kagi kidem kia posigam
kaki kitap kia patikap
[kaɣə kəɾɛm ɣəa pɔʃiɣam]
THING.CL written DEM.PROXIMATE EXP-teacup
This document is about Tikap.
Tikap is a conlang with five phonemes /p t k/ /ɨ ɐ/ (p t k i a). It's only goal is to make a functional language with this limited inventory.
Which requirements have to be meet to consider a language "functional" is an open discussion. However I developed a simple plan in few steps. Each step is an improvement towards the goal.
- Write a grammar.
- Translate text into the language.
- Learn it to fluency.
- Persuade someone else to learn it.
- Communicate together.
- Get married, have children, raise them as native speaker.
In order to achieve this the language tries to work with a small vocabulary and therefor uses some uncommon grammatical constructions.
One very productive feature is its system of nonconcatenative morphology. In any root word consonants and vowels can be regrouped to form different patterns with new meaning. The order of consonants and the order of vowels however stays the same. Therefor the root word "tikap" has the consonants "tkp" (in this order) and the vowels "ia" (in this order). This allows the following variations: "tkipa, tkiap, tikpa, itkap". Together with allophonic variation those five words can be pronounced quite different from each other [ʃiɣäɸ txəβɔ txəɐɸ ʃixpɔ ɨʃkəɸ].
This system is intentionally designed in a way that allows any consonant and vowel clusters to be broken apart. So they can not be analyzed as additional phonemes of their own.
While the conlang is largely determined by the constrain the phonology creates, inspiration for certain features has been drawn from some other languages.
- The Phonology itself is inspired by Rotokas. An alternative attempt would have a bilabial, an alveolar and a glottal consonant, which would more resemble Piraha.
- The system of "classifiers" is directly inspired by American Sign Language (ASL).
- Using demonstratives as copula is directly inspired by German Sign Language (DGS).
- The effort to keep the language conceptually simple and part of the aesthetics draw from Toki Pona.
Even though, according to my understanding, you can not license a language I want to explicitly state, that this language is in the public domain.
This documentation is licensed under CC-BY-SA.
If anyone for some reason is using this conlang I also want to encourage them to publish their original writings too under a free and copyleft license.