Tǫ̈dǫ̈ih! :)

he/him | (he, en) [de]

[paizau]

Tǫ̈dǫ̈ih! [tʌ̃ˈɾʌ̃̂ĩ] "Hello!"

Welcome to my conlang blog!

i plan for this blog to just be a dump for everything conlang related, all the way from random shitposts to proper posts about my conlang, plus reblogs of linguistics and conlang related stuff. i have two main conlangs - Yő-Ngot [jʌː ˈŋɔt] (previously Ngįout), which is was basically done but is now undergoing a rehaul lol, and Kshafa [kʂā.fā]. Hope that you'll find my posts interesting :))

main blog: @haomnamu

[paizau]

well. i've somehow saved over my sound change applier file so i basically have to redo it. and i dont remember most of it lol. that sucks :/

[paizau]

the full rules were still loaded in a lexurgy tab on my phone 🫠 damn that was a scare

[paizau]

well. i've somehow saved over my sound change applier file so i basically have to redo it. and i dont remember most of it lol. that sucks :/

[paizau]

what is conlanging if not relearning how to get the correct forms from your sound changes again and again and again and again and

[yuk-tepat]

what would you say is the best way to start out making a logography?

Thanks for the ask, this is just a note that I HAVE read the question & am going to get to it.

[yuk-tepat]

Advice About Making Logographic Scripts: Part II

Part I is here by the way: https://www.tumblr.com/yuk-tepat/821365323198529536/what-would-you-say-is-the-best-way-to-start-out?source=share

In the previous post I mostly just described the generalities of how logographs work. Here, I’d like get more practical by laying out a plan for applying this to a conlang writing system.

TLDR: Making a sign by combining two signs which both suggest the meaning is a possibility, but actually much less common than combining signs where at least one sign suggests the sound. In developing your own language and script, it helps to distinguish visualizable and non-visualizable concepts. Give the non-visualizable concepts names similar to the visualizable ones, then reuse pictures of the visualizable words to spell similar-sounding abstract concepts.

Ideogrammatic compounds

Before that though, I’d like to comment on one more thing which should have been in the last post, ideogrammic compounds. Previously I discussed how words are spelled out using multiple signs, some of which suggest the meaning of the word and some suggest the sound. I gave an example of the Chinese characters 水, 永, and 泳. 泳 yong ‘swim’ is composed of different parts. The three dots on the left side are a variant of 水 and indicate the meaning has something to do with water. The rest of the character is the same as 永 yong ‘eternal’ and indicates that it is pronounced the same way, hence it is dependent on the spoken Chinese language. (Contemporarily, it is; the twist, as we saw before, is that 永 is the original character for ‘swim,’ which was then borrowed to write ‘forever’ as well, because they sound the same.) This kind of sound-meaning combination is the phonetic-semantic character.

There is another possible way to use characters in combination. It is possible to combine two basic signs into a compound character where each of the components relate to the whole meaning in some way. This is called an ideogrammatic compound (or compound ideograph – there is a lot of variety in terminology, sorry).永 in its original meaning is an example of this; it was probably an image of a person in water, hence ‘swim.’

For many people, this seems the intuitive way to form logographs for more complex ideas that don’t have their own basic signs. If they are making a logographic writing system, they may think this is how they need to figure out how to write all the words in their language. The thing is, while these kinds of characters exist, they are much less common than combinations that combine meaning and sound. As a matter of fact, in Chinese something like 90% of all characters are phonetic-semantic compound characters. They absolutely swamp all the other kinds of characters combined. So realistically, your system should make a very big place for this kind of spelling.

Planning

Anyway, moving on.

What follows is some advice about making your system. Note, a lot of this is not how I made my logographs. A lot of this is what I figured out haphazardly while working inefficiently, and looking back, how I think I would make another script. Consider this partially tested.

