Yuk Tepat is the language of the Conciliarity of Tepat, and the language of civilization and learning on the continent Tiptum. It is a member of the Macro-Tepatic language family, of course.
Sites/Blogs: tepat.neocities.org/ (accumulated information about Tepat ends up here, although it's still a mess) (UPDATED) / DeviantArt: conciliarityoftepat / Conlang Wikia: Yuktepat
NEW: Currently working on:
Compiling and ordering a comprehensive master list of the glyphs
Crudely computerizing them so I can write stuff in script in my grammar
Writing up the complete history of Emperor Qathûq û-Qom.
Languages
About Yuktepat
What kind of language is Yuk Tepat?
Posts about Yuk Tepat
All posts tagged 'Tepatic glyphs'
Lexember and other words/glyphs featured on this blog
History of the Writing System: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - 6 - 7
The Declaration of Independence (2, 3) - The Great Gatsby
Culture
All posts tagged “Culture”
Culture Topics: Kinship in Swira - New Year - Evil Santa - Differently-Flawed Prophecies - Volcano Cult - Concept of the Soul - Furries - Death the Winnower - Concept of Rights - The Thread of Sleep - Winterval - For the Arrow to Fly Forth - Souls of Objects - Human Sacrifice (NEW) - Reactionary Geography - The Covenant of the People - Sorcery (NEW) -
Geography / Maps
Posts about geography / maps
Tiptum (general) (NEW) - Tepat (NEW) - The Inner Sea (NEW) - Northern Tiptum (NEW) - The Straits and the Southwest Corner (NEW) - Qom Homeland (NEW) - The East - Notoq, Wasak - Muqali - The South - Climate - Vegetation - Population - Tiptum (language families) - The Dragon's Fang - Comments on mapmaking -
Surrounding nations
The East Coast (Amtom) (tagged) – collection of small states, frenemies with divergent socioeconomic views, who sometimes cooperate as guardians of cilivization
Swira (master post here) - one of the "northern barbarians," nomadic herders and master horsemen, inhabiting the plains north of Tepat, occasionally gathering into confederations that threaten Tepatic security. Tepat has been pushing its frontier northward and settling tribes within its borders in “independent barbarian homelands.”
Also: May We See the Summer Again (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) - Kinship - Lunar New Year 1, 2 - Protolanguage - Horses/Thunder/Shrooms - For the Arrow to Fly Forth - Ear = Money -
Muqali (tagged) - that backward country up in the mountains that everyone makes jokes about.
Milim (tagged) - extinct kingdom Tepat overthrew, famed for massive human sacrifices - Pictographs - The Tsaltep and his demise -
Natural History
Vegetation regions - Pseudotaxites, the Confungus (2) - Bearded Tree + Assassin Tree - Nemul - Oregano - desert vegetation - the boss cat (NEW) -
Stories and Narratives
Yom and the Demon: A Supernatural Tale of Tepat
Vignettes: Facing the Tears (NEW) - No Sheep in the Sky - New Year - Approaching Luqtal -
Folktales: The Legend of Dumbfuck (NEW) - Cougar woman - Ice Woman - The Lonely Tombstone -
Other texts
(NEW) Ancient Tepatic Recipe - https://www.tumblr.com/yuk-tepat/797446671526133761/ancient-tepatic-recipe?source=share
Other stuff
General worldbuilding, linguistics, and other stuff
Other conlangs
Çomyopregi - an Indo-European language
Languages from the Chained Adept books by Karen Myers: Kitali - Zannib
Meta
How I organize it - Comments on mapmaking - Elephants and Zebras -
- O -
Glad to answer questions about the world. Also do freelance worldbuilding for other creators.
This probably deserves a far longer response (it probably deserves a book), but I’ll take a stab at it.
This is going to be broken up because it’s so long. I’ll talk about my conlang Yuk-Tepat & its logographs (Tepatic glyphs) but also the real-world logographic writing systems. I’ll get into some specific advice later. Of course, if you (readers) have logographic scripts please add on whatever you can about how yours work & how you made it, in order to make this more comprehensive. Or if you just have something to add / correct.
This goes on. (TLDR Logographs =/= pictures, they don’t represent translinguistic ‘ideas,’ they have a phonetic component that reflects the spoken language, and use semantic signs to disambiguate words. To be continued.)
