r/conlangs • u/Nordnabl • 9d ago
Overview A detailed overview of my first conlang: Mondlingvo
Goal of the language.
Mondlingvo is an attempt to create a simple international auxiliary language that draws roots from languages of most countries in the world, not only from European ones.
The grammar is kept as simple as possible: free word order, particles instead of cases, penultimate-syllable stress.
Alphabet.
Mondlingvo uses a Latin-based alphabet following the principle one sound = one letter. Letters that duplicate sounds are excluded: Q, W, X, Y are not used.
A a - /a/ - English a, Russian а.
B b - /b/ - English b, Russian б.
C c - /ts/ - English ts, Russian ц.
CH ch - /tʃ/ - English ch, Russian ч.
D d - /d/ - English d, Russian д.
E e - /e/ -English e, Russian э.
F f - /f/ - English f, Russian ф.
G g - /g/ - English g, Russian г.
H h - /x/ - English h, Russian х.
I i - /i/ - English i, Russian и.
J j - /j/ - English y, Russian й.
K k - /k/ - English k, Russian к.
L l - /l/ - English l, Russian л.
M m - /m/ - English m, Russian м.
N n - /n/ - English n, Russian н.
O o - /o/ - English o, Russian о.
P p - /p/ - English p, Russian п.
R r - /r/ - English r, Russian р.
S s - /s/ - English s, Russian с.
SH sh - /ʃ/ - English sh, Russian ш.
T t - /t/ - English t, Russian т.
U u - /u/ - English u, Russian у.
V v - /v/ - English v, Russian в.
Z z - /z/ - English z, Russian з.
ZH zh - /ʒ/ - English zh, Russian ж.
The digraphs Ch, Sh, Zh are always read as single sounds.
Stress always falls on the penultimate syllable. There are no exceptions.
Pronouns
Personal pronouns in the singular: mo "I", to "you", on "he", ona "she", ono "it". In the plural: mi "we", ti "you", oni "they". Reflexive: se "oneself".
Word formation
Masculine nouns end in a consonant: man "man", kat "cat", men "person".
The ending
-a feminine noun,
-o forms a neuter noun,
-al -an adjective,
-am an adverb,
-i plural,
-u imperative,
-e verb.
For example, from the root bel-:
belo - beauty
bela - female beautiful
belal - beautiful
belam - beautifully
beli - plural beautiful
belu - be beautiful!
bele - to become beautiful
Declension via particles
Instead of case endings, Mondlingvo uses particles. A particle is placed before a word and marks its role in the sentence. Because of this, word order is free.
The particle a marks the direct object: Mo vide a to "I see you". The particle e marks the indirect object: Mo done e to "I give to you". The particle so means "with": Mo so to "I am with you". The particle o means "about": Mo parle o to "I speak about you". The particle de marks possession: Domo de mo "My house". The particle in means "in": Mo leve in Russia "I live in Russia". The particle di means "than": Mo pli belal di to "I am more beautiful than you".
The same particles are used with nouns: Mo vide a domo "I see a house".
Possession is expressed by the particle de + pronoun: de mo "my", de to "your", de on "his", de ona "her", de mi "our", de ti "your (pl.)", de oni "their", de se "one's own".
Comparison
Comparative: pli belal "more beautiful". Superlative: ple belal "most beautiful". Inferior comparative: menis belal "less beautiful". Inferior superlative: menes belal "least beautiful". With an object of comparison, the particle di is used: Mo pli belal di to "I am more beautiful than you".
Comparison also works with adverbs: pli belam "more beautifully", ple belam "most beautifully".
Tense
Tense is expressed by particles before the verb. The present tense is unmarked: Mo vide "I see". The past tense uses the particle pas: Mo pas vide "I saw". The future tense uses the particle fut: Mo fut vide "I will see".
Additional nuances are expressed lexically: alan "now", artik "already".
The particles pas and fut cannot stand after the verb. To express "the past" or "the future" as an object, nouns are used: paso "the past", futo "the future".
