Gonna make cryptolangs for the Wings of The City because, as much as I would love to make fully original conlangs for each of them, I feel that it is A: More feasible to make really fancy cyphers/language games with built-in grammatical features than actual fully fledged languages and B: It makes as much sense for the Wings to make such cryptolangs as a means of protecting corporate secrets as well as adding to their brand while simultaneously cutting corners by not paying the language creators enough to warrant making entire lexicons for such languages.
That said, these "Corplangs" will be based on "The Head Language" which will be, for all intents and purposes, English. Yes, I'm a Native English Speaker. Yes, I'm not fluent in any other languages but willing to learn new words here and there when it suits me. It's just that English is the language I am most familiar with and that is the one I will be using to encrypt into the Corplangs.
That's all that I have for now. Wish me luck or damn me to hell, Imma do this because it's fun.
I've begun work on a second edition of the Hearthian grammar, and one thing this entails is coining scientific vocabulary, including Hearthian names for the atomic elements. Here's a glimpse at that.
Prehistoric elements
Some elements can just be dug up out of the ground and are therefore easy for a low-tech culture to identify. The names for these are short and opaque: brant (iron), diyr (gold), oog (lead).
Noble gases
As humans did, Hearthians first identified helium from the light emission spectrum of their sun, hence the name grotyrn "sun-air". Neon is ykliimyrn "float-air" for being less dense than the atmosphere; conversely, argon is liimyrn "heavy-air".
Readers familiar with Hearthian morphology may ask, why is "float" ykliim instead of yliim? That's because it's underlyingly yk-ol-liim "un-apply-heavy"; the l in ol is deleted by contact with the identical l in liim, and the o is subject to intertonic vowel deletion. The k in yk is brought out by a vowel to the right, and it stays even if that vowel goes away.
Heavier noble gases were named for their atomic numbers: krypton is linkyrn "36-air", xenon omdathligyrn "54-air" (lit. "one-three-zero-air"), and radon rozrozrozyrn "86-air" (lit. "two-two-two-air"). This fallback strategy applied to any element that hadn't been isolated but was predicted to exist.
Biochemical elements
Timber Hearth life was based on carbon, or railok "charcoal-stuff". The atmosphere was mostly nitrogen (ypthyrn "un-breath-air") and oxygen (zakyrn "fire-air" for its role in combustion). Metabolic processes require water as a solvent, which is made of hydrogen, aptly named vizyrn "water-air".
Sodium (klornzok "salt-crystal-stuff", a self-explanatory name) is necessary for nerve function and fluid balance, and magnesium (chornzok "spinel stuff" for its presence in that gem) plays a critical role in synthesis of DNA.
Hearthians shared our hypothesis that alien life could substitute carbon with silicon (drinzok "quartz stuff"). The only alien species known to them, the Nomai, were also carbon-based.
Arsenic and mercury were named for their poisonous properties: respectively zerchril "stop-heart" and zerchan "stop-nerve". (Cinnabar ore is tyvzyrch, from tyev-zerchan "red-mercury".)
Elements found in minerals
Many elements were named for gems and rocks that contain them. Sodium, magnesium, and silicon are mentioned above. Beryllium (kimkrok) comes from beryl (kimkor), boron (chimvok) from borax (chimov), aluminum (targraz) from corundum (taree), sulfur (zaktrok) from pyrite (zaktir), potassium (ympvok) from feldspar (ympov), and titanium (notrok) from rutile (notir).
In a non-obvious case, chromium's name (alzok) appears to come from blood (aalz). Chromium did not have a cardiovascular function in Hearthian biology; the name is from taree alzech "bloody corundum", as rubies are colored red by chromium.
Language: Celestial
Spoken Commonly by (but not limited to): Aasimar and Clerics of Faerûn, Deva and Celestials
Setting: *Forgotten Realms
[*Homebrewed for a Character Backstory but built upon the Forgotten Realms Setting.]
Etymology:
SUPERNAL; /zaʔaħuʀ/ meaning “without water”
SEMICOGNATE;
Infernal: /ˈkemad/ /ˈsaːʔa/ kemad sāʾa meaning “without” & “water”
Abyssal: /ˈzeːˌʔˤeːwus/ zēʾēwus meaning “without water”
Word Type: Noun; abessive case.
All descendants have a slightly different source for the abessive case endings from the initial Supernal, ultimately from dialectal variation, with the exception of Infernal that dropped the abessive case entirely.
The orthography for my enchantment table conlang (Kxënt'exo)
As you may be aware the "enchantment table language" in Minecraft is not actually a language, instead it's just a simple substitution cipher known as the Standard Galactic Alphabet, or SGA for short, it was originally created for the Commander Keen series of games but it got added to Minecraft as an easter egg.
Substitution ciphers replace an already existing alphabet with different symbols, so the SGA is just basically a different set of characters used to represent the letters of the roman alphabet.