Logographic systems work quite a bit differently from most ‘phonetic’ writing systems. Your inventory of signs will be much larger than other systems. Think a couple of hundred. Tepatic glyphs ended up with about 200 distinct signs, which is appoximately the number of Chinese radicals.
However, it also works similarly to ‘phonetic’ systems, or more similarly than you might expect. Some of the stuff you need to do will be the same as for any writing system / conlang - for example, consider the writing medium (paper, stone etc.) and tools (brush, etc.) and how they affect your system. Also, know your conlang’s phonology and basic grammatical structure – logographic or not, this will be important (as you’ll see).
First, I would like to talk about what logographs are, and how they work. Since you, Anon, asked the question, I’m guessing you might already know what logographs are, hence you are asking, but in case you don’t, I want to go into what logographs are, because I think many people don’t quite get what they are, and unless they are Chinese (or Japanese), don’t know how they work, and this is going to cause problems in making the script work if they try to make logographs for a conlang. In case you already understand logographs well (or you’re Chinese) you can skip over what I’m writing. Or read it anyway, if you want to hear about how other systems work. I advise you reading up a lot about how other systems work.
Earth has at least four families of logographic writing systems: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, Chinese characters, and Maya glyphs. They’re all very different, but have some similar principles, and one of them is they have a phonetic component, just like any other script. Also, logographs (also called logograms) are not ideographs or pictographs (‘picture writing’).
Many people think that hieroglyphs or Chinese somehow represent thoughts directly through some kind of picture, bypassing “words” and spoken language, but they don’t. This is no doubt exacerbated by the fact most hieroglyphs undeniably LOOK like ‘things.’ So it’s natural to think that an obvious picture of an owl must represent the idea of an owl, but often it doesn’t. Confusion about this will make you not get how to make your system work especially when expressing something abstract that you can’t draw. Logographic systems are intimately tied to the languages they are used to write. Hence, yours will be tied to your conlang. You should already have a good idea of your conlang. It doesn’t need to be complete (when are they ever?) but you should know the phonology, and some other parts of the grammar may be helpful (is it very inflectional, word order, etc.)
Logographic systems contain signs that can represent whole words (or roots), which may or may not be recognizable ‘pictures.’ They also have phonetic elements (which may also look like pictures). The way the phonetic elements develop is usually by what we call the rebus principle, which means a sign is borrowed to write something else which sounds similar.
I’d like to illustrate this with an example. I wrote the following English sentence in pictures:
If you’re having trouble, try saying the name of each thing depicted. You should get:
eye can knot bear two leaf ewe.
Now try saying it faster and see if you get it.
What I’m trying to say is, “I can not bear to leave you.”
This is something I still didn’t quite get when I started working on Yuk Tepat.
You will note, that none of these little pictures are actually pictures of the concept referred to by the word they are used to spell. They are pictures of the thing whose word sounds like the word for the thing you want to represent, but can’t easily, so you get at it by using something that sounds similarly. (I know that sentence is hard to parse, please read it again.) This example only works because “I” and “eye” sound the same in English.
Now, imagine for a minute that English-speaking America is pretty much the same as in our world but English is written logographically. Nuclear war or something happens and the country gets buried under mounds of ash and dust and dug up hundreds of years later by archaeologists for some human civilization from elsewhere, unrelated to America, and their texts are deciphered. In this future civilization’s version of Youtube, people start making videos explaining their mysterious, cool writing system.
“The ancient American sages represented the word for oneself, I, as a picture of an eye. And if you think about it, the self is a perceiving self; without a subject able to look around and observe an outside, objective world, there is no self, no ‘I.’ The self begins with a perception of the world. This is the profound and mystical wisdom of the long-lost ancient civilization of The United States of America. Every letter hides a profound truth about the world.”
The simple, possibly boring explanation is just that ‘I’ and ‘eye’ sound the same in English, so they could be written the same way. But laugh as you might, there are tons of people online (invariably non-Chinese) making similar fluff about Chinese characters. Beware.
People may think to write ‘be’ logographically you have to think up some cool symbol of the concept of ‘being’ but the likely solution for an English logography would simply be to draw a bee (the insect that makes honey) and have it represents the copula.
I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that it is very common (even usual?) for the word the sign is borrowed for to completely take over that sign, and that a semantic indicator will be added to indicate the ORIGINAL meaning of that sign, or a new character created for it. The sign will completely shift over; it is no longer a picture-drawing of its meaning, even in a highly stylized way.