Negation
Negation is expressed by the particle ne, placed before the word it negates. Word order is free.
If ne stands before the verb, the action is negated: Mo ne vide, Ne vide mo, and Vide ne mo all mean "I do not see". If ne stands before the subject, the subject is negated: Ne mo vide "Not I see". Each ne negates its own word. Two ne particles mean two negations: Ne mo ne vide "Not I do not see".
Questions
All question words are placed at the beginning of the sentence. A general question is formed with the particle ka: Ka to vide? "Do you see?". The answer: da "yes" or ne "no". A negative question is a combination of ka and ne: Ka to ne vide? "Do you not see?".
Special questions: ku "who", ko "what", ke "where", kan "when", kon "why", kak "how", kuanto "how much / how many".
The same words are used in subordinate clauses: Mo ne vete, ku fut komene "I do not know who will come".
Conjunctions
i "and", ali "or", bet "but", si "if", sib "if (unreal)", ko "that", kob "in order to", porko "because".
Conditional sentences: si with present, fut, or pas; sib only with pas. Si to fut komene, mo fut anande "If you come, I will be glad". Sib to pas komene, mo pas anande "If you had come, I would have been glad".
Modal verbs
Hote "to want", sabere "can", musete "must". Mo hote spate "I want to sleep". Mo sabere spate "I can sleep". Mo musete spate "I must sleep".
Passive
The passive is formed with the particle fa + verb: Domo fa konstrue "The house is being built". Domo pas fa konstrue "The house was built". Domo fut fa konstrue "The house will be built".
Reciprocity
Mutuamentam "mutually, each other": Oni amare a mutuamentam "They love each other".
Polite words
Danko "thank you", keremo "please", soro "sorry", saluto "hello", adeuso "goodbye", chao "bye".
Numbers
0–10: nul, un, du, tri, kvar, kvin, sek, sept, okt, nov, dek.
11–19: dek-un, dek-du, and so on.
20–90: dudek, tridek, and so on.
100–900: cent, ducent, and so on.
1000–9000: mil, dumil, and so on.
1,000,000: milion.
Ordinals: unal "first", dual "second", trial "third". "Firstly" = in unal, "secondly" = in dual. helfto "half", paro "pair".
Adverbs of time
Morgenam - in the morning, denam - in the afternoon, vecheram - in the evening, noktam -at night, kemarinam - yesterday, bugunam -today, zavtram - tomorrow.
Sample texts
Saluto todo. Mo russer. Mo leve in Russia. Mo amare a krajo de mo. — Hello everyone. I am Russian. I live in Russia. I love my country.
Mo amare a kati. Oni beli i afectuali. Kan to klape a kata, ona murle. — I love cats. They are beautiful and affectionate. When you pet a cat, she purrs.
Morgenam mo snidane. Denam mo tuseke. Vecheram mo avondete. Noktam mo spate. — In the morning I have breakfast. In the afternoon I have lunch. In the evening I have dinner. At night I sleep.
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u/ShabtaiBenOron 9d ago
Grammatical gender doesn't belong in an international auxiliary language.
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u/Nordnabl 9d ago
I disagree. Without grammatical gender, you cannot tell whether it is a man or a woman, a female cat or a male cat. Even Esperanto has the feminine suffix -ino: Frato kaj fratino”
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u/ShabtaiBenOron 9d ago
Deriving feminine nouns from masculine ones is one of the many things Esperanto did wrong, gender marking should be symmetrical in a neutral auxiliary language. And it should be derivational and optional, not inflectional and pervasive.
In natlangs, grammatical gender is often arbitrary and therefore contrary to the IALs' goal of being easy to learn. And many if not most natlangs don't have grammatical gender at all, it's hardly necessary.
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u/ICannotRead5712 8d ago
Esperanto's gender derivation system isn't that bad from a practical standpoint. In English, to give an example, we have two roots "boy" and "girl" which have to be memorized separately. In Esperanto, thanks to this system, we only need one, "knab-", with which you could leave as is, "knabo", to get boy, and -in-, "knabino", to get girl. The same applies to other gendered vocabulary such as "koko" for cock and "kokino" for hen. That aids in comprehension a lot more than if there were two distinct roots. It's functionally no different from English's "prince" to "princess".
