Cân Gert

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

Cân Gert is a philosophical, artistic, and a priori 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.

Introduction

Inspiration

The creator was first inspired to create Cân Gert while reading up on Toki Pona. He was intrigued by the idea of linguistic minimalism, but several features of Toki Pona did not meet his own understanding of what would constitute a minimalistic language. Primarily, he considered brevity, clarity and ease of use to be important features/results of minimalism. In that light, he identified the following aspects which he wanted to approach differently:

Phonological vs. lexical minimalism

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

Integrated vs. separated 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. 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 this problem.

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.

Nominal morphology

Determiners

• Emphatic circumduplication

Verbal morphology

• Verbal clitic
• Null copula