The typical development often goes:
- A picture is drawn to represent the word for the same thing that the picture represents. This is still pre-writing; you cannot draw a picture of everything you might want to talk about.
- The picture is borrowed to write another word or syllable in the language which cannot be depicted, but which sounds like the word. This is going to be different for each language because each language has different words and different words will be homonyms; hence you cannot separate a logographic script from the spoken language it was made for.
- Some of these signs develop into phonetic signs.
- The system reintroduces ‘pictures’ (or their relics) to clarify the meaning of words which might phonetically be spelled similarly.
This has happened many times in Chinese characters. It is probably the main way Chinese abstract, grammatical words get characters. The character 水 is ‘water,’ from an image of 3 parallel water flows. 永, representing probably a person floating on water, meant ‘swim’ (Old Chinese *ɢʷraŋs). This was then used to write the similar-sounding *ɢʷraŋʔ ‘forever,’ an idea which is hard to depict visually, don’t you think? ‘Forever’ completely took over 永. Then when they wanted to actually depict ‘swim,’ they added three water dots (itself ultimately a form of 水) to the left side to make a new character 泳. This is essentially ‘that ɢʷraŋ-ish sounding word that has to do with water.’
Signs like the three dots are called a radical in Chinese, and the remainder is called the phonetic. Some radicals are extremely common and form a great classificatory system, marking characters containing them as glyphs referring to words for people, animals, birds, plants, liquids, earth, etc. The vast majority of Chinese characters are of this type: composite characters made up of a part indicating roughly the sound, and a part assigning the meaning to some semantic domain.
Similar signs to radicals are found in hieroglyphs and cuneiform, the main difference being that they are called determinatives and they are still written as separate signs rather than being compressed into a single character like Chinese.
(I will note, radicals are basically a lexicographic tool for indexing characters, and not an etymological classification. But the radical usual corresponds to the semantic component of a character.)
If you understand this, you understand one of the key principles behind logographic writing and are ready to proceed.
So, logographic scripts generally have three components:
(1) Logograms (logographs) – signs that represent a word (or root) in the language
(2) Phonograms – signs that indicate sounds
(3) Semantograms / Determinatives – signs that mark
The way this works out in particular scripts varies. Not all of them will have all of the parts. I think Maya doesn’t really have a system of semantic determiners. And it may very well be that these may be functions and a language may use the same sign in each of these functions – but perhaps with a system for indicating when it is working as a logogram, a phonogram, or a taxogram. In Chinese and Maya, signs are generally compressed into a ‘block’ to indicate they are functioning together – as we saw in the Chinese example. In Egyptian, a particular sign may perform any of the functions, but when it is used as a logogram, a small vertical mark is added to it to indicate it is a logogram.
Systems can get vastly more complex: Old Persian or Japanese. Japanese is probably the most complicated writing system ever – certainly the most complicated in use now. But I will set that aside, and notably both of those systems are the result of existing logographic systems being repurposed to suit completely unrelated languages.
You can tweak this overall system a bit. In Yuk Tepat, I have incorporated a class of marks I have variously called ‘operators’ or ‘modifiers,’ which are attached to and modify the meanings of logograms. For example, adding various different marks to the sign ‘hand’ forms signs for finger, knuckle, thumb, palm, have, lack, etc. You see this sporadically in Chinese, for example the characters 刀 ‘knife’ and 刃 ‘blade,’ or 木 ‘tree,’ 末 ‘branch,’ and 本 ‘root.’ In Chinese though, this is a sporadic thing, while in Yuk Tepat this kind of marking is very systematized.
Since logographic systems are still at least partly phonetic, the phonetic / phonemic part can be classified by the different ways it works, same as phonemic writing systems. Hence, you can have logo-alphabets, logoabugidas, and logosyllabaries. Egyptian hieroglyphs are logoconsonantal (an abjad). The other systems are syllabic. While I don’t know any logoabugidas, you can always make one. Think about which one suits your language. Egyptian, e.g., is logoconsonantal probably because it’s Afroasiatic and abjads seem well-suited to their style of consonantal roots. The only difference between these and fully phonetic writing systems is that the phonetic part of logographic systems usually has much less phonetic precision, hence why semantic signs are needed to disambiguate similar-sounding words.