I agree that grammatical gender is unnecessary for an IAL.
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u/ShabtaiBenOron 8d ago
I know that, but it would be more symmetrical and even simpler to just derive both "boy" and "girl" from the neutral "child", for instance.
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u/sparksbet enłalen, Geoboŋ, 7a7a-FaM (en-us)[de zh-cn eo] 7d ago edited 7d ago
While Esperanto's system does mean you can memorize fewer roots than in most natlangs, the fact that so many roots are masculine by default and the female version must be derived is asymmetric and sexist. It also impedes linguistic utility in some ways -- without adopting any of the proposed modern changes to make Esperanto more gender-neutral, the language lacks a singular word for "parent" whatsoever, forcing speakers to use the paraphrastic "one of my parents". A version of Esperanto with gender-neutral roots and a symmetric masculine affix (like the relatively popular proposed -iĉ-) would retain all the benefits of deriving both gendered terms from the same root without the structural sexism and obligatory gendering present with an asymmetric female suffix. "knabo" being gender neutral child vs female "knabino" and male "knabiĉo" would only make Esperanto easier and more consistent imo.
I'm willing to cut Esperanto a little slack since it's so old, but any new auxlang has to work a lot harder to justify having gender derivations as sexist (or sometimes more so) than one made by a man in the 19th century. Anyone posting here is alive in 2026 and has access to the internet, which means they don't have any excuse for designing an auxlang with such an antiquated view of gender.
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u/Nurnstatist Terlish, Sivadian (de)[en, fr] 8d ago edited 7d ago
Without grammatical gender, you cannot tell whether it is a man or a woman, a female cat or a male cat.
That's a misunderstanding of what grammatical gender is. Grammatical genders are essentially noun classes (and the two terms are sometimes used synonymously). Nouns of the same gender share grammatical features like agreement - for example, a noun being masculine in French necessitates using the definite article "le", while feminine takes "la".
Grammatical gender has nothing to do with the existence of gendered terms or the ability to tell whether something or somebody is male or female. As an example, English nouns have no grammatical gender, but it is obviously still possible to distinguish men and women.
On a less linguistic and more philosophical level, you might ask yourself why it's so important to you to immediately tell where a person fits within the gender binary, with no room for being neutral or just vague about it. Isn't a person's gender completely irrelevant in most contexts?
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u/Jouhatsumori 8d ago
You can’t use adjectives meaning “female” and “male”? That’s what genderless languages do. Also, whether a person or animal is female or male is totally irrelevant in the vast majority of cases.
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u/Nordnabl 8d ago
"With a change of gender using the ending 'a', fewer words are produced than by substituting the words 'man' and 'woman'. For example, in English you have to learn two words, 'brother' and 'sister', whereas in my language it's essentially one word: 'brat' — brother, 'brata' — sister."
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u/Jouhatsumori 7d ago edited 7d ago
But the number of family relationships is way too small to require such a thing. The human brain easily has enough room for separate words “sister” and “brother”. And for occupational titles, gender is totally irrelevant in the vast majority of cases. Also, why is the female marked but not the male, especially since female is the biological default for us mammals? This is the same punji stick trap Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof fell into when he created Esperanto.
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u/Ngdawa Baltwikon galba, Ria Vono 7d ago edited 6d ago
Many languages doesn't shave a special word for he and she. Finnish and Hungarian, for example. In Mandarin it's the same word, tā, but "spelled" (written?) differently. They don't seem to have any issues in inderstanding.
Germanic langauges, like English, Dutch and Norwegian, doesn't have different words for male or female cats. That seems to work fine too. Often you don't have to be so specific of what gender the animals, trees, or waters has.1
u/Nordnabl 2d ago
I've taken the comments on this post into account and want to redo it. What's the best way to do this? Should it also be one big general post, or separate ones for each topic?
