Hey you made a conlang?! That's so cool! Why did you decide to create one/what do you use it for? What's your favorite phoneme in your conlang? Is the language more analytic or synthetic? What's the word order? What's the cultural background of your conlang? How do you balance the influence of preexisting languages that you know with creating your own unique language? (Sorry for the bombardment of questions lol)
Why did you decide to create a conlang? I was taking an intro to linguistics course in Germany and was overcome with the desire to make a script and conlang.
What do you use it for? Characterising the people who spoke it and making their myths come to life through literature.
What’s your favourite phoneme in your conlang? Impossible to say.
Is the language more analytic or synthetic? I want to say it’s on the fusional side, but I’m reticent.
What’s the word order? V+S+O (except for when it’s not) ;)
What’s the cultural background of your conlang? Here, as described in the preface to my first dictionary:
wgwet ut gwetmet (regarding language and the words of a language)
The unique language of this Ancient Near Eastern nomadic people provides a brilliant time capsule of their way of life before they disappear from the historical record at the dawn of the Iron Age. Neither an empire with an extended hand of influence nor a war-winning hoard that ransacked the pages of history, this ancient society and its language have come to be known to modern man through a series of remarkable archaeological finds in, around and between the heltmarrjj : the Black, Mediterranean, Red and Caspian Seas.
Unlike neighbouring civilisations whose writings were etched into great monuments, carved into stone, and housed on scrolls in libraries, kings’ chambers and to-do households, the Ätchgöan people recorded their language solely in what they referred to as the “traditional medium“ : clay tablets, whose production was, according to Ätchgöan oral tradition, taught to them by an unnamed wise one from the claypits of Uruk in the time before [the flood].
This method of recording would not in itself be unique - other contemporaneous civilisations in the Fertile Crescent region used wedge-shaped writing on clay to a far greater extent and for a much longer period of time - were it not for the fact that the Ätchgöan people did not build a continuous settlement, no one location to serve as the hub of life for their long-lasting civilisation. As such, the clay found in remaining literary tablets and rare shards of pottery attributed to this culture, while baring a distinctive Ätchgöan-cuneiform system of writing, does not hail from a singular region, but was rather sourced and baked at different sites throughout Northern Egypt and Mesopotamia, brought along on their wanderings and reproduced anew by subsequent generations.
And so it is that the tongue of this ancient people has survived the test of time, until now waiting to be unearthed from the dust.
How do you balance the influence of preexisting languages that you know with creating your own unique language? The influence of these languages was more apparent in my first dabblings with the language, so that skriv (yes, like schreiben but spellt differently) simply meant to write. Luckily this does not affect more than a handful of proto-words. I am currently in the process of purging such obvious idiocies from the language, so that to write has now changed from skriv to kiva : kivashash met metasurr (we are writing the word onto the tablet). Now that the language has enough vocabulary and rules for me to be able to assess what can exist within it (outside of the occasional loan word) it is easier to create words and structures in context and immediately dismiss ideas that clash with the whole.