Intro

Glotoida he Aia (IPA: /glo.toj.da.he.a.ja/, colloquially called "Glotoida" or "Aia", abbreviated as "GA" or "GHA") is a conlang made by jan Melon in 2023 AD. It is a kitchen sink conlang made to explore the following features:

• Mixed Head Directionality: Have methods to make both head-initial (noun before adjective, verb before object) and head-final phrases (adjective before noun, object before verb).
• Specialized Passives: Differentiate three types of passives based on its thematic role, i.e. the patient (an existing object affected by the action), the product (a new object created as a result of the action), and the ideate (a hypothetical reference that may or may not exist).
• Clarity of Pragmatics: Explicitly state your expectation and judgment about a statement by using discourse markers or interjections.

Its core vocabulary is a collection of stolen ten-dollar words from English ISV (or pseudo-ISV) with a style similar to well-known auxlangs, particularly Glosa, Esperanto, and u/srivatsa_74’s Lingua Akademika. It is an idiosyncratic euroclone that prioritizes Greek over Latin roots, removes tense/case/person/plurality agreement, and upholds 21st century sensibilities such as unisex terms for people and local words for toponyms and culturally specific objects like food and clothes.

Name Etymology

The phrase glotoida he Aia can be translated as 'the language whose name is Aia'. More precisely, the word glotoida literally means ‘something which resembles a language’ (glota 'language' + -oida '-like, similar'). This is similar to the concept of a 'lange' or a 'languoid' that includes any lingual entity regardless of its status or origin^[1]. At the same time, this addresses the frequent objection that conlangs do not accurately represent how natural languages work because they lack complexity and depth^[2].

Its proper name, "Aia" /aja/, came from the word ai /aj/ that means 'yes' or 'is' (inspired by English aye^[3] and Tagalog ay^[4]). A speaker will almost certainly say this word multiple times during a conversation. This feature is very noticable, which is why it became the name of the language. A similar phenomenon happened to France which is called "Wīwī" in Maori, from the word oui 'yes' in French^[5].

You can find a guide for its transliteration into other writing systems on the alphabet & phonology page. For languages that use han characters, it is prefered to be written as 唉亞語 (zh: 唉亚语, ㄞㄧㄚˇㄩˇ, āiyǎ yǔ; ja: 唉亜語, アイア語, アイアご, aiago) that literally means the 'ah yes! secondary language'^[6].

References

[1] Jeff Good; Calvin Hendryx-Parker (June 2006), “Modeling Contested Categorization in Linguistic Databases”, in Proceedings of the EMELD ’06 Workshop on Digital Language Documentation: Tools and Standards: The State of the Art.

"The figure in (2) makes use of the term languoid which Rosetta uses, at present, as a cover term for any type of lingual entity: language, dialect, family, language area, etc. It is roughly similar to the term taxon from biological taxonomy, except it is agnostic as to whether the relevant linguistic grouping is considered to be genealogical or areal (or based one some other possible criteria for grouping languages). Another word which as been suggested (by David Gil) for this concept is lange [lænjˇ]."

[2] Danny Hieber (@linguisticdiscovery) on Threads (also available on Reddit)

"Natural languages are messy, inconsistent, illogical, complex-adaptive spontaneous orders riddled with exceptions and layers of culturally-specific history that are shaped by constraints on human cognition. No conlanger could hope to create a language with the depth and richness of a natural language."

"As the economist Friedrich Hayek once noted, language is “the result of human actions, not of human design”."

[3] Webster, Noah. 1889. Webster's collegiate dictionary : a dictionary of the English language : giving the derivations, pronunciations, definitions and synonyms of a large vocabulary of the words occurring in literature, art, science, and the common speech. p.67.

"Aye} (äĭ), adv. [Origin uncertain.] Yes ; yea ; —Ay
Ay } expressing assent, or an affirmative answer.
Aye (äĭ), n. An affirmative vote or voter."

[4] Blake, Frank Ringgold. 1925. A grammar of the Tagálog language, the chief native idiom of the Philippine Islands. p.295.

"The particle ay, after a vowel ay or y, is used as follows, viz.:
a) to connect a subject with a following predicate ..."

[5] Te Aka Maori Dictionary, available at https://maoridictionary.co.nz/word/9284 and https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/W%C4%ABw%C4%AB

"Wīwī 1. (loan) (location) France - a country in western Europe.
Ā ko Wīwī e minamina ana ki te mea i a ia kia ea ai tana mate i te Tiamana (TW 22/6/1878:310).
/ France wishes to avenge its defeat by the Germans."

"From French oui, oui (“yes, yes”)."

[6] Wiktionary Entries:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/唉
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/亞
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/語