Your system doesn’t have to work just like any of these. You can figure out your own type, although it will likely mix logograms, phonograms, and taxograms in some form. I’ll grant that, of course, you don’t have to do even that. If you want something ideographic, you can try to make it. People constantly imagine fantasy languages that work completely differently from any real language, and that’s their prerogative. But if by ‘logographic,’ you meant a system like Egyptian/Sumerian/Chinese/Maya then it will be somewhat like I describe.
So to wrap up, logographs =/= pictures, they don’t represent translinguistic ‘ideas,’ they have a phonetic component that reflects the spoken language, and use semantic signs to disambiguate words. Once you know this, you basically understand the mechanics of logographs.
With that, I’m going to stop for a bit, then get back with Part II where I will get to some more particular points about making a script.
And of course, if you (readers) have a logographic script that you’ve made I’d like to know how you managed the overwhelming whole of it. Add a comment or reblog and add what you did.
Yeah, I plan to – no use having a dead website. Tripod's disappearance was a surprise (at least I save all my stuff offline), although I ought to have found a better place anyway. I used to have a Geocities, but that’s long gone. I also used to have a page on conlang.org too, but think at some point I lost my password. Something wiki-like could be useful for making numerous, frequent edits. Where IS the best place to set up a personal site these days? Any suggestions?
I went with the default choice of Neocities, instead of the other suggestions.
It was quickest option, and also most amenable to my limited technical skills. However, I was intrigued by the idea of “tiddlers” so I downloaded TiddlyWiki and Featherwiki to play with anyway. (Also if I’m honest, I was tempted by Tiddlywiki’s image of a kitten with laser eyes. Neocities has a cat mascot [mascat?] too though so it’s fine.)
It feels comfortably familiar to be back on “Geocities” - but better, from what I’ve seen. There are a few conlang sites, and for all the advantages of SSNs, it’s nice to visit a page & see someone’s entire grammar just there, instead of M&M-sized pieces of it. And no more ads!
By the way, I’ve reuploaded most of the files from the site & some that weren’t there yet, but having reuploaded it, I’ve realized what I have is a mess. Parts are out of date, both by my private notes and what’s published on Tumblr; other parts are musings that are not canon and may never be. I need to do a lot more work on it, but for now though, if you don’t mind, I leave it to you in all its incoherence.
For anyone interested in the Tepat website in its messy state:
Tsyam and the Qom empire is the newest page, and the most up-to-date, reflecting the newest information. Same for Proto-Nastowic. The Tepat glyphs page is not as new but the info is secure - most of it has been posted on Tumblr before, just not all in one place.
The language grammars - mostly in PDF form (sorry), are old. Not wrong per se but out of date.
The Notes on Tepat, and to a lesser extent info about its government, etc., is basically just a massive dump of info from my personal files without editing. There's a lot there, fairly incoherent, & probably contradictory. See it before I make it make sense.
The Swira page is similar - lots of random info, little organization.
The Introduction / Tiptum page are solid. Not likely to change much. "Tepatic New Year" is also solid.
The Flora-Fauna page is a missing link, I must not have made the page yet, don't bother clicking it.
"Native Linguistic Traditions" is dead too but there IS a page for it, I just mislaid it, please bother clicking it later when I tell you.
East Coast: still missing info about furries and infanticide, sorry.
Just noticed 'Tradespeak' takes you to Tiptum Geography ... I'll fix that.
Yeah, I plan to – no use having a dead website. Tripod's disappearance was a surprise (at least I save all my stuff offline), although I ought to have found a better place anyway. I used to have a Geocities, but that’s long gone. I also used to have a page on conlang.org too, but think at some point I lost my password. Something wiki-like could be useful for making numerous, frequent edits. Where IS the best place to set up a personal site these days? Any suggestions?
I went with the default choice of Neocities, instead of the other suggestions.
It was quickest option, and also most amenable to my limited technical skills. However, I was intrigued by the idea of “tiddlers” so I downloaded TiddlyWiki and Featherwiki to play with anyway. (Also if I’m honest, I was tempted by Tiddlywiki’s image of a kitten with laser eyes. Neocities has a cat mascot [mascat?] too though so it’s fine.)
It feels comfortably familiar to be back on “Geocities” - but better, from what I’ve seen. There are a few conlang sites, and for all the advantages of SSNs, it’s nice to visit a page & see someone’s entire grammar just there, instead of M&M-sized pieces of it. And no more ads!