(image from the Commander Keen wiki)
Ciphers are used to encrypt text in an already existing alphabet, so in Minecraft when you click on the enchantment table the SGA text you see is usually just random English words like "fiddle" or "water" or references like "cthulhu" or "xyzzy".
When I started turning the "enchantment table language" into an actual full fledged conlang I decided to use the SGA in case other Minecraft fans became interested in my work, I wanted the symbols to still be recognizable to them so I didn't want to change things too much, I avoided doing things like adding new letters, diacritic marks or removing letters, I wanted to use all 26 base glyphs to write the words in my language (though I slightly modified the appearance of some of the symbols to make it flow a bit better).
But of course, as a conlanger I didn't like the idea of my language being written with what is essentially a copy of the roman alphabet, I still want to give it its own identity so it feels a bit more original, so I'm going to explain what I did to turn the cipher into something that is hopefully more interesting (I'll let you be the judge of that).
First let's look at the names of each character, similarly to some roman letters the name starts with the letter itself and if it's a consonant a vowel sound gets added (like the letter T just getting "ee" added onto it) but in this case every letter gets the same vowel, so all consonants are just (consonant) + a.
Some of the letters are used to spell identical sounds though (more on that later) so for example the equivalent of roman {j} and the equivalent of roman {x} are both used to spell the palatal glide /j/, so they are both called "ya" /ja/.
To disambiguate, speakers add nouns that start with that letter, similarly to how in Spanish <b> and <v> are both pronounced the same and sometimes they both get called /be/ so some people might say "v de vaca" meaning "v as in "vaca" (cow)" to make it clear they're talking about the letter <v>. This is also basically what Thai does with its letters: ข kho khai (egg "kho") vs ค kho khwai (buffalo "kho").
Then let's look at the order they come in, I ended up changing the alphabetical order because I think that also helps to make it feel a bit more unique, I'll link to a longer explanation later but in short these are actually organized based on where in the mouth the sound is produced, the letters come in the following order:
labials like /p/ /m/ /f/
coronals like /t/ /n/ /ɬ/
sibilant-like sounds like /t͡s/ /s/
dorsals like /j/ /ʀ/ /k/
vowels
But ultimately the biggest difference comes in the way the letters are mapped to sounds.
When choosing the sounds each character was going to represent I didn't want to make it completely arbitrary, like assigning the {a} glyph to something utterly different like /χ/, but I also didn't want to make it completely like Latin or English, so I avoided just mapping all the letters onto their obvious equivalents, this way hopefully it will feel a bit more similar to when people try to map roman letters onto Arabic letters, some have clear equivalents like <م> - <m> but some require special markings and things to more accurately represent their sound, like <ظ> - <ẓ>.
I evolved the conlang from an ancient stage of the language known as Proto-Kxënt'exo, and in Proto-Kxënt'exo each letter was used to spell a different sound, hence why there are some sounds that can be written two different ways: they used to be pronounced differently way back when.
In the roman alphabet there are voicing distinctions in the stops: unvoiced <p> <t> <k> versus voiced <b> <d> <g>, in Proto-Kxënt'exo that distinction was actually between emphatic and plain stops, so the {p} {t} {k} symbols were pronounced /pˤ/ /tˤ/ /kˤ/ and the {b} {d} {g} symbols were pronounced /p/ /t/ /k/, these evolved into ejectives /pʼ/ /tʼ/ /kʼ/ so in the romanization I represent these as p' t' k' vs p t k instead.
I also added the affricate /t͡ʃ/ and it too has an emphatic equivalent /t͡ʃˤ/, to spell them I used the SGA letters for {c} and {q} respectively, this is because the letter <c> is sometimes used to spell that affricate sound (like in Indonesian: kucing /ku.t͡ʃiŋ/) and the letter <q> is used to represent a similar sound in Mandarin Chinese romanization: qin /tɕʰin/, but <q> is also used for uvular sounds, like in Arabic romanization: qaṣr /qasˤr/ so it doesn't feel completely arbitrary to use that letter for the /t͡ʃˤ/ consonant, and then both of these sounds evolved into alveolar affricates /t͡s/ /t͡sʼ/ romanized as ts ts'.
The fricatives used to have a voicing distinction (except for /ɬ/) so you had {f} {s} {x} representing unvoiced /ɸ/ /s/ /ʃ/ vs {v} {z} {j} representing voiced /β/ /z/ /ʒ/, but this is one of the things that got lost in the evolved language, these consonants merged, so now {f} and {v} are both pronounced /f/, {s} and {z} are both pronounced /s/, and {x} and {j} not only merged but ended up becoming the palatal glide /j/.
There's also some sounds that aren't represented with a single letter, for example the vowels /ɵ/ /ʉ/ and /ɯ/ are all represented with digraphs (letter combinations), because these sounds didn't exist in the proto-language, and once they started to exist people just repurposed the letters they already had to represent the new sounds.