I would like to start by talking about visualizable and non-visualizable concepts, and then walk through several exercises in making them into stuff you can write with, and turn to several ways of organizing logographs – because logographic systems have many, many more signs than purely phonetic ones, and this both makes them more difficult to organize, but also makes organizing them much more important.

For a moment, I would like to get some obvious stuff out of the way. What material do people write on? What do they write with? What direction do they write? Are their signs all the same size or not? This is stuff for any writing system, and they matter to logographs too.

Let’s start by drawing some pictures and thinking about visualizable concepts and non-visualizable ones.

You don’t necessarily have to start with pictures, but it can be helpful. Remember that you don’t have to draw well, in fact, drawing very badly can result in nice shapes that aren’t too figurative. Remember, also, that cultures may not necessarily visualize the same object in the same way.

So, try drawing some stuff. Try to draw very simple, recognizable stuff. Think about what the picture means / represents. You can keep drawing if you want, over and over until the pictures stop looking like pictures and just look like strokes.

Start your wordlist: Visualizable and non-visualizable

I’d like to ask you to make up a list of all the concepts you want to put into words – something you probably do anyway as you make your language. There is a whole separate discussion to be had about ‘What words do I need’ – I won’t go into that here. For now, we’ll assume that you have a word / idea list and your list is sufficient, at least to start with. You can always add to your list.

I would like you to try practicing dividing these words / concepts into ‘visualizable’ and ‘non-visualizable’ categories. Visualizable includes anything that can be represented by an image. This might include things like ‘tree,’ ‘rock,’ ‘sun,’ ‘baby,’ whatever. If you want to be a bit more detailed, you can distinguish things that can be represented by a straightforward picture of the thing itself, and things that can be represented iconically, things like ‘up’ or ‘down.’ Non-visualizable includes abstract things such as ‘be,’ ‘you,’ etc. that you can’t just draw. This would include plenty of verbs, abstract nouns, probably all of your grammatical words / morphemes. It might include some theoretically visualizable ideas, such as colors – assuming coloration isn’t an inherent part of your writing system. These are words you can’t just draw, but you need to figure out some way to represent.

Matching the elements

Assuming you have a list, you’ve started making up words, and drawn some pictures, now try assigning words and pictures to each other.

First, match your crude pictures to your visualizable concepts – e.g., if ‘sun’ is on your list of essential words and you have a picture of a sun, they go together.

For the next quasi-exercise in logographic script making, I would like you to assign phonetic forms you have made up in your conlang to the concepts on your list, but only to the ‘visualizable’ concepts we just discussed. Your job right now is to pair up the three items (1) a wordform in your language, (2) a meaning, (3) an image or icon of #2, which will become part of your writing system.

At this point, I would recommend that you spread your words out as much as possible over your phonological space. So choose forms that are fairly distinct from each other as much as possible, not too close, but that cover a lot of ground. You should ideally have words that include most consonants in your language, and every vowel, and as many combinations of them as possible – unless of course you decide that you’re going to ignore certain distinctions. For example, voicing – it is entirely possible that you may decide that your writing system will simply not regularly distinguish consonants that differ only in voicing. Egyptian tends to be strict about consonants, but ignore vowels completely. Logographic systems do have phonetic parts, but they also tend to be fuzzier than non-logographic systems – indeed that’s why they include semantic elements, to distinguish words that are otherwise similar.

So far, this accords with what we might call “best practices” in conlanging, insofar as there is such a thing: most people would probably recommend you use all your sounds, and different combinations and syllable types, and not make all your words sound the same.

Step 2 is going to be assigning phonetic forms to the non-visualizable concepts, but in this case, I want you to give them forms that are similar or even the same as the visualizable concepts. How exactly you interpret ‘similar’ depends on you and your language. You could use a strict syllable correspondence, where the first consonant-vowel in the words is the same. You may choose to match the consonants but ignore the vowels. Or you may work on vibes and just match words with a ‘close enough’ ‘family-resemblance type’ similarity – such as Chinese, where phonetics tend to match an entire syllable but hand-wave away lots of fine phonetic distinctions.

