User:Pjacobi/Constructed Languages (minor)

=Ceqli=

Ceqli is an artificial language originally inspired by Loglan. Its name is pronounced "cheng-lee", a blend of the names "Chinese" and "English", expressing that the grammar of Ceqli is mostly based on those two languages. Ceqli is an isolating language; words are not inflected, but simply put in combinations with other morphemes.

Ceqli began as an attempt to improve the morphology of Loglan. The morphology of Ceqli is designed to make it easy to tell where each word begins. Every word begins with a consonant or series of consonants, and the rest of the word is a series of vowels and/or "weaks", which are defined to be l, m, n, r, q, w, and y.

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 "bing") is the word for "ice", borrowed directly from Mandarin. "Blu" (blue) is borrowed from English, "dolor" (sorrow) from Spanish, "dyelo" (matter, business, affair) from Russian, "gin" (computer) from Hindi, "hana" (nose) from Japanese, etc.

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.