Gampang

Matthew McVeagh | my conlangs

A language in which all or most words are disyllabic, with the first syllable containing all the lexical information in one morpheme, and the second all the grammatical in a single fusional morpheme.

The above principle is systematic. There would be no derivational affixes or multiple grammatical affixes, and in order to get all grammatical info into one unique syllable there would need to be considerable variety of syllables. This prospect is very difficult, as even with a baroque phoneme inventory there are only so many possible syllables. I've chosen a fairly simple (C(C))V(C) structure for a few of my languages, but here I'm going to have to accept more clusters and phonemes. The lexical-semantic distribution would have to be light and analytic – many meanings would take several words. The range of grammatical features combined would have to be efficient, e.g. no subject marking on verbs if subjects are explicit anyway.

It wouldn't be the end of the world if there was some homonymy in either the lexical or grammatical morphs, as long as word class was clear or syntax or context could disambiguate. There could be massive homophony between the two sections and it wouldn't matter. "Shkrumpf" could mean both "umbrella" and "allative plural with definiteness", but "shkrumpfshkrumpf" is still clear as "to the umbrellas". However while I might accept redundancy and ambiguity I would still aim to avoid it.

For some reason the name "Gampang" popped into my head around this language, so that's what I will probably call it, although I don't know how I'd wangle "gam" and "pang" to mean what they need to mean. Having looked it up I've discovered it's the Indonesian for "easy", which has probably remained in my subconscious since I learnt some Indonesian when I was 15.