By the way, I’ve reuploaded most of the files from the site & some that weren’t there yet, but having reuploaded it, I’ve realized what I have is a mess. Parts are out of date, both by my private notes and what’s published on Tumblr; other parts are musings that are not canon and may never be. I need to do a lot more work on it, but for now though, if you don’t mind, I leave it to you in all its incoherence.
Yeah, I plan to – no use having a dead website. Tripod's disappearance was a surprise (at least I save all my stuff offline), although I ought to have found a better place anyway. I used to have a Geocities, but that’s long gone. I also used to have a page on conlang.org too, but think at some point I lost my password. Something wiki-like could be useful for making numerous, frequent edits. Where IS the best place to set up a personal site these days? Any suggestions?
I have been avoiding working on the story of Qom while / by organizing the lexicon (reorganizing, really) of Classical Swira … and not finishing that, either. While that goes on, it seems that it doesn’t matter that I prune every single protolanguage etymon that I no longer use, and that is a waste of time for now, at least. So I’m focusing on cleaning up particular semantic domains. This time, it’s the kinship terms.
(Of course, having done so, mewling central beat me to it & made a prettier chart.)
You may remember from a while ago, the kinship terms for the protolanguage.
Swira terms are mostly an update of this. This gives us:
In the traditional anthropological six-type typology of kinship systems, it seems to be somewhere between “Inuit” (because it doesn’t distinguish cousins much) and Sudanese (because it does distinguish different types of uncles). In addition, it distinguishes relative age within generations – both ego’s generation and the parents.
Many kinship systems will merge particular relationships in one term. I considered giving Swira a different set of kinship term mergers – all relatives of one’s own and one’s parent’s generation are referred to by the same term IF they are younger than the parent but older than you. Additionally, all people in ego’s generation, younger than ego, are ‘younger sibling’ regardless of whether they’re a biological sibling or cousin. (I don’t know if any earthly society does so, but why not? It does at least fit one rule of kinship which I do observe, which is that more distinctions are made in older ages / generations than younger ones. However, I did not do this for the chart.)
Many of these have multiple forms. I have shown one form, the “free” form, which is unbound, usually used in a direct address, sometimes in place of a name – and in some cases is found as a generic noun, for example, lara is also a typical word for just ‘old man.’ It is common to extend kinship terms to some people to whom one is not really related. For example, it is polite to address strange old men and women as “grandfather / grandmother,” and the terms without a personal prefix generally mean just “old man / old woman.”These words also have conjugated forms with a personal possessive prefix, which form may differ from the unbound form. For example, muku has the bound form just -mu as in kʷemu ‘my son.’
One thing I wanted to do is to have terms resemble each other in a “family-resemblance” way that is not entirely regular. Many of the words have broad regularities going back to the protolanguage, but altered by sound changes – visible in the o- on parternal relatives and the na- on maternal ones. That said, having all the words be etymologically / morphologically-derived / related isn’t super real. One thing I thing I’ve noticed while looking at kinship terms, is that (like names for sexes and ages of animals), when a language distinguishes numerous different words for different relationships, they’re often different roots, rather than transparently derived from some kind of ‘mother’s side’ / ‘father’s side’ / ‘in-law’ prefix as seen here. But I kind of like it, and don’t see any reason why it CAN’T be.
Another thing: cousins can be referred to as brothers or sisters, but also with the descriptor iksi. Iksi has not changed, but the etymology has. In the protolanguage kinship post, iksi simply is, it doesn't have any morphological complexity. However, I realized it could also be evolution of *isǝkǝg, and thus could be derived from *isa 'blood.' In that case it should refer to paternal (blood) cousins, but I figure it has extended to all cousins.
Qôntoq is one of the more amusing errors of Tepatic history.
Among the barbarians of the north, people commonly called themselves ‘the people’ or ‘our people’ or ‘real people’ or something like that. What do they call people outside the tribe? Often just ‘those other people’ or ‘strangers.’ Since most are Nastowic languages, they tend to resemble each other. In Proto-Nastowic, the root *qigɯ for ‘other, the other, another, something else (not the self).’ With *tab ‘people’ (redundant plural: *tabud) you get *qigɯ(n)tab(ud).
There are a variety of derivates, derived from this, ranging from qeyuntawoʔ to qeintawiʔ to qe:nto:ʔ to keyundau etc. - but as you can see, there is a certain resemblance among all of them.
