so most people can handle a /p t k/ contrast, no real need for a /ʔ/ but it could be there too, continuant-wise probably just /s l j/ and maybe a rhotic, like do you think /ʁ/ would be enough for people without an l-r contrast?, /h~f/ maybe too, vowels: maybe just a vertical vowel system or an arabickish /a i u/?, i don’t think different voicings would work for any of that, they’d just be allophonic, and i don’t know how lexical tone interacts with autism? like people who can’t do tone of voice.

I will take all that into account! The use of the glottal stop is an interesting idea (that’s what /ʔ/ is, right, as in the British pronounciation of bottle?). I’m tempted to be like “yeah just leave the rhotic out” because they’re so nuanced but maybe accepting any rhotic as being all one phoneme would work? Like having one character for the speaker’s choice of any of them? Is that a ridiculous idea or no?

I really like the idea of having just /a i u/ because they’re on the very corners of the little vowel chart and very distinct and clear. 

You’re probably right about lexical tone, I think it would be doable but unnecessary. With such a distinct set of vowels though it would probably be possible to use a lot of dipthongs or possibly even tripthongs without losing the ability to distinguish the vowels? 

It might also be nicer to use /ɐ/ instead of /a/. 

I don’t know if other autistic people have an opinion on vibration-heavy consonants? I feel like those are really polarizing, like you love them or you hate them. It also makes a big difference to me whether they’re voiced or unvoiced – possibly voiced/unvoiced consonants could be in free variation?

I feel like it’s futile to try and figure out what sounds would be most aesthetically pleasing for ALL autistic people, but it’s interesting to consider. I was also thinking that there could be a narrower gestural/signed vocabulary for people who don’t like talking or something along those lines. 

I mean I’m a total amateur with this it’s just a really really intriguing line of thought to me

A few nights ago I wrote down the idea of making a neurodivergence-specific conlang (constructed language), which would be to neurodivergence as Láadan is to women. 

Láadan was created by Suzette Elgin about 30 years ago to prove a point about how language caters to men. It has specific particles to indicate, among other things, promises and warnings, and there are a number of other interesting quirks to it – possession is indicated differently whether it’s natural possession (as you own your body), possession by law (as you “own” your spouse, like in the phrase “my husband”), possession by chance, and a catch-all for possession by unknown provenance.

The vocabulary is also interesting to skim; it’s quite nuanced in some ways that English isn’t, with 6 words for “to be alone” depending on the quality of the aloneness (i. e. “alone with terror” and “alone at last, after unpleasant company” are different words). It was written in an era where feminism was very much equated with the vagina and uterus, so there are a number of different words referring to menstruating, including “ásháana”, to menstruate joyfully, and other variants referring to menstruating early, late, for the first time, or painfully.

The idea of it is that being a woman, there’s not a rich vocabulary to describe the experience of womanhood, perhaps because society doesn’t consider women’s experiences worth recounting. Whether or not this is actually a structural element of our language would be difficult to investigate empirically, especially since femininity has changed so much in definition over the years and in Western society has become less breasts-and-vulva-centric than it was a few decades ago, but it’s a beautiful idea and impressive execution nonetheless, in my opinion.

Anyway, that became kind of an infodump, but it’s a really neat experiment that you guys should check out, especially those of you into conlanging.

I see the autistic community (of which I consider myself a part) as having a really rich culture of its own – we’re constantly coining new terms to describe our experiences and reclaiming those used against us. Stimming, sensorweird, brainweird, brainfog, meltdown, shutdown, “going nonverbal”, “special interest”, echolalia, and echonoia are all words that aren’t frequently used outside of our community, and I’ve seen some autistic people successfully represent autism-specific feelings like “!!!!!!!!” that seem to be un-representable in English. I think it would be really interesting to try writing a language exploring different “moods” of stimming or echolalia (I’m imagining a verb for echolalia with different variants indicating whether it’s voluntary or involuntary, communicative or not, whether others hear it, whether one is ashamed of it, whether it’s a pleasant or unpleasant word or phrase being repeated…)

I know it’s unrealistic but the idea of having a secret autistic language in common really appeals to me, especially since I think we already communicate more easily with other ND people and have different body language, vocabulary, and vocalics that we use among ourselves.

I’m cleaning out my room and found a printout of a lexicon of one of my other middle-school conlangs lmao

I’m one of those people who forms headcanons really fast and it comes across a lot in conlanging because I have cultural stories behind some of the words

like for example the root “dran” makes both the verb “dranal”, to shatter, crush, or destroy, and the noun “dranben”, one who breaks everything they touch.

But “dranal” can have a positive connotation, like you would say “nwl reydranyl da” to say “I crush them” as in I’ve defeated them completely, I pwned them, I’m the winner. Whereas being called “dranben” by someone trusted is a scar that one would carry for life. Like if a loved one was like “you’re dranben” you’d go through the weeks following worrying every time you walked near a delicate vase, every time you touched something beautiful or someone you loved, that it would shatter. 

cool linguistics thing I just learned:

Outside of transitive and intransitive verbs, there are actually categories of verbs with different numbers of arguments: impersonal (zero), intransitive (1), transtive (2), ditransitive (3), etc.

Impersonal verbs is shit like “(It) rains” – “it” is just a dummy subject in English and doesn’t really count. In Spanish, “rains” takes NO subject and it’s just a one-word sentence.

In English, the word “bet” can have FOUR arguments: “I (1) bet him (2) three dollars (3) he would lose (4).”

by the way guys, if you’re hearing all this talk about conlanging and thinking “goddamn, I want to be enough of a fucking nerd to write myself little notes in a secret fantasy language in class TOO”, look no further than this book.

It’s The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder. It can be bought off THIS WEBSITE. If you poke around the website, some of the info in the book is on the site also, so you can get an idea of what the book will be like. Rosenfelder goes so hard with his conlanging; he was my idol when I was younger – he’s so badass that not only does he have fucking massive lexicons for every one of his languages, he even knows the protolanguages that lead to their development. If that’s not awesome I have no idea what is.

The book really shows that he knows his stuff – you’ll end up learning a lot about linguistics if you read it (or the webpage) which is pretty cool if you ask me.

yo guys guess what there’s a fairly active conlanging tag on tumblr!

I’m getting ready to start writing the Silvertongue and the Common Tongue and the Crown Tongue so if you want to blacklist “conlang” now would be the time, cause I’ll probably end up more-or-less liveblogging it. 

I’m reading over one of my own journals and apparently I decided to journal in a conlang (constructed language, alternative alphabet, sounds, vocab, grammar, etc.) and apparently I was really good at it?

Like it reads, “Kyd ad mu rafifu! Hy da zo tech. Kyd da zo dy-swsofifubafy. Ky fwduka dymwdswsofifu kwnu” and it just goes on like that… on the second page there’s a bit of English mixed in (“Dy-swsofifukafy day. It’s super boring. Zat kyd edez da swsofifukafy zo silad.”)

Jesus I used to be SO COOL.