kaiaŋ! this is the script for my new conlang din ɛgwa :D it's written top to bottom, left to right. everything is connected, so you could technically write an entire book in one long line if you had a really long strip of paper. theres a round and an angular version.
(<gw> is /gʷ/, <y> is /j/, <r> is /ɹ/, <VV> is /Vː/)
and here's a little text written in the script! at the points where one line ends and where another begins is a little dot to show continuity.
Translation under the cut! thanks for reading :)
What did this player dream? This player dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created. And it dreamed it destroyed. It dreamed it hunted, and was hunted. It dreamed of shelter. Does it know that we love it? That the universe is kind? Sometimes, through the noise of its thoughts, it hears the universe, yes.
wɛs obayarɨ raamsa sul? wɛs obayarɨ raamsa ug bɨgwɨniilwɔ yɛ ɔrewo. ug dɨrwɔ yɛ luuswɔ. din raamsa, ide din modena. yɛ din raamsa, ide din gwɨgna. din raamsa, ide din ebigna, yɛ ide din ebigsa. din raamsa ug ɨlsɨlaiwɔ. din ɔdiman ai, ide gom mɔnan din? ide wiisru naugwɔ? ins lɛbɛno, oden rugwu ug yawɔsɨwo ug dɨl, dim legwun wiisru, mai.
right now my favorite activity is creating a very sonorant conlang, where sentences such as kasa o bao pauo kasa so lio fao and awadi so raisai moihui? are real things...
... and having it be spoken by a rather violent culture that is basically a military dictatorship, where all non-second-class citizens are required to be part of a standing on-call army/militia, and coming-of-age ceremonies involve potential murder.
but they sound really fluffy while they’re talking about these terrible things.
I was gonna do these all in one post but I think it’ll be too long so I’m gonna go one language at a time. I did a series of conlang sketches last year in which I tried to subvert fantasy phonoaesthetics, aka the phonological profiles normally associated with specific fantasy races/cultures. I did five of them, elves, dwarves, orcs, humans and goblins. This is the first of those five, elves, starting under the cut.
Elves
Tolkien designed Elvish after all the linguistic features that he found most aesthetically pleasing, and unfortunately the aesthetic preferences of an early 20th c specialist in northern european languages have been uncritically adopted as the standard for all fantasy elves
I basically wanted to give the elves a lot of sounds that scan as “ugly” to a lot of english speakers (altho i really like these kinds of sounds)- a lot of velar and uvular fricatives, /ʌ/, /ŋ/, etc., plus a lot of consonant clusters to break up the “open, flowing sound” that people associate with Elvish. I think the resulting sound is really pretty, but it’s also pretty different from the Tolkienesque sound that Elves usually have.
Phonological inventory
p b t d k g ɪ u
n ŋ ə o
ʀ ʌ
f v ʒ x ɣ æ a
t͡ʃ d͡ʒ ou, au
ɹ
Orthography
I don’t feel like typing all these non-ascii characters so I’m instituting a simplified orthography.
There’s a case system, although the case prefixes behave more like Korean or Japanese particles than normal cases, and flexible word order. It also has no grammatical plural.
pronouns:
1 - pragh
2 - bit, formal - djabit
3 - tuvn
particle prefixes (first form is for consonant-initial stems and stecond form is for vowel-initial stems):
nom va/vagn
gen to/togn
ins brrau/brraugn
loc xu/xuvn
acc ngah/ngahgn
dat jibe/jibn
abl fo/fogn
Verbs
verbs have a negative prefix, jo/jon. They also have aspective suffixes. The uninflected verb is the base, non-past form. The suffix -(e)doge creates a past form and the suffix -(e)vaj creates a gerund.
There’s also an imperative suffix, -pa. To soften the imperative it can be paired with the word for please, fuhng.
Adjectives
The adjective takes the same case particle as the noun. I’d originally done it slightly differently but I don’t like it so I’m changing it to this. One weird exception is in declarative statements with an adjective as the object, because to be, gruva, takes an accusative object.
NOM.1PRON ACC.2PRON love NOM.1PRON ACC.tall ACC.tree see
I love you. I see the tall tree.
Varraxo gruva varebi. Gruva vapragh ngahkapra.
NOM.dog be NOM.blue be NOM.1PRON ACC.elf
The dog is blue. I am an elf.
Aknpa! Jonaknpa fuhng.
see.IMP NEG.look.IMP please
Look! Please don’t look.
Rrabpa ngahpragh, ngahchtoma vapragh gruva.
help.IMP ACC.1PRON, ACC.desperate NOM.1PRON be
Help me, I am desperate.
This last example is one that I did for every language because I made the mistake of asking for ideas for example sentences on twitter. Thanks a lot, Erin
Naswiyan’s verbs are probably what I like most about this language, since they work so nicely. I took a lot of inspiration from Ancient Egyptian here, though I frequently went my own way (which is a good thing, otherwise I’m just relexing). It should also be mentioned that Naswiyan has a consonantal root system, much like Egyptian and its Afro-Asiatic brethren, though less like Semitic, where the system has dramatically increased in scope.
