Xoq

General informationEdit
I've decided to shorten xolq (/ʃɒl(ə)ŋ/) to Xoq (/ʃɒŋ/, clipped from xotlaq /ʃɒtlaŋ/ 'short language') because why not. Xoq is a personal conlang and my attempt at creating an as concise and unambiguous a posteriori language as possible without the need to memorise a large vocabulary. That means it strives to keep word length at 3-to-4-to-5-tops letters. It's still on the tweaking stage. Putting it on this site is intended to encourage me to put more work into it.

History, influences Edit
I've always been finding fault with natural languages, felt the need to improve them. Every time i saw a feature of one language that wasn't present in the ones i knew i realised all the good traits could be brought into one perfect language. Well, it didn't turn out that easy.

Chinese was a huge influence. Both its word length and traits such as static verbs were very inspiring. I liked its conciseness and its isolatingness. I also like its morphology but i don't find a closed vocabulary very practical and am not up to making up my lang's vocab. Chinese made me realise how word categories are just convention and thus how an adjective in one language can be a verb in another etc.

My other conlang attempts focused on the syllable structre CV-only but the resulting words proved unbearingly long. Also, i tried to make an a priori language. i got discouraged by the amount of time and effort involved, as well as the fact observing natural languages lead me to realise how arbitrary their vocabulary is. Borrowing words from other languages earns English words a lot of conciseness. But I'm aware of how neat Chinese morphology looks (fire+arrow=rocket, walk+star=planet), if it weren't for its morphemes' ambiguity.

PhonologyEdit
Xolq's sounds are not the main objective of its creation. The basic sounds allowing to read the language cover the 26 letters of the English alphabet. I'll try and add as many sounds expressed by digraphs as possible to further shorten the pronounciation, but first i need to figure out which letter combinations are going to appear the most in practice.

The basic sounds are as follows:

Orthography Edit
Xoq's orthography is 100% phonemic. There are no capital letters. The phonotactics design is intended to allow for reading acronyms as you would regular words.

Phonotactics Edit
There are no limits in Xoq's phonotactics. There are two epenthetic sounds used to make any combination of sounds pronounceable: /ə/ between consonants and /ʔ/ between vowels. Words are stressed on the first syllable. /ə/ is not stressed unless, if need be, in a consonant-only word like wt /'wət/'' 'what. ''Digraphs, like 'aa', may be pronounced either separately using their basic sound quality (/a(ʔ)a/), or, if available for a specific digraph, as a special sound (in aa's case it's /ɑ/).

Possible pronunciations: Edit
wn ('when') is pronounced /wən/ or /wə̃/.

Morphology Edit
Xolq's morphology is based on that of English. All grammatical particles listed here are isolating and precede what they modify. The spelling's changed. In practice it's simplified for conciseness's sake wherever no ambiguity arises, in other words, diphthongs are only used to disambiguate words whose simplified form would make them homographs. This means 'consise' is rendered as ksas /ksʌs/ (the morpheme 'con-' is simplified tok-) as there are no words like 'consuss', 'consarse', 'consass' or 'consouse' in English to mistake it for. Compound words can be written together since each of them must contain one vowel. Words are pruned of unnecessary sounds and letters preserving (most of) the stem morpheme (must contain a vowel) while limiting the affixes to ideally 1 consonant, eg. 'unify' becomes unf /ʊn(ə)f/, 'important' becomesmpotn /mpɒtn/ (frequently used words will surely be further shortened; i'd have no trouble rememberingmportn as just mpo). Glides, nasals and liquids may be elided if there's no ambiguity, eg. 'venerable' is venb(elided 'r').

Basic elision patterns:

GrammarEdit
Adjectives and adverbs form a modifier category and they respectively follow nouns and verbs.

Nouns Edit
General marker: m.

Optional plural marker: j.

Pronouns Edit
In isolation pronounced /kə/, /ŋə/ etc. k like Dutch ik, q similar to Chinese ni, z like German sie, h like he, l like Latin ille, s like us, g like old englishge, d like Swedish de
 * possessives add v-, eg. doot vk /'dɔtə vək/ =  'my daughter'.

Prepositions Edit
Prepositions of motion act like verbs if preceded by w or a tense/mood particle. Many of them ultimately will be dropped:

He's similar to his brother.

h w sim bro vh.

/xəw sɪm bɹɒ vəx/

Adjectives and adverbs Edit
General marker: y.

Verb Edit
General marker: Adjectives and participles act as verbs if preceded by v or tense/mood particle. She's been seeing my teacher for months.
 * perfective: t
 * progressive: r

z tr sii ticr vk fo j manf.

/zə ʈə si tɪʝɹ vək fɒʒ mʌ̃f/

Her cousin was doing her homework.

kanz vz ta du homk.

/'kʌ̃z vəzə tʌ 'dʊ 'hɒmk/

Participles Edit
The man believed to have been killed in the fire was seen alive yesterday.

man p bliv (eu) p a kil in fae b sii laiv yde.

/'mʌn pə 'blɪv (ø) pʌ 'kɪl ɪn 'fæ bə si 'lav jə'dɛ/ We admired the choir's singing.

s a mai hy siq v kai.

/'sʌ maç 'sɪŋ əv 'ka/ Which of them will come?

wc v d e kam.

/'wəʝ əv dɛ kʌm/

I don't know which of them to choose.

k n no cy v d cuz.

/kə̃ 'nɒ 'ʝəjvdə' ʝʊz/

Questions Edit
The question particle ui is used to form open questions.

Example.

Do you like cars?

q lak kaa ui.

/ŋə lʌk kɑ ʏ/

or

ui q lak kaa.

/ʏŋə lʌk kɑ/

Wh-questions preserve the basic word order.

What did they want from you?

d a won wt fm q.

/'dʌ wɒn 'wət fəm əŋ/

Numerals Edit
billion: tuy, trillion: diy etc.

VocabularyEdit
If you like this house, buy it.

q lak ds has tn i bai l.

/ŋə 'lʌk dəs 'hʌst nɪ 'bal/

I'll see you at 3 pm tomorrow.

k sii q at far kl tmo. (24h time base)

/ksiŋ ʌt fʌɹ kəlt mɒ/