When Tepat had relations with neighboring barbarians, they when they encountered new tribes, or merely heard about the existence of ones further out, they would often ask the adjacent tribes with which they had more contact “Who are they?” And the near tribes would just say, “They’re other people.” At least once the answer must have been something like *qeyuntoʔ, which Yuk Tepat borrowed to refer to the still unmet Qôyûntoq tribe.
Tribal and national boundaries were long in a flux; some nomads would displace others, and Tepat would encounter them, and hear about still more tribes out there, and so the aforementioned conversation would repeat itself many times. Another time the answer was *qe:nto:ʔ, which gave Tepat Qôntoq. Each time, the answer would be slightly different. Soon they pieced together that Qôyûntoq and Qôntoq were the same, but not much else. All they could gather was that the Qôntoq were still further out there, all the other barbarians were talking about them, many of them didn’t like them, and the tribe must be huge.
Finding out about the Qôntoq and preparing for an encounter with them became a priority of Tepatic geopolitics, as they had surmised this poorly understood nation could potentially be the most threatening northern tribe.
Klamen, the military officer who led several expeditions up the river deep into the prairie, reported that he never encountered them either, but still found people talking about them elsewhere, at the furthest extent of his journey.
Less scrupulous adventurers sometimes claimed to have encountered the tribe or even been captured by them, and wrote fantastical, contradictory travelogues of bullshit. Tepatic imagination went wild with them. They became a staple of Tepatic lang fiction, a standin for basically whatever the author wanted to put.
But they had already met the Qôntoq, many times. They were every other tribe that they had met.
Some scholars, reviewing the history, and noticing that no matter where they went, the Qôntoq were always just past them, became suspicious that they were legendary and they were talking about the ethnic equivalent of Bigfoot.
It took until a Tepatic scholar of barbarian heritage to realize that Qôntoq was a corruption of the word “other people,” and simply meant any other tribe, and not any group in particular. That was it.
So disappointing! But the word lives on to refer to a mirage, or imaginary threat.
Could I commission you to create a new conlang for me or would that be extremely expensive considering how famous you are?
I have no clue how to create one myself. I've tried for years and read books about it but I still can't figure it out.
I'm not able at the moment, but can I recommend a different book—a new one? My wife Jessie wrote How to Create a Language: The Conlang Guide and it's the best resource for starting out—better than The Art of Language Invention. You can purchase it here:
Discover How to Create a Language, 1st Edition, Jessie Peterson, HB ISBN: 9781108834070 on Cambridge Aspire website
Quick add-on for my 2C -- I bought this book after reading this post and watching a video about it that I think I have queued for tomorrow and it's so good. It really embraces the beginner and explains things thoroughly and in interesting ways. I'm not far into it at all but I'm far enough to say it's earned its shelf space and is well worth spending that kind of time and focus on.
Five (and possibly more ways) to utilize, develop, or increase native abilities are:
Talent: Be naturally born with an overabundant endowment of these abilities.
Analogy: Most people have average memories. Few people are able to see something once, and then recall every detail of it. Some people just have really good bodies for running, swimming, or other sports. Most humans can run. Most of those that can run could become really good at it, if they put in the time and energy to train for it. They could probably do a marathon. But very few of those people have the body of Usain Bolt. In fact, only Usain Bolt has the body of Usain Bolt.
Education: Enhance normal abilities through long and diligent training in special techniques
Analogy: people with normal attention spans increasing their powers of concentration by practicing meditation. Regular Joes jogging every day for a year to train for a marathon.
Symbiosis: Cultivating relationships with symbiotic spiritual organisms
Analogy: Trees can absorb nutrients so-so. By getting colonized by mycorrhizal fungi, they get that much better at it. Humans digest much better with bacteria in their intestines.
Alchemy: Use of potions that stimulate various mental functions
Analogy: People who trip on shrooms can perceive the world in new and totally different ways, that they would never realize sober
Technology: Use of specially crafted tools or objects - magical “technology” - which can do things mere humans can’t
Analogy: People wearing watches instead of counting the minutes themselves
Swira depends on identifying people to whom #1 applies, and then pushing them into apprenticeship with a sorcerer, through which they encounter #2-4. However, even most ordinary people traditionally had some familiarity with those processes. Tepat in particular works almost entirely with #5.
As a bonus, here is a link to a full album stream of Sorcery, the 1995 debut LP by Quebecois death metal band Kataklysm:
(I did not upload this video nor do I have any rights to it)
Chichit or chicit /͡tsʰiˈ͡ts(ʰ)it/, or chitwoq /͡tsʰitwɔʔ/ the oxpecker.
