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Dununmi - Conlang Profile   Advanced
Language NameDununmi
Language AuthorYiuel
Year Began2002
SiteDununmi
Broken LinkNo
Site LanguageEnglish
Language Typefictional language
Uniqueness

It's a fictional language spoken by a mass of people on Tawsawo (which means "Ocean and Earth" and is the name of the planet in that language). This people are from a novel I am writing. That is the basic story, but there is more.

As for the "inside" history, there is nothing on the site about it, since it is only a brief description of it. The in-story author of the language is named: he's called in the language "Oduwnunhmij" (none is recorded about his former name in his mother tongue). He first intended his language to be a personal language to try out what he learned about linguistics. Then he thought about maybe trying to do an unambiguous language (AKA a logical language). And that's all about his job. He published what he had done. And people in his university were calling him a geek for what he did, but a few years later, that Oduwnunhmij met with one of his friends, a famous politician. As a joke, O. showed his previous work to the politician, and the politician decided that he would take that language to make it an interethnic language for a new city (that will be later called Tsejvatcsew) where he lives and where he wants to be the mayor.

It became so, and the language spread quite quickly throughout the new city, and the people liked it. In the days that I write about in my novel, the city is the main place where the language is spoken, besides many ethnic languages, and some people from the neighboring countries speak it. My novel touches the developement of that language and its spreading on the planet. (At the end of my novel, Dununmi becomes the main international language of all the people.)

See also the name of the language in the language itself :

Duwnunhmijéswewìwendomthenqoló Word-to-Word translation : "Duwnunhmij-of-togheter-many-person-group-idea-speak" (The Interethnic Language of Duwnunhmij)
It also has a basic alphabetic script (actually, three scripts: Uzic, Runic and Notic), but some people speaking the language are beginning to create pictograms and ideograms to more quickly write the language. (I'm still thinking about what those ideograms would look like, but they would be really simple.)

Language SourcesAs for the external history: Esperanto was a great inspiration (mainly about basic grammar). Other languages that inspired me were Chinese (for the monosyllabic feature of the language), Latin (about scientific word creation), Japanese (about images for my words, also about grammar), Tolkien's Quenya and Finnish (grammar), Klingon (verbs) and Quechua (phonology).
Design Principles

Every radical is formed C+V+C. The first consonant may be a cluster, but only like this: Ts, Tsh, Dz, Dzh and every consonant + J or W. The language is then monosyllabic.

The language is declined, mostly as Finnish (a lot of declensions).

The phonology is quite simple, but it has sounds that English (or French, my mother tongue) does not have.

There are no borrowings in the language, everything is created within the language itself. If you need a new word, you can create yourself a radical but mostly, you can agglutinate some radicals and create a new word. (This looks like Chinese.)

Some words are derived in a quite odd and funny way: "K(w)er" is go, while "R(w)ek" is come. It's mirror derivation. (Liw = Woman, Wil = Man.)

Interest Of OthersNo
DictionaryYes
EtymologiesNo
GrammarYes
Sample TextsNo
Unique ScriptYes
PrimerNo
Babel TextNo
Lexicon Size300
Submitted ByYiuel
Date SubmittedFriday, November 21, 2003
Date EditedFriday, November 21, 2003
Date To HeadlineFriday, November 21, 2003

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