Zango

Zango (formerly called Penta and Dengo) is a funlang created by Rich Harrison (formerly called Rick Harrison). It consists of 5-letter nouns, verbs and adjectives that have their consonants and vowels arranged in a CVCCV or CCVCV pattern, plus a few grammatical particles of CV or CVn shape.

Vocabulary Sources

Words in Zango are created in various ways:

(1) By borrowing and slightly modifying a word that has cognates in several natlangs. dobri, the Zango word for "good," is inspired by inspired by Czech dobrý, Polish dobry, Ukrainian dóbryj

(2) By taking bits and pieces of natlang words and fusing them together. sabro, which means "morning," contains fragments of Japanese asa, Turkish sabah, Greek proí, Russian útro

(3) By fusing bits of other Zango words. denxu, meaning "diary," contains pieces of the Zango words for "day" and "book."

(4) By inexplicable poetic inspiration or other undocumented subconscious process. An example is xazma, the word for rain.

Orthography and Phonology

The language Zango only uses lower-case letters of the Latin alphabet. The letters and their most likely pronunciations (expressed in IPA) are listed below. The inventory of phonemes is not meant to be bizarre or interesting; attention has been focused on experimenting with syntax and on enjoyment of the vocabulary creation process.

a - a or ɑ ; e - e or ɛ ; i - i ; o - o ; u - u or ɯ

b - b ; p - p or pʰ

d - d ; t - t or tʰ

g - g ; k - k or kʰ

z - z ; s - s

j - ʒ or ʤ ; x - ʃ or ʂ

v - v ; f - f

l - l ; r - r, ʀ, ɻ

m - m ; n - n

h - h ; w - w ; y - j

The digraph ai represents the diphthong aɪ or ɑɪ which only occurs in a few particles.

Grammar and Syntax

Zango is essentially an isolating language.

Known tendencies in Zango syntax:

• SOV in formal usage; flexible in poetry and in short, casual statements

• demonstratives, possessives and adjectives come before the nouns they modify

• a name precedes a title or honorific

On 15 Feb 2016 the following speculations about likely future developments were published:

• postpositions rather than prepositions

• relative clauses precede the nouns to which they refer

• subordinators appear at the end of subordinate clauses

Further Reading

Zango_lexicon on FrathWiki

ZangoNotes blog