Conlang has gotten good enough that I can form sentences!

Now I just need to add a few hundred verbs and a few thousand words, no big deal.....

(...probably refine the grammar too...)

Rasika și ueþia ata ēnahauio

/ɾasika ʃi wɛðija ata ɛːnahaʊ̆jo/

Þotuene rasika și þoueþia

/θɔtuwɛne ɾasika ʃi θɔwɛðija/

Nia hetaga þoþuranași nișa.

/nija hetaɡa θɔðuɾanaʃi niʃa/

The dog that weeps after it kills

Is not better than the dog that doesn’t weep,

My guilt will not purify me.

Lexember 18,19,20,21,22

Ni- 1st person pronoun, depicts a human standing

Nī- third class noun, eye, verb, to see, depicts an eye

Ueþi- verb, to weep/cry, depicts an eye with the water radical beneath

Go- fifth class noun, knife, depicts a blade

He- verb, to be near, close. Conjunction, and. Depicts a tree with a smaller tree close beside it, indicating relation or following.

Ni nīhe aigotai he ueþiheșo

I saw the knife and so wept.

Lexember 23,24,25,26,27

ata- verb, to say, speak. Depicts a mouth and tongue

rana- fourth class noun, the weather. Depicts the sky with rain/clouds (water radical)

hua’a- fourth class noun, fog/mist. Depicts the weather touching the earth.

igia- verb, to run. Depicts a running figure

nahau- verb, to die. Depicts a person seated in meditation, either waiting to die and accepting of it, or in grief for one passed.

Ni atā ni igianē iohua’āi he itu atā ioranaī nișa ēnahauē.

I say I am going to run in the fog and you say the weather will kill me.

Lexember #1: Mup

Mup means ‘witch,’ ‘wizard, ‘sorcerer,’ or ‘shaman’ or something like this.

On the left side the semantic determiner is POWER, and on the right side is the phonetic lup ‘fish.’ This formation is a bit odd, but in ancient times lup evolved from *mrup, making it closer to mup.

It refers especially to local practitioners of magic from before the Tepatic era. It has also been applied to the shaman-like priests and sorcerers of the Swira and other nomads. Like ‘witch,’ it has negative connotations.

After Tepat gained control of Milim, overthrowing their reigning Tsaltep and ending his human sacrifices, Tepatic leaders outlawed most of the rituals associated with his court. At a small, personal level, some ancient practices may have persisted. These people, suspected of continuing the Tsaltep’s evil and harming those around them, were gradually rooted out through successive witch hunts during the feudal Kingdom of Tepat.

During the era of the Qom Empire, the Emperor Qathûq û-Qom imposed rigid laws across the entire empire, but himself delved secretly into numerous magical practices, attempting to consolidate his power over others and make himself immortal. Qathûq sought out an allegedly immortal mup, who had survived from the Milim era, but at this point, he needed to seek outside Tepat for her.

He has been accused of attempting to reconstruct Milimite sorcery, and of a variety of aborted atrocities. Among other things, he is said to have tried making enchanted worms that would crawl under people’s skin and control their minds; creating invisible eyes and ears to put inside walls; and stealing one breath from each of his subjects to extend his life. Qathûq’s attempts were all failures though, and his successor Kulhûq accused the court sorcerers of poisoning his father and had them put to death.

When the Conciliarity replaced the Empire, all of these practices were very heavily restricted. Nemul or ‘demons’ were expelled and kept out by an invisible wall. Most kinds of magic are banned for private individuals, as well as any materials for their use. Tepat regularly pressures surrounding countries to regulate their sorcery as well, or at least prevent it being brought into Tepat.

Itu ōgaiaihe na’ūþeiri?

Did you remember darkness?

Eīaşu ouilonio itu eīþei.

Cry on the flowers when you cry.

Because I’m attempting to design the system to be written in any direction this sentence starts in the center and is written outward both directions.

Valya Vednesday #4

I’ve been working on a Valya font! It’ll be a while, since there’ll eventually be hundreds of glyphs, but I have the basic set complete:

The earliest form of the Valya script was a syllabary, and these 51 glyphs are the descendants of the original ones. Aside from the i, u, and a glyphs, the rest of these are all still used for CV syllables in modern Valya. (I’m not actually sure if those first three will get used; right now I don’t have any use for them but they might show up in some form or another.)

