irregular pluralization(noun)/tense change(verb)/intensity change(adjective) (cactus/cacti instead of -(e)s for noun, hold is held instead of -ed (verb), bad is worse instead of -er (adjective)
silent letters/non phonetic spelling
accent stress/emphasis (moral/morale)
ORDER OF (FUCKING) ADJECTIVES
(FUCKING) CONTRONYMS (words that have multiple meanings and they’re opposites)
a/an
1 word with multiple meanings
synonyms? (someone could argue this isnt bullshit, but there are words that EXACTLY mean something else (if you search a dictionary for the word, the results are gonna be like: “another term for [WORD]”))
(i thought of this post when i was having a minor breakdown because of scenarios when translation could fuck a story, wanna make a conlang? (actually no, just a conSYNTAX))
It’d be similar to english except with more words, and fewer long words, and every letter is a word. Basically I’d want it to be more dense, so it would also have tones like chinese, except each tone is just a single pitch which can be transposed as necessary. Letters would be distinguished by shape as well as value (it would be written with utensils that can make darker or lighter lines depending on the pressure, without changing the size of the lines). Every word would also be associated with a certain color, for faster reading if it’s written with that color, but that wouldn’t be essential to understanding the meaning, because that would make life difficult for colorblind people. Also there would be a lot more different kinds of consonants
a word having multiple meanings is probably inevitable. I don’t think you can stop people from creating new meanings for words. Ideally I’d want all the words to be 1 syllable, but people would probably combine some similar to how they do in english like trustworthy or accident-prone. You can’t possibly have a vocab that accounts for everything people might ever want to say, and it’s much easier to combine existing words or use them in a slightly different sense than to make a brand new word and explain it to everybody who hasn’t heard it before. For multi-syllable words, I’d want there to be accent stress
English but without repeating words (their and there, red and read, etc) and silent letters. Additionally I’d remove the letter C due to it being redundent. Use S or K. Car? Kar. Pacify? Pasify. Control? Kontrol. Knack? Just remove the C all together. Knak. C does not need to exist and it’s starting to genuinely frustate me as I talk about it.