This bird customarily alights on all manner of large animals, including cattle. It is the animal’s constant attendant, eating all the little bugs that dare land on it. And, however, occasionally sipping its blood.
Chitwoq is literally ‘pecks cattle.’ Chit, an otherwise little-used word for ‘peck,’ refers primarily to these ‘peckers’ now, usually in the reduplicated form chichit. Also called thelchit (‘peckbird’).
In feudal days, every ruler’s entourage had a nebulous assortment of people: guards, magicians, scribes, generals, servants, and so on, managing various tasks. But many, perhaps the majority were the kind of people, often other nobles, who didn’t have a particular job. Some of the smarter ones might be ‘advisors’ of sorts, with or without (more often without) specific portfolios, helping him make wise decisions. But often they were kind of just … there. They might dine with the ruler or ride or hunt with him, but basically they were around the court in order to be around the court.
These amorphously functional(?) there-people were called ‘peckers’ - chichit. (Also called: yaqthôy ‘one who is there, there-person.’) Like the birds, sometimes they picked metaphorical bugs off the king. But they were also kind of parasitic, weren’t they?
Moving sideways: woq is also found in nitwoq ‘oxkill’ and pyalwoq ‘ox event’ which both basically mean ‘barbecue’ or just ‘party’ nowadays, because cattle were valuable workers, and a peasant was unlikely to just eat them. There would be too much meat anyway; fish and ducks were much more common. If he did kill it, likely because it couldn’t work anymore, it was a big deal, and he would invite the neighbors to help eat it.
One of the peculiar customs of Tepat is the coming-of-age of young men.
If that's a sensitive topic for you, skip to the next post.
Although there are many customs associated with rite-of-passage, which may or may not be done, or may be handled differently in different places, one of the most widespread and consistent is a ritual where the boy gets his first orgasm and ejaculation from the community.
Teenage boys are initiated into manhood by being brought to oragasm and ejaculation by an elder – typically by an older woman or older women of the community, one not related to the boy(s).
The woman who did this was often called a tyum (< *ti- hand + -um feminine suffix - see the glyphs at the top of the post (2 variations)). The tyum could be no woman in particular, or a group of the elders of the community, or a particular woman might be given the role customarily; in the latter case it was common for this woman to also be the midwife, matchmaker, or shamaness.
(In case you’re wondering, passage-rites for young women are less common and well-developed, but one of the more common ones is for families to announce menarche by flying a red flag outside the house.)
When the boy came, the old woman/women would shout hurrah and the semen would be saved as a talisman for the boy when he grew older.
There was a lot of variation, and how it went on was often particular to the ways of the particular village. In old villages, this was often a big event – all the boys of a certain age might go through it together. For several days each teenage boy would go through it one by one – or possibly, all of them would be done together at the same time. Rarely, they were all done outside in public, with the teenage girls watching and cheering for them. However, it could also be done to each boy alone in private when he showed signs of puberty. This could make it difficult to perform, although the women who gave it were often skilled with their hands.
It’s worth noting that masturbation has long been considered taboo in Tepat. People are not supposed to do sexual stuff alone. The handjob ritual must be done before a kid learns this. It must be the first ejaculation they have. In fact, part of the reason for this is to socialize and communalize sexuality and prevent people from having their first experience alone and making it a habit. Boys are told if they masturbate, it will raise their blood pressure and heart rate dangerously and cause a heart attack (no mention is made of whether plain old sex will kill you). Additionally, it was believed that when the old woman touches him, she can ‘sense’ if a boy has done it before, and would report his misdeed to the village.
Obviously, there’s a lot of embarrassment potential. Nobody wants to be humiliated – and really, most people don’t want to humiliate their friends and neighbors either, so it can be supposed deception was actually quite common. Silhen i-Tsyam was supposed to have failed to ejaculate, despite which his old woman lied and claimed he had, which he remembered as an early, formative experiences of human deceptiveness.
For the feudal elite, the old village woman could also be called in to the estate to do the lord’s sons, or the household might hire a nanny and expect her to do it, although the nanny might also be an older serf. In towns, elites might also do the communal thing at an exclusive party for only their sons.
