Bitonese
From Langmaker
| Conlang | Bitonese |
| Author | Wouter Steenbeek |
| Year Began | 2006 |
| Language Type - by purpose - by source | artlang a posteriori conlang |
| Typology - morphology - word order | fusional SOV |
| Lexicon Size | 160 |
| Etymologies | Yes |
| Grammar | Yes |
| Sample Texts | Yes |
| Primer | No |
Bitonese, or Olkadek Bitônik, is an artistic language created by Wouter Steenbeek. It is intended to be a typical language for a student fraternity, Biton, in the sence that much of its vocabulary is derived from concepts common within this community.
Language sources
As said above, the vocabulary is largely based on concepts within the fraternity. These are in first place given names and nicknames of the members (the fraternity having a sophisticated system of nicknames in case two people bear the same real name), and besides on the names of various organisational structures within the association, on words or stock phrases popular among its members, and so forth.
Much of the morphology was inspired by or even freely borrowed from various Indo-European languages, including Latin, Greek and Sanskrit.
Design principles
Bitonese is not intended to be easy to learn by a lot of people - it is an artlang, not an auxlang. It is highly inflecting, having seven or eight cases and an elaborate verb system. A peculiarity is that Bitonese is a tripartite language: one case for the agent, one for the experiencer and one for the patient. There are four numbers: singular, dual, trial and plural. The verb has two aspects *(imperfective and perfective) and three agent forms (active, medial and passive), which permit quite a lot of different expressions. Flexion and conjunction are pretty regular, but a few contractions do occur. On top of that, perfective stems are formed by root inflection, so it would be inappropriate to call Bitonese an agglutinative language.
Lack of appropriate words is a major challenge in Bitonese. Its rich morphology and derivational system compensate this a little: one root word can be affected in many ways and can mean many things. Root words are always nouns and typically nouns with an abstract meaning. This noun can be made a verb (with lots of different meanings, depending on form), it can be made a tangible thing, a person, an adjective etcetera. Thus, rýd means "game", rýdama "to play", rýdading "a game as a tangible object", rýdûr "player" and rýdik means "playful".
Interest of others
During the very first days of the formation process, some people were told about and were interested. However, since the grammar was only developed very recently, presumably noone but the creator has been in touch with it yet. In the next few weeks, it will likely be made better known.
Due to its sources, it will be particularly of interest to other members of the Biton student fraternity. However, other conlangers might be interested as well, since the language sources are rather unusual.
Links
(not external, however)
- User:Steinbach/Olkadek Bitônik An introduction and a brief grammar (in Dutch), with a separate very brief root word list.
