ECL1: a reaction-based conlang

Experimental Conlang 1 (tentative name) is a conlang that strives to do away with verbs by following a ‘chemical reaction’ paradigm. It also seeks to be a testbed for a simplified form of oginiþe cfarðerþ deduplication.

Link

I’ve read through Logan Kearsley’s How to Not Verb[1] for the second time, and it’s motivated me to dig up an old idea I posted on the Ŋarâþ Crîþ v9 server: having the object of a verb come before or after it depending on whether it exists before the action or after it. This can be generalized to being able to specify two objects that way, and then you could do away with the verb. In the end, you specify what caused the action, what gets changed by the action, and what it gets changed to. You can even nest these clauses to express more complex ideas!

TODO list:

  • Specify how type I oginiþe cfarðerþ is resolved
  • Provide a way to express ‘relative clauses’, perhaps mirroring AllNoun’s ‘hoisting’
  • Add a category of words that describe the nature of the reaction itself broadly; e.g. “with violent force”, “by physical manipulation”. These correspond to the verbs in the original idea, but they be used less often than verbs in English, when the utterance would otherwise be unclear.

  1. Please refrain from calling me a hypocrite; the title is from Logan. ↩︎

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