Car Slam
The Language of False Cognates
Overview
Car Slam is a critically endangered language spoken by a small population of indigenous North Sea islanders. Despite being an isolate of no relation to its Indo-European neighbors, anglophones tend to find Car Slam superficially familiar.
This is a conlang project under development by Sam Frost (/u/destiny-jr) for the dual purposes of shits and giggles. I pray it brings you only the latter.
History
Early Middle Car Slam (EMCS) was an isolating language that favored free-floating particles over morphological transformations. Although modern Car Slam prefers affixation, it retains many artifacts of EMCS and is often best understood through that lens. Evolutionary history will be provided wherever it is useful.
It began in 2015 with a series of Reddit posts portending a language composed entirely of false cognates with English. Now, ten years, later, I return with vaster knowledge and renewed vigor to perpetrate my promised crimes.
Thank you for reading.
Nouns
Basic Paradigm
The unmarked dictionary form of a noun is the nominative plural. Suffixes mark for case and a prefix indicates the singular number.
Despite Car Slam's deep orthography, the noun lie performs a highly regular set of declensions.
| PL | SG | |
| NOM | lie | fly |
| ACC | liar | flier |
| GEN | liars | fliers |
| PL | SG | |
| NOM | mall | small |
| ACC | melt | smelt |
| GEN | melts | smelts |
Each noun root has its own unique SG prefix and ACC suffix, but the GEN suffix for almost all nouns is -s.
Irregularities within a paradigm are common, such as the vowel change that occurs in mall.
Human Nouns
Nouns that refer to people constitute their own class due to the fact that they distinguish a total of four cases and seven numbers.
Columns are labelled with glossing abbreviations for neatness. Hover over one to read the full name.
| PL | SG | DU | TR | PC | GP | CL | |
| NOM | eye | sigh | why | my | dye | lye | vie |
| ACC | hire | sire | wire | mire | dire | layer | fire |
| GEN | hires | sires | wires | mires | tires | layers | fires |
| DAT | hired | sired | wired | mired | tired | layered | fired |
Human noun forms are comparatively predictable thanks to a quirk of evolution.
Early Middle Car Slam featured an array of number-marking via particles that also encoded animacy. Only human nouns retained all seven number particles, which themselves diminished over time and came to be reanalyzed as prefixes.
Hover over an EMCS word in the chart to the right to see its descendants in modern Car Slam.
| EMCS | English | ore ("child") |
| so | "one" | sore |
| be/we | "two" | bore |
| me | "three" | more |
| to/do | "some" | tore |
| lull | "many" | lore |
| if/of | "every" | fore |
Lesser Animacy
Animacy particles became increasingly optional during the millennium that transpired between ECMS and modern Car Slam, and the speech community was willing to throw out the co-articulated number distinctions with the bathwater. The surviving animate particles replaced their inanimate counterparts, closing the book on morphological animacy-marking.
Most non-human nouns are left with only PL and SG expressions in the modern day. Others were more stubborn to varying degrees. Thus a weakened animate-inanimate distinction shattered into an animacy hierarchy; the more inherent animacy a noun was perceived to have, the more number markings it has today.
| DU | TR | PC | GP | CL | |
| Animals and plants | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | |
| Intangible concepts | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ||
| Bodies of/running water | ✓ | ✓ | |||
| Weather phenomena | ✓ |
Derivation
Reliable patterns of derivation are few and far between. Most compound words resist analysis and must be taken as whole lexemes. For example, expert ("sun") is formed from hack and spurned, meaning "day's ball." It's unknown whether this etymology is transparent to native speakers.
Here are a handful of evolutionarily young processes that build new words with something approaching regularity:
| Morphology | Example | |||
| Agent | NOM.SG + -esque, -ish | gray council |
→ | grayish councillor |
| N.→Adj. | a-(ACC.SG)ing | scorch name |
→ | a-scorching nameful (famous) |
| Place | Sir (GEN.PL)s-a-lot | lump food |
→ | Sir Lumps-a-lot kitchen, pantry |
Compound nouns are incompatible with the standard paradigm, so Car Slam makes do without. Case is conveyed by the article (as always) while stress placement indicates number. Plural nouns stress their initial syllable and singular nouns their second.
less is peel Sir Lúmps-a-lot
in the.3.DAT kitchen.SG
all pile gráyish
with the.3.COM councillor.PL
Note: Diacritics added by the author for clarity.
Articles
Much like nouns themselves, articles are the result of ancient particles coalescing into a fixed form. Irregularities and suppletion have had comparatively little time to erode the table.
| Person | NOM | ACC | GEN | DAT | COM | VOC |
| 1 | not | rum | ram | ream | rhyme | room |
| 1 EXCL | lick | luck | lack | leak | like | look |
| 2 | slip | slut | slat | sleet | slight | soot |
| 3 | pill | pull | pal | peel | pile | pool |
Car Slam's articles are mandatory directly in front of all nouns. They express case and person but NOT number or definiteness, which leads some linguists to analyze them as pronouns. The line is blurred even further by noun-dropping when both speaker and listener know the referent:
So honey pull.
(IMP take.IND.SG 3.ACC)
Take it.
Articles are the only part of speech to express the comitative and vocative cases morphologically. Nouns assume their accusative forms to agree with these additional cases.