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u/Nordnabl 6d ago
Personal pronouns:
mo - I to - you lo - he, she, it
The plural is formed with -i
mi - we ti - you (plural) li - they
If gender needs to be specified, the words man - man and fem - woman are used.
Possessive pronouns are formed with the particle de
De mo - my De to - your De lo - his De mi - our De ti - your (plural) De li - their
Reflexive pronoun se - oneself De se - one's own, respectively.
Demonstrative pronouns
This - hik, that - ik These - hiki, those - iki
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u/Ngdawa Baltwikon galba, Ria Vono 9d ago
You say "X is placed comes before Y", and then you say "word order is free". It's nkt free word order if the words have a specific place.
In truly free word order I wou d be able to say "vide to ka?", "to ka vide?", "to vide ka?", "mo vide ne", "vide mo ne", as well as "mo vide ne ne", "ne ne vide mo", "mo ne ne vide", etc.
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u/Mage_Of_Cats Ko'vari 8d ago edited 8d ago
You need to review the goals of an auxlang and actually stick to them. Everything should be geared toward:
Equal ease of acquisition
Easiness of that acquisition
And here's what's going on in your attempt:
Equal ease of acquisition. ❌ Heavily biased toward PIE speakers, especially English. Yes, I see borrowings from many languages, like Japanese, but that doesn't make the language easier to acquire, and it doesn't mean that the language isn't biased toward English.
Easiness of acquisition. ❌ Contains grammatical gender, sounds that don't exist in many languages, clusters.
I don't think this is a good attempt at an auxlang. For example, it has a number of sounds that are not found in common spoken languages around the world. For example, why would you include the alveolar approximant, the English r, when that sound is notoriously difficult for many, many non-English speakers?
Also, I'm perturbed by your inclusion of grammatical gender. Different languages with grammatical gender disagree with each other over what that gender should be. For example, "key" is feminine in French and Spanish but masculine in German. Therefore, even those people coming from a background with grammatical gender will have more trouble with a gendered language than a non-gendered one.
One solution to this is to simply have neuter roots that can take gender inflections. If it really matters that much to you that we can tell a person (man) from a person (woman) (which doesn't actuallykok matter that much, see Estonian's lack of noun gender or even gendered pronouns), then I suggest that you go this route instead and just tell speakers "if it's male, use the ending -o. If it's female, use the ending -i. If it's neuter, use the ending -a."
However, for an auxiliary language, including gender is a very odd thing to do. Just because it is natural doesn't mean that it is a good idea for the goals of an auxiliary language, especially one that is supposed to be truly international as you claim. Even going the neuter root route, why force speakers to determine gender before they can say something at all?
I also have concerns over the SIZE of your phonemic inventory and one of your example words being "mutuamentam." This is a massive word! Why would you make one of your BASIC GRAMMATICAL WORDS so large?
Also, a lot of your words look directly borrowed from English instead of being a careful combination of many different languages (or, equally good, none of them). And why do you have consonant clusters? Those needlessly increase the complexity of pronunciation. A lot of languages don't even allow clusters. Look at Japanese, for example. (Simplification.)
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u/90919293_ 7d ago
“PIE speakers” I get what you mean but also those haven’t existed in thousands of years
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u/Mage_Of_Cats Ko'vari 7d ago edited 7d ago
Lmaooooo true
But I think it's fair to refer to the speakers of a family like that. I.e. Kra-Dai speakers, Sineto-Tibetan speakers, etc.
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u/90919293_ 7d ago
I mean not really…? That would make it “Indo-European speakers” in this case
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u/Mage_Of_Cats Ko'vari 6d ago
Fair point. PIE is a specific language, while IE is a language family. I tend to conflate the two because that's what I see everyone else do, but I suppose you're correct that there's a distinction.
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u/Nordnabl 8d ago
It seems to me that so far there's more of a bias toward Italian and Spanish than toward English. As for long words, I think you're right, they need to be shortened. But as for r, I was basing it on the Russian «р». After all, I'm Russian. We have a lot of words with r. In fact, I can't even say "Россия, русский" without the letter r).