Verb forms can either be verbal or nominal, which is independent of finititude. Finite verbal forms can inflect for mood (indicative, imperative, subjunctive, optative), while finite and non-finite nominal forms inflect for the gender and number of their antecedent. The non-finite verbal form is termed the infinitive (and some verbs have more than one), while the finite nominal form is termed the relative, and the non-finite nominal forms are the active and passive participles. Finally, all forms other than the infinitive and imperative inflect for perfectivity and perfectness.
Perfectness is expressed through a suffix -na, placed after any inflection in the nominal forms, while perfectivity is expressed through doubling the final consonant of the root, and then inflecting regularly like a perfective of the new verb class (which is determined fully by the number of consonants). Thus, for example, the imperfective forms of the verb hanəs “carry” look like the perfective forms of a hypothetical verb hansəs. In the finite verbal forms, mood is expressed through a series of prefices, except the imperative which is formed from a separate stem. These prefices are: Ø- (indicative), ḥi- (optative), ʔu- (subjunctive).
Verbs are either strong or weak, which can be determined by seeing if the infinitive ends in a consonant (strong verbs like hanəs “carry”) or a vowel (weak verbs like þaśa “write”), although this condition is too strong, as there are strong verbs ending in y or w whose infinitives also end in a vowel. Weak verbs differ from strong verbs in that while their final consonant alternates between Ø~ʔ in the infinitive and imperative (ʔ only appearing when the final consonant would be intervocalic), and y elsewhere (with the qualification that it’s ʔ instead of y in the active participle of 2-weak verbs such as ka).
There are four kinds of infinitive, each with different semantic connotations. The most common kind is the a-ə infinitive, as in hanəs, which is the default infinitive. The next most common is the -a infinitive, as in þšah “be smooth”, which occurs in intransitive stative verbs. Then there’s the i-e infinitive, as in hiþeþ “glow”, which is associated with unaccusative verbs. Finally is the -i infinitive, which occurs only in impersonal verbs, such as sŋiŋ “be hot”.
As mentioned above, verbs can have more than one infinitive; these cases generally pair the default infinitive with either the stative or unaccusative infinitive. In the former pairing we find stative ambitransitive verbs, where the stative infinitive denotes the intransitive sense, such as ʔnaḫ “be possible”, while the default infinitive denotes the transitive sense, as in ʔanəḫ “be possible to”. In the latter pairing, we find ergative verbs, where the unaccusative infinitive denotes the intransitive sense, such as wireh "die”, while the default infinitive denotes the transitive sense, as in warəh “kill”. Other pairings are possible, but rare as in sŋiŋ “be hot (of the weather)” ~ sŋaŋ “be hot”.
so I've been working on my latest conlang, irkan osla (or just osla for short), for a bit now and would like to showcase its writing system in this post! osla has a syllabic alphabet, not too dissimilar to korean hangul, where letters are stacked according to certain rules to make syllable blocks.
osla's syllable structure is (C)(C)V(V)(C), here's how the stacks work for each type of syllable:
all letters have small, wide, and tall forms depending on their position in the syllable. here are all the letters with their IPA value and romanization:
and here's an example text! i translated parts of the minecraft end poem into osla. maybe i'll make another post just focusing on the grammar when it's more developed. the poem says in english:
What did this player dream?
This player dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created. And it dreamed it destroyed. It dreamed it hunted, and was hunted. It dreamed of shelter.
Does it know that we love it? That the universe is kind?
Sometimes, through the noise of its thoughts, it hears the universe, yes.
this post is getting long, so under the cut you'll find a "sans-serif" version as well as the poem in osla and its gloss if you're also a linguistics nerd and wanna know what's going on under the hood (the roman numerals stand for the 3 noun classes)! thanks for reading!
The way regular people would write something quickly on a piece of paper with a regular pen is an aspect of creating neographies that I feel is often overlooked, so I developed this sans-serif version that people would probably be more likely to use when writing their shopping lists or diary entries:
And, finally, here's the poem translation:
pak oṇḍul phan wimbakis?
DET.I.SG.PROX play-AGN what dream-PST.3SG.I?
pak oṇḍul lümaṇiuṣerothi han buloni an wimbakis. kaṣkhaothi han nilothi an. wimbakis, run sëmamkis. wimbakis, run xokthakis, han bumxokthakis. zöga an wimbakis.
DET.I.SG.PROX play-AGN sunlight-II.SG.DAT and tree-II.PL.DAT of dream-PST.3SG.I. Fire-II.SG.DAT and water-II.SG.DAT of. dream-PST.3SG.I, that create-PST.3SG.I. dream-PST.3SG.I, that hunt-PST.3SG.I, and PASS-hunt-PST.3SG.I. shelter of dream-PST.3SG.I.
ṭauraka, run kaak samare? run glutsüna flia?
know-NP.3SG.I, that 3SG.I.ABS love-NP.1PL? that universe kind?
imba ethamo, khaṣiŋli an ka’am hu’aŋni pitë, glutsüna ṣaraka, ti.
some time-NOM.III.PL, noise-ACC.II.SG of 3SG.I.GEN thought-NOM.III.PL through, universe hear-NP.3SG.I, yes.
