[conlang_learners] Comments on Qakwan and Ilomi

[Jim Henry]

With just a couple of days until the voting starts, I'm going to try
to get in some brief comments on several languages rather than an
in-depth review of just one.

Qakwan /tʃak.wan/, by Larry Sulky, is a little hard to classify.  It's
clearly an artlang, with a fictional setting if not (as far as I can
tell) a thoroughly developed one, but in spite of its fictional
setting it doesn't seem that a high degree of naturalism is one of
Larry's goals; it has some engelangy features like self-segregating
morphology, part-of-speech marking, and particles to demarcate and
classify proper names; and my impression is that it's too regular to
be plausible as a naturally evolved language.  The numerous apparent
or actual cognates to English and other European languages suggest a
possible origin as a pidgin or creole, or possibly a language isolate
that massively replaced much of its vocabulary from European source
languages, but the grammar as a whole doesn't seem entirely consistent
with that theory.

The phonology is only slightly more complex than that of Toki Pona,
with eleven consonants, six vowels and a few diphthongs.  It
apparently allows few consonant clusters, though if the set of allowed
consonant clusters is set out explicitly anywhere I haven't seen it
yet.  The orthography is nearly one-to-one phonemic, exept that "w"
can sometimes represent /w/ and sometimes /ə/; still far more phonemic
than, say, Ido or Sambahsa.

The syntax is generally SVO, with interesting features like verb
chains and a conflation of relationship and spatial verbs wtih
prepositions.  What I've seen so far of the derivational morphology
includes an engelangy part-of-speech marking vaguely similar to
Esperanto or Ido, though simpler.  Adverbial phrases are formed from
adjectives and nouns with a prepositional particle "wi".  Yes/no
questions are marked with a sentence-final particle -- if I recall
correctly, that's unusual for an SVO language, most such having
sentence-initial particles if they don't use word order or intonation
or verb morphology to mark questions.

A discussion group for Qakwan exists, but has only two members so far
and has seen little traffic since its inception (16 messages in about
3 months).

The corpus is of an impressive size for a conlang as new as Qakwan,
but not huge; the Babel Text, a few fables or jokes, and about a
hundred or two hundred sample sentences and phrases mostly organized
like a travel phrasebook.

Qakwan looks, based on the little study I've had time to devote to it,
as though it would be more expressive and precise than Toki Pona but
similarly easy and fun to use.

Larry's earlier conlang Ilomi is fairly similar to Qakwan in phonology
and grammar, and has a more diverse corpus although possibly not quite
as large.  For a few months after its first publication it was learned
and used by several people, some of whom wrote poetry and wrote or
translated short stories and jokes into it.  Ilomi was proposed as an
auxlang at the time, and didn't have the fictional context that Qakwan
has.  Qakwan seems to have a more varied sound than Ilomi, allowing a
few consonant clusters and diphthongs which Ilomi lacked, while still
being very easy to pronounce.  I suspect that there are a variety of
other differences which I would notice if I had studied Ilomi more
recently or Qakwan more deeply.

-- 
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/