Pondscum

Pondscum is spoken by pond nymphs, a species of green amphibian leech-mouthed gossips and crybabies.

They live in swampy lakes and rivers, and navigate more by touch than sight. Their lungs are powerful enough to project underwater, but they have the easiest time chatting above water in the shallows.

They connive in underhanded mean girl politics and melodramatic soap opera drama all the time, but they never really have wars or violence.

The language is spoken really fast and characterized by wild fluctuations in emphasis. It sounds like a variety of squishy, fluid-filled objects being steadily fed into a garbage disposal. (Sounds described below are for the human-throat adaptation.)

The written form is rapidly woven in long strings of reeds (and in each other’s reed-like hair), and is read mainly through touch.

Sounds

My idea for this is that it sounds silly and goofy to English-speaking ears, sort of in the manner of comic book sound effects. Like zip! Bam! Pow! Plip! Blup! Fizz!

So I’m thinking words are usually a single syllable, CVC, and the only vowel sounds are the ‘short’ English vowels: bAg, bEg, bIg, bOg, bUg.

Besides that, I'll keep it simple again and use the English consonants rendered in the English orthography.

Structure

Adjectives

All content words are adjectives!

Adjectives can be emphasized in a lot of interchangeable ways, including volume, length, repetition, trill, physical gesture, and preceding pause. (Nymphs can trill any sound indefinitely.)

There are three levels of emphasis, or ‘ranks,’ that create concrete phonemic distinctions. These are marked in gloss by the numbers 1, 2, and 3 after words.

Usually rank 2 expresses a neutral intensity for the adjective, making 3 a superlative and 1 a diminutive.

Verbs and particles don’t have ranks and are expressed without special emphasis (the equivalent of rank 1).

Notes

In woven writing, they use repeated, stretched-out, thicker, or more ornate patterns. When typing, they use bold, italics, underlines, asterisks, and so on. But most importantly, they employ the three alphabets: lowercase, uppercase, and uppestcase.

Due to “emphasis inflation,” the language has progressively become louder and more playfully distorted and physically muppetish.

Nouns

All (improper) nouns are composed of a series of adjectives.

The ranks of the adjectives are part of what defines the word; e.g. ‘round1-big3’ means ‘the moon,’ while ‘round3-big1’ means ‘society.’

Modifier Stacking

Adjectives and nouns can be stacked indefinitely, each modifying the next. The first word is the outermost layer of the onion and the final word is the core.

It’s like if English didn’t have any prepositions.

Verbs

There are only two verbs: ‘be’ covers all static states of being, and ‘become’ covers all change.

A clause is made up of an object, a verb, and a ‘description’ that assigns properties to the object. The order can be OVD or DVO, and the verb inflects based on the order. I'm showing this in gloss with little arrows pointing from object >to> description.

The verb also inflects for conditionals. Other moods (statement, question, command) all use the regular form of the verb and come down to context.

Source Particle

All clauses end with a ‘source particle,’ which usually notes the origin of the information. (Casually, it can be skipped and conveyed by tone of voice.)

In a question, the source particle suggests who is expected to have the answer. In a conditional, it suggests who is expected to know or determine whether the condition is met. In a command, it marks the target.

There is a special one, /dot/, which doesn't actually name a source, but instead marks the statement as a desire of the speaker.

Questions

Pnd doesn't use a rising tone for questions, nor does it have WH-words. Instead, you include two or more possible answers in your sentence.

“Which flavor ice cream do you want?” → Lit: “You want chocolate vanilla strawberry ice cream.”

There are no simple equivalents to the words ‘yes’ and ‘no.’ Instead you use context-specific adjectives.

“Do you skydive?” → Lit: “You skydive sometimes never.”

Like

The pond nymph version of the valley girl “like” has no mandatory uses but is essential to natural speech. It usually occurs at least once per sentence.

The sound is best imitated by humans with a tongue cluck or lip pop. It’s rendered in gloss as an asterisk.

Its multiple functions include:

> Clarifying borders between ideas, especially to separate a series of loose adjectives from a noun chunk.

> Assigning emphasis that is unrelated to rank, especially to give focus to words with low rank.

> Expressing vagueness and uncertainty.

> Acting as a word-replacer, like for a fill-in-the-blank, to keep a name anonymous, or to indirectly imply an impolite phrase.

The collocations for where a * does and does not feel natural are notoriously nuanced, indescribable, and specific to different neighborhoods.