Then there's a couple digraphs that sound identical to single letters: {dx} used to represent a /tç/ cluster, but it ended up merging with the alveolar affricate /t͡s/, so now that sound can be spelled two different ways depending on the origin of the word.
There's even more details, and the post is getting a bit long so to see more go to the Kxënt'exo orthography page on my conlang website.
The last thing I want to highlight is the fact that the spelling of words is also tied to grammar.
There's a lot of silent letters at the end of words, for example the word for cat "yak'e" /jaˈkʼe/ is spelled like {jakex} with a silent {x} representing a lost /ç/ consonant, and this is significant because that actually marks the noun as animate, a large portion of animate nouns were suffixed with *-ʃi in Proto-Kxënt'exo.
Another example is infinitive verbs, they used to end in *-βu in Proto-Kxënt'exo, so now they're all spelled with a silent {v} at the end, and that marks the word as an infinitive. This helps to disambiguate between some words, for example the word lhëxu /ɬəˈχu/ can be either an infinitive meaning "to see" or an adjective meaning "that stands out", word order and context are usually enough to disambiguate, but if you look at the words written down it becomes clear which is which because the former is spelled {lyhuv} and the latter is spelled {lyhul}.
This type of phenomenon happens a lot in different types of words, and I think it also helps to further distinguish this script from the roman alphabet, the way it's used makes sense for Kxënt'exo, the spelling of words isn't what you would expect from a simple cipher, there's nuance to it that comes from its phonology and its history.
So that's basically what I wanted to share, I think I succeeded in making the SGA at least a bit more interesting for my conlang, I had never done something like this before because this is my first fanlang, so let me know how you think I did.
Also if you have any questions feel free to ask! or you can also check out the Kxënt'exo section of my website for more information!
(oh yeah, if you notice that the phonology described in this post is different from what you can see in my Lexember entries for last month it's because I changed some sounds, those Lexember posts are no longer up to date, so yeah)
[PONEGLYPH FANLANG] Chapter 272's Stelle transcription and translation
Hello, back with the Poneglyph Fanlang!
After previously translating Roger's words on the Shandora Grand Bell, as seen here: [WIP] One Piece's Ancient Language (Poneglyph) Fanlang, I'm now attempting to translate another Poneglyph with a full translation. In the canon manga, only two Poneglyphs have full translations. This one is from Chapter 272, "Play," and was discovered by Robin.
If you're familiar with the Japanese language, you might notice that the sentence structure is identical to Japanese syntax (SOV). The basic language used is Old Egyptian, employing a triconsonantal root system similar to Arabic.
Here are some words you might recognize if you know Japanese:
okkaret = kokoro (heart)
enṓganopet = ogane (big bell)
You may notice that the same sound can be represented by completely different glyphs. This is because the Poneglyph uses a system somewhat akin to the Maya script and Rongorongo script, allowing different glyphs for the same sound for aesthetic reasons. Another reason for these complex sound-to-glyph correspondences is to make Poneglyphs difficult to read and decipher by the government.
But let me be honest, the main reason is that the Poneglyph is a gibberish-type of conlang. It seems like Oda didn't create a fully functional conlang for Poneglyph and may have scribbled-down the script. Or perhaps Oda used a cipher conlang? Who knows.
An ancient version of Native Tower with more complicated letters.
The sentence roughly translates to “the dog chases the cat.” (“Kiur tumyo da-yafa kiur ba-jao.”)
The language has the same word order as English because people in the Tower have socialized with English people much more than those of other languages.
First post, but hello. This is an introduction to the language. I should have the modern alphabet posted soon, as well as the ancient one.
what do you think of what i've been calling "fan-conlangs", made for an already established universe, usually around some already established random words? I suppose it's sort of what you did with Dothraki (taking GRRMartin's few words and expanding). If the universe is already based on an Earth-culture, should the fan-conlang be as well? (eg, something based on Ancient Egypt, should the language sound Egyptian)
I don’t really think anything about them in general, though if there’s a specific one you had in mind, I’m sure I could take a look at it and comment. Fanlangs have been around for as long as artlanging has. I gave one a Smiley Award a while back (ámman îar, which is a posteriori much the way Dothraki is, but using elements from Tolkien’s languages).
As to your second question, if one takes the endeavor seriously, one should incorporate all elements of the original construction, be they words, concepts, or inspirations. So if your goal is flesh out a language in a book that has mangled Malay words, then your continuation should have Malay words mangled in the same way. The result may not be very good, but it will be faithful to the source material. If the endeavor is a sincere continuation and expansion of the material in the original work, then that’s what should be done.
If, however, one takes that goal less seriously, one can do whatever one wants, I suppose—even creating a good conlang out of a bad sketch. It will really be up to the fanbase, though, to decide how well what you created works as an expansion of that source material. It may be the best conlang in the world, but if it bears little resemblance to the source material, fans of that source material may very well reject it, and I don’t think one could blame them. But, of course, if other fans are never going to see the language, then it doesn’t matter what they think, so it just depends on the precise nature of the project and its goals.