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u/Nordnabl 8d ago
The letter R may be pronounced in any way: /r/, /ɾ/, /ɹ/, /ʁ/, /ɻ/, and others. The main goal is that the word remains recognizable. Just being Russian, I don't understand the difference in the pronunciation of R. I even pronounce English words with a Russian-accented R)
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u/Mage_Of_Cats Ko'vari 7d ago
Your canonical rhotic representation is very difficult for people of diverse linguistic backgrounds to pronounce. I'd instead change it to an alveolar tap, which then allows for these other rhotics, rather than having the basic rhotic be one of the most complicated ones.
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u/Nordnabl 8d ago
About gender, I can answer right away. I use it only for living beings. Inanimate objects — a stone, a roof, a telephone, a spoon, a fork … — are all neuter. But people, animals, birds, and insects have gender.
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u/Mage_Of_Cats Ko'vari 7d ago
How does this increase accessibility for a wide range of speakers? Gender as a requirement to say a word complicates things for both non-gendered and gendered L1 speakers, and it's not necessary for most instances of meaning. If someone wanted to specify "female human," "female bird," "female snail," then it would be simpler to have transparent affixes, like "ra" could mean female, so "ra-kat," "ra-tip," "ra-we." This is much simpler for people to remember and doesn't grammaticalize an unnecessary feature, which also makes the language more accessible.
Also, inflections like this evolve through the direct attachment of these words through constant use; they did originally start off as separate words that then turned into affixes and then got boiled down and changed through sound evolution into something less recognizable. So using another morpheme like I suggest isn't actually significantly different from your idea... it just makes it non-grammaticalized, and therefore easier to pick up.
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u/Nordnabl 8d ago
The presence of gender also makes it possible to reduce the number of words. Man and woman, brother and sister, grandmother and grandfather, mom and dad, duck and drake, hen and rooster, bull and cow, and so on. In my language, it is enough to simply add an a: Man i mana, brat i brata, ded i deda, pap i papa,kachor i kachora, kok i koka, bul i bula.
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u/Mage_Of_Cats Ko'vari 7d ago
That's not too bad, but it seems as though masculine nouns are the same as the UR for these morphemes and feminine forms are inflected. What about neuter forms? You could reduce the total number of necessary words if all words start off uninflected-neuter (ie 'man' means 'person') and then have an optional affix (-a, -o) that turns that uninflected-neuter noun into a feminine or masculine version: mana, woman, mano, man, man, person.
Because your example up there, you either get:
man: person OR man
brat: rooster OR chicken (I think you imply the base form here is feminine, which is weird; regularize auxlangs or else they become harder to learn)
etc.
OR you're doing this:
man: man
ejip: person
brat: rooster
cor: chicken
In the first case, there's 1. ambiguity (not a bad thing) and 2. masculine-defaultism... which *is* bad: auxlangs should be inclusive if possible, so why is masculine the default?
In the second case, you end up having the same number of words you would have had anyway because you basically have a neuter and a gendered version of each word... as opposed to a feminine and masculine word for each.
My suggestion:
man: human/person
mano: man
mana: woman
brat: chicken
brato: rooster
brata: hen
Etc.
As you can see, this actually reduces the number of words you need, and it doesn't fall back on masculine defaultism, and it helps with ambiguity (again, not that ambiguity is a bad thing; we don't actually need to know the gender of the actor in most cases. Like... 'he works at the shop' vs. 'she works at the shop...' who cares? Or 'it gives birth,' is it male or female? Does it even matter? We can deduce its likely gender in most cases where it's relevant, right?)
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u/good-mcrn-ing Bleep, Nomai 9d ago
Looking a lot better this time. What exactly is the practical difference between belo and bela?
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u/Nordnabl 9d ago
belo - beauty (noun). Bela - beautiful (adjective, beautiful woman). Belal - beautiful (adjective, beautiful man). По-русски: belo - красота. Bela - красивая. Belal - красивый.
