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This is my first conlang effort, and I need your help.
I'm going to be creating a fictional world for my next story; I need strange people to inhabit that world. By now, Tolkien's elves, dwarves, hobbits, etc. are all worn-out cliché races. I'm thinking of putting in a race that's overwhelmingly cute, on the level of those blasted Precious Moments figurines. They'll need an overwhelmingly cute language to match.
Some ideas I had
Spanish is cute but Italian is cuter. According to CBisquit, "the pronunciation of c as ch is good stuff." In fact, I'm going further with the soft/hard consonants, by preserving the hard endings of singular nouns and soft endings of plural nouns even with suffixes.
In a cute language with a base-10 number system, the words for "one" and "two" rhyme, as do "three" and "four," "six" and "seven," "eight" and "nine," and "five" and "ten," leading to a count of "eight nine ten" that sounds like hickory dickory dock. (Note that this only works for base a(1 + 2b) where b > 1 and a > 1, and see also http://www.lyvennet.com/Sheep_counting.htm before you lose sleep over this.)
Serial verb constructions can cut down on prepositions and cases down to the magic four (nominative, accusative, genitive, and dative). For instance, "I cut the bread with the knife" would be expressed as "I take the knife and cut the bread." "I run into the house" would be "I run and enter the house."
Ideas pouring in through Chatterbox
- adamwolf suggested something based on the language of the Ewoks; others pointed me to yub yub and http://www.neuvel.net/alienlang.htm
- CBisquit recommended the sound in clue and few and also short words with one syllable. "a race of cute people would speak in a mixture of baby/kitten/puppy dialects, since that where cute comes from"
- atesh wrote: "Naw, they would have to be gawd-awufl Pikachu sounding."
- Whywait? wrote: "malay is a pretty cute language. lots of l's, p's, n's and k's. and they are a small, cute people, to generalise somewhat."
To other noders
If you have any other ideas, add them. If you don't have enough to make a good write-up, /msg me.
To editors
Editors, if this node gets too long to load on dial-up, /msg me before you start killing writeups, so that I may integrate their information into my writeup.