This IS a break from the typical ‘best practices.’ Not that this is bad advice, but logographs change the calculation. When it comes to logographs, it will be an advantage to have homophones. This is more of an aesthetic rule than a structural one, for the same reason that a book probably won’t give two major characters both the name ‘Jim’ unless there is a specific good reason to have characters with the same name. Here, we have a good reason to have two Jims.

If you remember the first post, talking about the rebus principle, you may guess why: images of visualizable concepts can be used to write abstract concepts that cannot be visualized easily. What you want to do here is to create pathways by which a picture can be borrowed to write an abstract concept. And it will depend entirely on your language. You are finding your own language’s equivalent to “eye = I.”

Semantic elements

The final step of this stage is to completely borrow over the images of various visualizable concepts to spell the nonvisualizable concepts.

Having completed this step, you can write stuff, but with a lot of ambiguity. Obviously, it’s now hard to tell if, say, an image of an eye means ‘I’ or ‘eye.’

The next stage is to clarify this ambiguity by reinserting a semantic element that you partially removed by borrowing images to write words they don’t literally represent. Here, start adding back in images, signs, marks of some kind, to distinguish different words that might be written the same. You may bring in any unused pictures you made at the very beginning to use, or variants of those. Or you might decide that some of the pictures you have that have been borrowed to spell phonetically by the rebus principle will be reserved completely for phonetic spelling. What you are starting to do here is create semantic determinatives like the radicals of Chinese characters.

Note that typically, the abstract concepts now written with images of other things will get to keep those images they captured. They own them completely. More likely, additional elements will be added to words that originally matched the image. So in a hypothetical English example, a sign that was a picture of a bee, which was used to write the word “bee,” would begin to be used to write the verb ‘be.’ Beyond that, it is more likely that the bee image will become mainly a sign of the copula, and that a new sign will be created, or a new addition made to that sign to indicate that, yes, the bee-image now in fact does mean “bee” here. This is evident in my perennial example, 泳 – the original glyph 永 switched over entirely to the abstract meaning ‘eternal’ and a new glyph for ‘swim’ was created by adding figurative water drops to it.

OK, I’m very sorry about this, but I’ve already written a lot and I’m kind of tired now, so I’m going to finish up the rest of this later and this is going to go into a THIRD part. Any questions so far?

[sombra-conlangs]

I've decided to start a new conlang!

Unlike my other langs I'm going to share my whole process for making this one here, on bluesky and on my webbed site conlang-guide.bearblog.dev/guides-make-a-conlang-with-me so if you think that'd be interesting or fun feel free to follow. I'll try to make things beginner friendly.

On my site I'll also focus on explaining things a bit more so it's easier to follow along with me if you want to make your own lang. I will say if you've never made a conlang before following my method won't be super easy, but I figured I'd try to use this as an opportunity to teach ppl abt the hobby anyway.

So let's start with step 0: setting goals.

There's lots of different types of constructed languages, I'll make the most common one: a naturalistic conlang. That means one of the main goals is to emulate the features you see in natural languages such as irregularity, language change, and so on.

Side note: sometimes with naturalistic conlangs the naturalism is the main focus. For me it isn't always, a lot of the time I'm going after aesthetic appeal as well which can be quite subjective. I'm doing that for this one as well, so one of my goals is to make the language beautiful (to me).

Lore-wise this will be the language of demons, and to make things simpler I'm deciding they're quite reclusive, they don't exit from the underworld often.

This won't be set in the same worlds as my other languages. And I actually don't think I'll expand too much on it beyond the relevant areas.

The reason them being reclusive makes things simpler is I won't have to worry about how other languages influence this one, so I don't have to make other complementary langs to borrow vocabulary from. I might make other languages in the future but for now I won't worry about it.

As for the speakers I'm thinking of mostly regular style demons: they're humanoid but they got horns, tails, wings, and maybe some draconic or snake-like features would be cool, like scales in some areas and forked tongues. I should make a sketch or smth to solidify their appearance a bit more.