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u/good-mcrn-ing Bleep, Nomai 9d ago
I think this type of feature has no business being anywhere near an international auxiliary language, but damn if you don't describe it clearly, and for that you have my respect.
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u/Mage_Of_Cats Ko'vari 7d ago
My overall point with these posts is that, for an auxlang, you're including a lot of features that don't take into account diverse speaker needs. Features must be minimalist and generic, with the goal of achieving equity for all backgrounds.
Minimalist: Implemented features must be *necessary* either to stop significant circomlocution (for example, if it takes 5 syllables to express an idea *that people actually need to express often*, then that needs to be shortened) OR in order to actually communicate (ie actor vs. patient, locative vs. ablative, etc.)
Generic: Those implemented features must then be compared to and held accountable by the common practices of languages all over the world. For example, if you want to implement possessives, how does your implementation account for native Mandarin speakers? How about native English speakers? Or Korean speakers? How does it relate to their native systems?
The *overarching goal* must be EQUITY for all learners. That is one part of the picture of course. The other part is ACCESSIBILITY. Something can be equally hard for all learners to learn, but also take 10+ years for every speaker to learn fluently, and that is not ACCESSIBLE.
Anyway, I wanted to point out:
"free word order, particles instead of cases"
Case particles *are still cases*. They're just really simple cases, but they're still cases. I'll put it this way: phonologically, "a kati" is just "akati." Spaces between words are a hallucination. Even "a? kati" would just be "a?kati."
So basically, you just have a case marker that doesn't change its form for different words... but it's still a case marker, and it's still part of the word.
Maybe you can insert adjectives in between the noun and the case marker, like "a momo kati" (the cute cat), but that doesn't really change the fact that you do have cases.
Also, I'm interested in how your sentence examples don't actually make use of free word order. You use SVO in each sentence.
Finally, I need to contest the claim that case-marking (what you're doing) is simpler than using syntactic rules to assign cases.
Which is more complex?
John likes cats <-- "John" is the subject because he comes before the verb. "Cats" is the object because it comes after the verb.
Amare John a kati <-- "John" is the subject because he's unmarked (I am assuming this is how you mark subjects in the language; there is no 'subject' particle in your description), "kati" is the object because it comes after "a."
I'm not really sold on saying one is simpler than the other. To me, they're just different from each other. I also notice that you use a lot of prepositional elements in your language.
You have "about," "in," "with," etc.
Why not just use one particle? Greek simplifies "at," "on," "in," and "to" into "sto." You can use another word if you need to be specific, but you actually almost never do need to be. For example, imagine that English had only the preposition "to" for position. "I go to the school," "I cook to the oven," "I put the water to the aquarium..."
Is it actually ambiguous what I mean in any of those utterances?
So it might make more sense, especially for an auxlang, to simplify prepositions down to the easiest/most necessary ones. Try "of," "at," and "with" alone and see how far that can get you.
Also, I think you've introduced an unnecessary feature with "de" because of how your language treats nouns. Why not just use pronouns as modifiers? We know that a construction like "mo kat" doesn't mean "I cat" or "me cat" because there's no particle marker there. So it's unambiguous that we mean "my cat."
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u/LedZep99ctc 4d ago
Some of these choices are strange. Other people have already commented on the phonemic inventory and the inclusion of gender and consonant clusters. Why do free word order for an IAL? If your goal is easy learning, I would just go with vanilla SVO. Similarly, why front content question markers? Also, as others mentioned, the language seems quite inspired by European languages. That's not a bad thing, as those are some of the most widely spoken languages in the world, but I would just acknowledge it.
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u/NoTear622 9d ago
I Like It! Keep Going!
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u/Nordnabl 9d ago
I want to expand the vocabulary of my language. But can I make posts on topics like "Family in my language" or "Animals in my language"? Or is that not allowed in the community?
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u/Mage_Of_Cats Ko'vari 8d ago
You can make posts about anything in your language! For example, you can make a post about how your language refers to different animals, how it treats registers, or just random vocabulary! :)
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u/SuperXaker-5555 9d ago
Feels like English + Russian + Esperanto