Still widespread in the Shattered Land, the custom has declined since then. Selkwit in her monograph (Y+247) elucidated several causes for the custom’s decline. Urbanization speeded decline of the practice. Increasing numbers of people moving to the cities (speeded by dislocation) severed communal ties and group cohesion – although there were still institutions emerging for those who still wanted to keep the ancient ways. So while there was some decline, urbanization also led to the emergence of semi-professional specialist women. These were NOT prostitutes – the type was an older, married woman with children, a ‘fertile’ one, definitely not a virgin – and one who had knowledge of sexual and womanly thing, who was wise and could teach. Her fertility would also, er, rub off on him. So they were often not exclusively handjobbers.
However, later parents questioned whether it actually encouraged boys to masturbate. Fellatio would be better, because people can’t do it to themselves, but this crossed the line for many, and many old women (and their husbands) who would be OK giving a handjob balked at giving a blowjob. So many families stopped doing this altogether. In late Conciliar times, the multicultural cities included many barbarians, East Coasters or Muqali who would not have undergone this either. However, there has been a neomovement in Conciliar times attempting to revive the custom, using informal parents’ associations for handjobs.
As it happens, the problem was that I changed the email linked to this account, but hadn't re-verified the email, just in case anyone else gets the same problem.
Hey, just a note: if you're putting out conlanging materials, there is no reason to use AI images to illustrate them. Grammar materials don't need illustrations. I promise you the people who are into conlangs will be attracted to your declension tables more.
If you have the chops for making art yourself, that's cool. But using AI illustrations ends up looking worse than just having nothing.
Conlanging really took like 10 years to go from "I have invented a new minimalist language that lets everyone in the world walk up and down everything" to "I don't want you dagnabbed whippersnappers making infographics on your Xboxes and your Nintendos."
I'm talking about AI paintings inserted into the document. I'm not even making a moral argument. It's just distracting, and it's not essential to the presentation.
For what it's worth, I have actually tested LLMs for language construction and found them entirely useless. Everything I would want to automate about the process can be done better with simpler algorithms, and the AI makes it impossible to even stay consistent. And my process is entirely digital except for occasionally drawing the early form of a writing system on paper.
Interesting, I haven't used them for language construction - the only thing I really tried using AI for, conlangwise, was trying to create summaries of very long documents - a task I thought useful but uninteresting compared to creating stuff, and maybe better automated, although it botched even that. It sounds reasonable that it would produce inconsistent results.
I second that a declension table would probably be more attention-getting to the kind of people who would actually read a conlang grammar. (I must not read many recent ones though because I can't recall seeing AI graphics in any conlang materials.)
An example of Classical Swira. This is the 4th of 5 parts, showing its evolution. (Or 15 parts - there may be extensions, to be announced - but the last part for now!) Previously, I posted a short text in Proto-Nastowic, then one in Early Proto-Swiric, then Late Proto-Swiric, and finally Old Swira, all versions of the same text, through time, describing a family / hunting party in winter.
This is more or less how Swira would be spoken at the time they invaded and ransacked the Tepatic Conciliarity, following years of conflict.
At the Classical Swira stage, the number of geminate consonants increases due to assimilation, and also some cases of metathesis and epenthesis.
Omo iyol, weeiwo. Pyoosi sɯɯle, fimoko irka, niima ferko puke, arar alkii.Ɯra weka puattɯl, fii byoo.Imoke, tema tem, omo nubuna, lime wara.Farengatike para mur atsa miwakɯl.Fiiatyaai sifu yol saguike, petemu tiina.Tokike, fiiatsilkɯmuna, lime mito neko.Tobi, ema fiinubuna, ekoln ifol mol. Anna komolɯn uta tetiina, fipurun-kangina, pekɯl katsa telpufoola. Atta, aaki, arbu mepeniina mitusɯ. Weka my-oru serekan.Niilɯn ime miwaatte, temaatkiirɯ. Pekarɯ arkɯ tepatel -- Potal ko.Na, tesal ko!Perbu paaste arkɯ tefaa. Poltekiitte tiime polifo letɯn oke.Tɯn tema, tobi mekɯ gaayal.Tokibara-bara yɯɯrkɯ.Tiyar, mitawena miini. Aulau mikatso ifyaayaarkake. Imo yoinakiiaru ina!
Trying to work out all the stylistic elements of Tepatic glyphs.
These are distinct from glyph radicals, which are the smallest distinctive meaningful elements of the writing system, which are combined to spell words.
What you see here mostly don’t have any meaning, or any sound, they’re just shapes.
The Annals of Tepat @yuk-tepat - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