I'm thinking they'll live for a long time and will be able to use magic that they possess innately, perhaps some form of necromancy would be fitting. The ability to control something like fire also makes sense.

And finally their home. The underworld is in a separate plane from the human realm and while many souls can end up there they're kept secluded, so most demons don't really interact with humans.

The place is desolate, cold, I'm imagining like a massive cave with lots of dark rock, sand and ice.

So I guess I'm going for a slightly less conventional version of hell. There isn't quite a day-night cycle but they got some weather in the form of wind and fog. They have earthquakes and sinkholes.

And there wouldn't be a lot of plants and animals but I imagine you could find a few here and there.

Mostly little bugs I think, given it's not the most hospitable environment I should look into creatures that can survive harsher conditions.

But yeah that seems like a pretty good base to start working on the language proper soon!

[sombra-conlangs]

I've decided to start a new conlang!

Unlike my other langs I'm going to share my whole process for making this one here, on bluesky and on my webbed site conlang-guide.bearblog.dev/guides-make-a-conlang-with-me so if you think that'd be interesting or fun feel free to follow. I'll try to make things beginner friendly.

On my site I'll also focus on explaining things a bit more so it's easier to follow along with me if you want to make your own lang. I will say if you've never made a conlang before following my method won't be super easy, but I figured I'd try to use this as an opportunity to teach ppl abt the hobby anyway.

So let's start with step 0: setting goals.

There's lots of different types of constructed languages, I'll make the most common one: a naturalistic conlang. That means one of the main goals is to emulate the features you see in natural languages such as irregularity, language change, and so on.

Side note: sometimes with naturalistic conlangs the naturalism is the main focus. For me it isn't always, a lot of the time I'm going after aesthetic appeal as well which can be quite subjective. I'm doing that for this one as well, so one of my goals is to make the language beautiful (to me).

Lore-wise this will be the language of demons, and to make things simpler I'm deciding they're quite reclusive, they don't exit from the underworld often.

This won't be set in the same worlds as my other languages. And I actually don't think I'll expand too much on it beyond the relevant areas.

The reason them being reclusive makes things simpler is I won't have to worry about how other languages influence this one, so I don't have to make other complementary langs to borrow vocabulary from. I might make other languages in the future but for now I won't worry about it.

As for the speakers I'm thinking of mostly regular style demons: they're humanoid but they got horns, tails, wings, and maybe some draconic or snake-like features would be cool, like scales in some areas and forked tongues. I should make a sketch or smth to solidify their appearance a bit more.

I'm thinking they'll live for a long time and will be able to use magic that they possess innately, perhaps some form of necromancy would be fitting. The ability to control something like fire also makes sense.

And finally their home. The underworld is in a separate plane from the human realm and while many souls can end up there they're kept secluded, so most demons don't really interact with humans.

The place is desolate, cold, I'm imagining like a massive cave with lots of dark rock, sand and ice.

So I guess I'm going for a slightly less conventional version of hell. There isn't quite a day-night cycle but they got some weather in the form of wind and fog. They have earthquakes and sinkholes.

And there wouldn't be a lot of plants and animals but I imagine you could find a few here and there.

Mostly little bugs I think, given it's not the most hospitable environment I should look into creatures that can survive harsher conditions.

But yeah that seems like a pretty good base to start working on the language proper soon!

[paizau]

Interesting self observation

Context - my native language is Hebrew, and English is a sort of secondary L1~Heritage language for me (grew up with English spoken around me so I always had comprehension, but I only started actively working on production when I was 15)

When speaking, I intuitively glottolize the /t/ in "between", even though it's supposed to be in the onset of a stressed syllable /bɪ.twijn/ - so it shouldn't glottolize. This suggests that my brain tries to syllablify this word as /bɪt.wijn/, which would make it a coda of an unstressed syllable and eligible for glottalization. And why it does that? probably because of influence from Hebrew, where intervocallic clusters are always devided between two syllables as VC.CV and never as an onset cluster V.CCV. So that's neat.