The other few hundred glyphs are for CCV syllables (with a few exceptions) and are all essentially ligatures of pairs of these ones. Lya (shown at the top) is a ligature of li and a, for example. Most combinations are a little less straightforward, for a couple reasons. One is that there are multiple possible ligatures for most CCV syllables, as there are multiple sequences in Old Valya that result in the same syllable in Modern Valya. Generally, CiCV and CuCV will end up the same, but also due to assimilation and other sound changes there are some Modern Valya syllables that could potentially have eight different sources in Old Valya! In some cases words will be spelled historically (i.e. with a ligature of Ci-CV if that’s the historical form of the word), but in many cases spellings will change for convenience. It’ll be a pretty messy system in the end!

Here are a few sample sentences I was able to construct using only the glyphs I’ve made so far (all the CV syllables plus lya):

I haven’t done any work on kerning yet but it looks like it won’t be as bad as I initially feared—only a few pairs of characters look like they need significant adjustment in the above examples.

Next week I’ll talk about the real and fictional development of this writing system!

Basic Color Terms in tuuliponi

My favourite leonardo da vinci quote translated into Gamlieg + a sneakpeak of my conscript that's been in development longer than Gamlieg itself but I'm yet to post about haha

Uit kiniing tiniivayig tanirhutaš iinnuutš’aaši.

A wound was never made less painful by making it slowly.

Numenorean Adunaic Alphabet

I know you're all thinking it.. .. .. If they were going to make an alphabet for the numenoreans in the rings of power, why didn't they at least derive it from one of the alphabets tolkien actually created? Well, you hungry dogs, eat up.

New conlang!

This is a project I started last spring and then abandoned, but recently picked back up. It’s still in early stages, and lots of stuff has been changing so most of this post might be out of date by next week.

The still-unnamed language is a nonlinear, written-only conlang, inspired heavily by UNLWS. It’s meant to look very different from UNLWS, though, and functions in a different way as well. I won’t get too into the details here, but I’ll share a few short things I wrote today to test things out:

“Cats, opossums, mice, goats, and rabbits are mammals.” I decided after writing this that the glyph for “dog” looked more like a goat, so that’s what it means now (bottom row, third glyph). Pre-goatification, though, this was a reference to the five completed seasons of Langtime Studio, which have followed the creation of conlangs for various animals.

“Mammals have hair, but other animals don’t.” The top left glyph is “mammal,” which is a combination of the glyph for “hair” (bottom left) and the glyph for “animal” (center). The latter glyph also the basis for all the glyphs for specific animals in the first image. The resemblance of the glyphs at 6 o’clock and 9 o’clock to the animal ones is a complete coincidence, though.

“I saw a bunny, and it saw me. It came toward me, but then it ran away.” True story! Here are photos from the incident:

The rabbit visited from Watership Down as the muse of conlanging

T’owal T’uesday #10

A little while ago I came across a post which I can’t find now (I think @arayaz had reblogged it but as everyone knows searching on tumblr is near-impossible) which compared word order for a number of languages with a sample translation. Fortunately I wrote down the sentence that was being translated before losing the post, so here it is in T’owal:

The original sentence was phrased something more like “across the street from our hotel,” but I changed it to be able to match almost word-for-word with T’owal. The literal translation is actually “on the other side of the street from our hotel’s side,” which is why there are two instances of byin “side.”

A few little translation details:

Ts’ox is just any article of clothing, as I didn’t feel like I needed to make a word for “suit” just for this.

Fan tso we is three words for “saw” because it’s the verb itself (fan, to see), with the passive marker tso and then the past marker we. Adding the pronoun su after, that makes it literally “that/which was seen by me.”

Tyot inthed is “place of shopping.” I may make a single word for “shop,” “store,” etc. at some point, but for now this works okay.

I didn’t have a word for “hotel” before this and thought about making a similar compound phrase with tyot “place,” but I wasn’t really sure what the associated verb would be. Possibly tuxya would work, which is used for visiting a person or attending an event, but that doesn’t quite match, I think.

Of course I found the post right after posting this

Sdefa Sdaturday #9

Earlier this week I posted a short poem in T’owal that I wrote last August in anticipation of the conlang conference/convention Kopikon. A few days before the event, I wrote a Sdefa text on the same subject. I recorded it to share with friends but I wasn’t satisfied with that recording, so I recently made a new one!

Here’s an English translation:

We’ll travel to gather together and talk about languages. We’ll talk about our conlangs, We’ll talk about others’ conlangs, And we might even talk about natural languages, too!

At the time Sdefa didn’t have a writing system but now it has two, so here it is in both:

The original recording was slower than I had intended, and had some mistakes. I just recorded it on my phone to share with friends, but to my surprise it ended up played at the end of Kopikon itself! Due to some technical issues it wasn’t audible on the livestream, though, so if you were there for the livestream and couldn’t hear it then, now you can!