Auquardo

Matthew McVeagh | my conlangs

A language that’s so ‘awkward’ it is completely inconsistent in phonology and grammar.

Auquardo is a language created to be as awkward as possible. It would combine different and conflicting phonologies and grammars, not only within the same language but within the same word. One half of a word might be a Hawaiian style model of (C)V simplicity, the other half a North-West Caucasian nightmare of consonantal complexity. Some of it would be ultra-analytic but a sentence might suddenly morph into polysynthesis. There would be things like noun classes, but they would be inconsistent and an adjective might not agree with a noun but with what the noun would be like if it was the sort of noun the adjective could agree with. Some verbs would be accusative, some ergative, some tripartite... I'd probably add in a saliency or hierarchy factor but work it differently for different contexts. Some important subjects would have very vague vocab with no means of clarifying or distinguishing; some less important issues would be pedantically nuanced into pointlessly specific variants. In short it would be a pain in the arse to learn and use, and not much short of that to create.

But it would still be a workable language. There would be a way to say everything, it could actually be used, just with great difficulty.

"An adjective might not agree with a noun but with what the noun would be like if it was the sort of noun the adjective could agree with"

This thought was inspired by someone asking about the feasibility of having a gender and noun class system. Imagine that Auquardo, with its inconsistency, has two or more parallel noun class systems, one like European gender and one like Bantu entity sets. Some adjectives might only inflect for one of the systems, meaning when they're used with nouns of the other system there's a bit of a problem deciding what form it should take.