[paizau]

Little Orthography Updating

One of the consequences of the complete rehaul of Yő-Ngot (formally Ngįout) is that its script also needs to be updated.

Originally the script had a few characters that converged through the making process and I distinguished them through diacritics. For example, between <M> and <X>. <X> which has the value /x/ has split off from /k/, which became distinguished through another diacritic.

One of the changes to the phonology was the introduction of a palatal series, which I decided to mark using the same one which differentiates <X>:

But now I have a problem because this diacritic now stands for palatalization, and even though I can still have it that way and say "in this case it's just not", I want it to be consistent. So my solution: have <K> now be <X>, and create a new letter for <K> based on it:

And the problem is solved!

The fun thing about it is that there is no double-looped letter without the under-ring! theoretically it is possible and is simpler, but because <K> was built on <X> which has the diacritic - it kept it!

This kind of inefficient over complication is really fun to create, whether it's in morphology, syntax, orthography or whatever. It makes the conlang feel nice and squishy :))

[paizau]

Wow inspiration really struck today, I'm working on a document detailing the Kǫ̈uh (prev. Ngįout) script and orthography and I'm just breezing through it. Currently I have about 1400 word totaling almost 7 pages written out. Nice.

[paizau]

God. making sense of a deep orthography, especially in a conscript, can be such a headache. But I think I Got There. >:)

[paizau]

The Five Forms of a Dummy 2nd Conj. Verb

So I think I've settled on a final version of the rehauled phonology of Ngįout(?, this name is not possible anymore so I need to come up with a new one lol).

To showcase it, and the new spelling rules of the orthography to match this new phonological history and morphophonemics, here are the five forms of a dummy 2nd conjugation verb:

lǫpnhį [lɔ̃pˈɲĩ] (long 1st.sg)

lǫpnhot [lɔ̃pˈɲɔt] (long 2nd)

lǫuhm [lɔ̃̂ũm] (3rd, short 1st)

lǫuhm [lɔ̃̂ũm] (short 2)

lǫuhm [lɔ̃̂ũm] (combining form)

Forms 3-5 are homophonous, but are distinguished in writing. In the photo below you can see forms 1-5 from top to bottom respectively in the script.

[alder-prince]

I've been meaning to showcase my conlang for SO LONG. lol. it's really mostly just a script with a few dozen nouns but I think it sounds cool and cozy and I write it everywhere when I get bored.

the blue scroll on the side says "Sho'eyic" (/ʃoejix/ in IPA phonemes). then is shown the 19 glyphs. tried to make it look pretty-- medieval manuscript style 🔥🪻

here's the IPA for further reference, cause my handwriting is a bit messy:

[paizau]

Kshafa in its hiatory has gone through 2 big restructurings of its vowel system, which I will make specific posts about some day. This led to some funny situations where a proto-form like *datemi, with 3 distinct vowels, evolves into dèthéme [dè.tʰé.mē]. The /e/-fication of Kshafa.

[kelasian]

now that i finally have something to show, here are two simple example sentences from sentian. fun fact this is probably like the third conlang i have ever made that has a definite article (and possibly the first one that has both definite and indefinite article)

anyway im very excited to be working on this conlang that has given me nothing but pain in the past!! ive got ideas for differences between the literary and spoken language and am really looking forward to expanding upon them

[kelasian]

one of the differences that i had already worked out before the pause which is possession. except i deepened it further with reflexive forms which are used in the spoken variety usually only in the third person but are completely preserved in the literary form

[kelasian]

also have a pronunciation while im at it. nothing crazy though

[yuk-tepat]

Yuk Tepat - Basic Color Terms

[paizau]

in the sound change applier. straight up "tweeking it". and by "it", haha, well. let's jutsr say. Tonogenesis.