I skipped latin today so I could sleep in and conlang all day. I'm thinking about pounding out a conlang specifically for using less words to take notes. My handwriting is extremely slow, it always has been, and if I try to write at a normal man's speed it becomes unreadable. Every class, there are points that I just outright can't take notes on because I don't have the time required to write it out before the professor moves on. I greatly enjoy the inflections of latin, being able to use affixes in the place of entire words. I have decided to document my progress on this conlang here.
Here are some grammar rules I drunkenly pounded out last night:
1. Inflections for nominative, genetive, accusative cases.
Two declensions (one for names of people/places/titles, one for common nouns)
2. All nouns are attached to verbs as affixes.
Nouns with opposites are inflections of the same stem with a prefix. (similar to esperanto "helan" (light) and "malhelan" (dark)
- e.g. evil could be "<negative affix><stem morality>, good is <positive affix><morality.>.
- e.g. light is <positive affix><stem shade>, dark is <negative affix><stem shade>
3. Three baseline tenses.
(past present future), no more.
4. Consistent articles for ablative, dative
This seems easier than messing around with extra inflections, especially when the majority of nouns in note taking for history and language are nominative or accusative.
5. All proper nouns are feminine, all common nouns are masculine,
Both denoted with an infix. Infixes seem much less convoluted than having genders inflected along with case.
6. No passive voice
(I am very unsure about this because I barely comprehend the utility of passive voice)
7. All adjectives are attached to the noun they modify after the case inflection,
With a suffix after the inflection that assigns the property immediately thereafter. The suffix changes depending on whether the noun is accusative or nominative, dative recieves the property as a suffix due to already having an article.
(I do not think I am going to go with this one, I am thinking it might be more prudent to simply have the adjectives match the case inflection of the noun and be beside the noun. Easier to read.)
*NOTE -- ALL of these rules are subject to great revision, I just came up with all this in probably 15 minutes.
Will it work?
Out of curiosity, I tapped out a paragraph summarizing William Shakespeare's Macbeth. I then rearranged it using these rules, deliniating conlang words with brackets like this: <macbeth nominative>. I ended up using 38% less words -- however, it took me forever because I am unfamiliar. I reckon one paragraph isn't enough to accurately assess how effective this will be, but initial results look promising. I will continue to develop more rules and test them through trial and error, until I come up with something that I can use to take notes.
If I do get around to finalizing a set of grammar rules, I do not think it will be out of its testing phase by the end of this semester. I will need to complete and memorize a lexicon, familiarize myself with syntax, memorize the inflections. My hope is to have it prepared by the beginning of the fall semester, so that I can go into class taking notes in this conlang.
Next steps
- Develop the phonemic orthography
- Research the cases I am unfamiliar with and assess if they will function well with this conlang
- Determine if I want to play around with aspect/voice/mood/whatever-the-fuck
- Determine if I want to develop glyphs for this conlang to minimize strokes needed (most likely I will)