Ceqli
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Ceqli | ||
|---|---|---|
| Created by: | Rex F. May (1996) | |
| Setting and usage: | engineered language | |
| Total speakers: | — | |
| Category (purpose): | based on Loglan, English, Chinese and other languages | |
| Language codes | ||
| ISO 639-1: | none | |
| ISO 639-2: | art | |
| ISO 639-3: | — | |
| Note: This page may contain IPA phonetic symbols in Unicode. See IPA chart for English for an English-based pronunciation key. | ||
Ceqli (pronounced /ʧeŋli/) is a constructed language created by Rex F. May. It was originally inspired by Loglan. Its name is a blend of the names "Chinese" and "English", expressing the fact that the grammar of Ceqli is mostly based on those two languages. On the isolation-synthesis spectrum, Ceqli is closer to isolating than synthetic; there is no inflection, but Ceqli does derive new words by compounding.
Ceqli began as an attempt to improve the morphology of Loglan. The morphology of Ceqli is designed to make it easy to tell where one morpheme leaves off and another begins. Every morpheme or root word begins with one or more stops, fricatives and affricates, and the rest of the morpheme consists of vowels, semivowels, nasals and liquids.
Given the special morpheme-shape, Ceqli "finds" vocabulary by searching through languages, the ones with most speakers first, for words that fit Ceqli's rules. For example, "biq" (pronounced /biŋ/) is the word for "ice", borrowed directly from Mandarin. "Blu" (blue) is borrowed from English, "dolor" (sorrow) from Spanish, "dielo" (matter, business, affair) from Russian, "gin" (computer) from Hindi, "hana" (nose) from Japanese, etc. Ceqli will often look through many languages before finding a suitable word for a concept, and its influences are diverse, with Ceqli including words from Albanian, Bengali, Hungarian, Indonesian, Samoan, Serbo-Croatian, Sinhalese, Swahili, Turkish and Vietnamese.
Since it was originally intended as a replacement for Loglan, Ceqli began as a logical language. However, the goals of the language have changed since then. It has abandoned being completely unambiguous; instead it seeks to provide the option of being unambiguous in most cases, while allowing very concise ambiguous forms. Seeing how concise these forms can get has been a focus of the language lately, leading to the criticism that it is a "language of newspaper headlines". Its grammar has also changed from the predicate-based structure of Loglan, where any predicate can be a noun, verb, or modifier, based on its position in the sentence, to one more based on natural languages, which distinguishes nouns and verbs.
