, but Salapa seems to have it in his mind that Sekany is a full conlang. Let’s look at the points from Sekany’s side, shall we?

1. Sekany is mutually unintelligible with English. This is true, but only because of the vocabulary-replacement which defines a relex. While an English speaker will not understand a Sekany text, glossing the text itself reveals such intense similarity with English that one would have to be a fool to not recognise one as a relex of the other, especially in domains where languages differ, such as idiomatic expressions. A phrase in Sekany is as follows:

Ilvis cheniyiy fasugyem lipvebliyak, a noda veyem komonavriz.
12 voice-PL shout-PST anger-COM | COM 3PL be-PST alike-all
Twelve voices shouted in anger, and they were all alike.

Note that the only differences between the English and Sekany samples are in adjective and adposition order (attached in writing to the previous word, although their use in practice seems to indicate free morpheme status). Despite Salapa’s insistence that it is not the case, heavy use of specifically English conceptual metaphors and idiomatic expressions defines Sekany as a near-textbook example of a relex.

2. Grammar is not what defines a language. While grammar is not the only aspect of a language (others including phonology, lexicon, syntax, etc…), it, along with syntax (and Sekany does imitate English syntax quite effectively), constitute the definition of a separate language according to most modern linguists (especially in the conlanging community, where relexes are common mistakes by ambitious novices).

3. All a posteriori conlangs are relexes in some way or another of the natural languages on which they are based. Um, ok then. You got your linguistics degree from Flat Earth University? I see. Let me just direct you to the Asyl–, I mean Careers Office, just down the street.

In all honesty, this argument is a rather ignorant one, in that it assumes that the statement in bold above is the case for all a posteriori conlangs, and thus it is part of their definition. This is in fact quite far from the truth, as many great conlangers have constructed a posteriori conlangs  without resorting to relexes, and the results are often magnificent. See for example the romlang “Brithenig“, which was created for an alternate history scenario where Latin replaced Old English as the vernacular language of Britain and evolved into a romance language of its own.

4. No, you don’t understand. My point is that all languages are, by definition, relexes of each other. Didn’t see that coming, did you? No, of course I didn’t – not because my points are somehow destroyed by this argument, but because I’m too busy facepalming to respond adequately…

And, I’m back. I suggest you to read up on how languages, codes, and programming languages (for the slow-thinking in the crowd – not true languages) work, because the amount of logical sense you are making has now gone below Creationist levels. I won’t even bother disproving this because the evidence against this proposition is in every language ever to exist. The amount of semantic processing for codes and relexes is not at all sufficient for them to be considered languages, and Sekany is not even in a gray area. To prove this, please see my 7 Steps for Parsing English to Sekany:

1. Regularise irregular English roots (specifically irregular plurals and verb conjugations)
2. Replace all words with their Sekany equivalent
3. Replace plurals with iy, except when vowel to remove the vowel and add iy
4. Transfer all prepositions to the ends of the words that come after them
5. Transfer all adjectives to the end of the nouns after them if no preposition was transferred
6. Remove articles
7. Add past tense suffix to verbs in past tense, future tense suffix to those in future.

Barely any semantic processing is required, therefore Sekany is a relex of English.

5. SHOW SOME RESPECT! I’m not being disrespectful, but rather blunt (which is defined as communicating ideas/facts without euphemisms and other niceties) – and as such, the argument is baseless. If you are losing in the facts department, at least resign in honour and promise to improve rather than resorting to claiming a violation of respect.

Thus we can conclude this article of the MicroConlang blog with the notion that Sekany is not a conlang. Good day to all.

My View of Artaghean

It has come to my attention that Lucas Campos of St. Charlie and Richard Garrshire of Artaghe have begun work on a conlang called Artaghean (link: http://microwiki.org.uk/index.php?title=Artaghean_language). Here is my breakdown of the language from what I’ve seen.

Quick facts:

Alignment: Nominative-Accusative

Word Order: de jure Topic-prominent; de facto SVO

Influences: de jure Icelandic, Modern Gutnish, Farose, Norwegian, Afrikaans, Wayuu; de facto I have yet to see Afrikaans or Wayuu influences

Type: Agglutinative

Writing system: Latin, with Icelandic-esque diactrics

Opinions:

Phonology: Very interesting, contains aspirated vs unaspirated distinction as well as the more common voiced vs unvoiced, as well as unusual sounds such as /c/ and /n̥/. The phonology is mostly based on Icelandic.

Grammar: Ok, has a few basic cases and otherwise very little of note. Based heavily on Icelandic.

Lexicon: interesting, and I like the Faroese influence, but otherwise not much different from Icelandic.

Overall: a bit boring currently, but has great potential

The MicroConlanger’s Dilemma

So, you’re a micronationalist who is just starting to work on your nation’s culture. The perfect choice would seem to be to create a unique national language – a conlang for the nation. However, the micronational conlanger faces challenges beyond those of a conventional conlanger, somewhere along the lines of an auxlanger. These shall be gone over in this post.

First off, the conlang is a language that you probably want to have spoken by your populace. The citizenry of a micronation is often notorious for its indifference to any and all efforts of the leader and their elite to advance the nation. Therefore, one must expect it to be spoken fluently only by said elite.

Even this elite will have trouble learning a new language, so said language must be made as easy to learn as possible. The budding conlanger often turns to a posteriori to solve this problem. This, however, creates another problem.

There are two types of a posteriori that we will go over today – single subfamily and multiple subfamily.

Single subfamily (SS [no pun intended]) is based on only a single subfamily. These languages are undesirable in the micronation because they too closely resemble the natural languages of that subfamily, which defeats the whole purpose of making a unique language when its whole purpose is to be unique, but then fails even at that. A good example of this is Zealandian, which is essentially Swedish but with some loanwords from other Norse languages, German, and English. The result isn’t that much different from the base Swedish. In the case that the micronation is based on a specific macroculture, it would be better if the nation adopts a natlang rather than make its own useless conlang (which will also probably attract more speakers than the conlang due to real-world use). another problem is that the conlang you create like this is probably not much different from the hundreds of other conlangs created in the same fashion.

Multiple Subfamily (SM) is based on multiple subfamilies or families. If done correctly, such conlangs can become very unique and be a truly good microconlang. However, because most micronationalists are speakers of Germanic, Romance, or both, languages, they can only realistically do a mixture of languages from these subfamilies. The problem with this is that it has been done so many times that such a mixed conlang is not really unique in any sense, and so is useless for the one purpose it was created for – uniqueness. However, those that speak languages from other families or subfamilies or are knowledgeable in such a language can succeed in creating a unique conlang suitable for microcultural use. For those who want something based on Romance and germanic, I would recommend using Esperanto, as it is very popular, has a lot of learning material, and has more learning appeal.

The other option is to create an a priori conlang – not based on anything. These are probably the best option for a microconlang, but often they are hard to learn due to a lack of familiarity with the vocabulary. However, if the language is constructed relatively logically and with the idea of making it easy to learn in mind, it should turn out OK (as did my Veletan language). Agglutination is often convenient for this purpose.

Stay tuned for more microconlang-related posts.