Cân Gert

Cân Gert
Pronunciation	[/kaːn gɛrt/]
Created by	Frederic Bayer
Language family	isolate
Sources	Scottish Gaelic

Cân Gert is a philosophical, artistic language created by Frederic Bayer. Its name means "short language" in Cân Gert, and brevity is among its major design goals. It features a strongly isolating but partly agglutinating morphology. The name is a nod to its original inspiration, Toki Pona, whose own name means "good language".

The language is a priori in the sense that it is not derived from another language by way of regular sound changes and identifiable diachronic grammatical developments. However, as its vocabulary is mostly derived (often in intransparent ways) from the Scottish Gaelic lexicon, it could arguably be described as a posteriori depending on the definition applied.

Introduction

Inspirations

Toki Pona

The creator was first inspired to create Cân Gert while reading up on Toki Pona. He was intrigued by the idea of linguistic minimalism, and this sparked the idea of trying to create a language that featured more of a compromise between minimalism and pragmatism.

Several features of Toki Pona did not meet his own understanding of what would constitute a pragmatic-minimalistic language. Primarily, he considered brevity, clarity and ease of use to be important features/results of such a compromise philosophy. In that light, he identified several aspects which he wanted to approach differently, and which became part of Cân Gert's design goals.

Scottish Gaelic and others

Most of Cân Gert's root lexicon is taken (sometimes transparently, but often less so) from Scottish Gaelic. For instance, "cân" derives from cànan (language), and "gert" derives from goirid (short). A few aspects of Cân Gert's grammar are also inspired by it.

Occasionally, words from other languages contribute to choices of root words. For example, sû meaning "water, liquid, juice" is ostensibly derived from Gaelic sùgh (juice), but this choice is also influenced by Turkish su (water). Otherwise, a root may have been created based on Gaelic uisge (water) instead.

Design goals

As mentioned above, the guiding principles for Cân Gert are brevity, clarity, and ease of use.

Lexical minimalism

Applying minimalism to phonology and phonotactics, as Toki Pona does, limits the number of possible syllables. This results in long (i.e. polysyllabic) root words. A language with minimalistic phonology thus, in a sense, becomes lexically maximalistic. Bayer wanted to take the opposite approach by prioritising monosyllabic roots and instead allowing for a larger phonological inventory than Toki Pona.

Integrated compounds

Toki Pona allows concatenating root words in order to describe more complex concepts. However, these do not compound into a single lexeme orthographically, instead retaining spaces between each root term (separated compounds). This can make it more difficult to parse sentences, and also makes sentences appear longer due to the high prevalence of spaces.

For Toki Pona this makes sense, as compounding several polysyllabic roots could result in absurdly long words (e.g. "band", kulupu pi ma kalama musi > kulupupimakalamamusi). Also, the fact that roots are variously mono- or polysyllabic could create ambiguity in a compound - e.g. pini appearing in a compound could be either pi ni or pini.

Having only monosyllabic roots obviates both of these issues, which is why Cân Gert instead features integrated compounds.

Root lexicon size

A key feature of Toki Pona is its minimal lexicon of root words. While keeping roots to a minimum is important for a minimalist language, Bayer believes that both brevity and ease of comprehension are aided by allowing for a larger lexicon.

Non-universality

The creator believes on the basis of the egocentric predicament that it is impossible for anything a single person or group of people creates to be reflective of universal human experience. This is well-demonstrated in the area of constructed languages by the many problems that plague auxiliary languages in the area of semantics.

Hence, rather than an attempting to be a universal language – a language to suit everyone – Cân Gert makes no apologies for betraying its creator's own biases in its design. For instance, it has an easily recognisable, distinctly Scottish character.

Scottish influences

Besides the fact that the actual lexicon itself is mostly derived (in an irregular fashion) from the Scottish Gaelic lexicon, Cân Gert shows many other Scottish influences.

In vocabulary terms, the choice of what is assigned a root word against what is described by a compound is often based on how fundamental it would be considered in Scotland. For example, wheat, barley and oats all have their own roots (crin, iorn and corc respectively), but other cereal grains like corn, rice, rye and spelt use compounds (buîgran, bângran, fadiorn, sencrin – yellow grain, white grain, long barley, old wheat).

The phonology of the language is also strongly influenced by phonological features found in Scotland. The most palpable example of this is the positional allophony of [ɾ] and [ɹ] for the phoneme /r/, a feature common to many dialects of Scottish English and Scots.

Phonology

Cân Gert distinguishes 18 consonant phonemes and 10 vowels, not including allophones.

Vowels

The following vowels are distinguished in Cân Gert:

	Front	Near-front	Central	Near-back	Back
Close	iː uː ɪ ʊ eː oː ɛ ɔ a, aː
Near‑close
Close‑mid
Mid
Open‑mid
Near‑open
Open

Permissible diphthongs are /aɪ/, /aʊ/, /ɛɪ/, /ɔɪ/, and /ʊɪ/.

Consonants

	Bilabial	Labio-dental	Alveolar	Palatal	Velar	Glottal
Nasal	m		n		ŋ
Plosive	p b		t d		k g	ʔ
Fricative		f v	s			h
Approximant	w			j
Flap or tap			r
Lateral app.			l

Orthography

Currently, Cân Gert is written using a modified version of the Latin alphabet. The creator intends to eventually create a logographic system not unlike Toki Pona's sitelen pona, with basic glyphs representing root words and some combined glyphs to represent common compounds.

The short vowels /a ɛ ɪ ɔ ʊ/ are represented by ⟨a e i o u⟩, and the long vowels /aː eː iː oː uː/ by ⟨â ê î ô û⟩.

Most consonant letters used in the orthography correspond to their IPA phonemes, with the following exceptions:

IPA	Cân Gert
/ŋ/	⟨ng⟩
/k/	⟨c⟩
/w/	⟨u⟩
/j/	⟨i⟩
/ʔ/	⟨'⟩

Nominal morphology

Pronouns

The first, second, and third person singular pronouns are mi, hu, and san. The plural forms are generated by the plural prefix tor-.

To form possessive pronouns, the singular or plural pronoun is prefixed with the preposition ec meaning "at". This mirrors the Gaelic prepositional pronoun paradigm agam, agad, aige, etc.

Determiners

• Emphatic circumduplication

Verbal morphology

• Verbal clitic
• Null copula