madelinelovesick

[madelinelovesick]

Update

(What you don't see: motion of all cratons from 1000 to 0 Ma is all done, and now I just need to add all the crust, subduction zones, orogenies etc)

Suffice to say, not having a concrete plan is definitely something that ends up making me question what the Madelineverse and the Saraverse even are. The general idea was that Saraverse would only bother itself with one continent and what its constituent cratons were doing, while the Madelineverse would have a full-blown sim like this. But, as we can see, I actually started on the more complicated project before the less complicated one.

As always.

[madelinelovesick]

Saraverse: I forgot I don't have a plan

Not having a true plan (other than posting significant, chapter-starting pages on the 1st of a month) is at least one issue I identified with the Madelineverse, and I might have just repeated it with the Saraverse as well.

I was considering doing something like "Saraverse Word of the Week", but entries of that may very well end up being invalidated once the phonological evolution is finalised.

In either case, your input is appreciated.

[madelinelovesick]

Saraverse?: Globe go spinny

(I am assessing the possibility of coding a software like GPlates, but with all the user accessibility that's possible, to figure out whether it's GPlates that's the problem or the plate tectonics method itself, as I haven't ruled out either)

[madelinelovesick]

Saraverse TL;DR

the Madelineverse needs the attention of someone who knows what they're doing

the Saraverse is my attempt to become someone who knows what they're doing

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Longer version here

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Saraverse: How to coin words for a conlang when you don't know how

The phonology of Saraverse Language I, shown previously in its phonemic inventories but also constituting phonotactics and an evolution behind the scenes, is currently being looked over together with an actual professional linguist, who I do plan to compensate for their work. However, even in an incomplete state, I am actively anticipating the next steps, such as morphology and lexicon.

If I were crafting a single personal language without much regard for naturalism except in superficial ways, then this blog post could basically end here: I would be picking words and their meanings purely based on personal appeal. However, Saraverse Language I is intended to be the first of many, to say nothing of the Madelineverse's secondary languages, and eventually, I will end up with a language whose phonaesthetics work internally, but just aren't appealing to me personally, and yet, I'll still need to actively work on the language, making judgments as to what would and would not fit in the lexicon.

For this, I need a methodology, and a whole array of methodologies can be ruled out immediately due to producing unnaturalistic results. One of those is, of course, turning the phonology into a computer program that spits out valid words while brushing its teeth, and then simply using those, one by one. Even worse are the approaches rooted in the modern notion of "machine learning".

Instead, a rudimentary methodology I have devised is as follows:

Two differences from how flowcharts normally behave must be noted:

Though there is a START node, eventually, you will reach a small circle, which calls you to pay attention to what else is going to it, and even (in case of "a need to translate a specific text to the conlang") what else the information you obtained can be useful for.

Many of these are continuous processes; they are "unlocked" in a sense when a conlang gets to that point, but they don't ever stop or conclude unless the conlang's development as a whole concludes.

With regard to the lexicon generation, since a conlang requires a lexicon of >100 words to be usable by the conlanger and >1000 to be usable by people other than the conlanger*, each step in the lexicon part is designed to be automated or, if it does require human intervention, need at most a few seconds per human decision.

So far, Saraverse Language I has progressed to a point where I have 128 "calls to the conlanger" words, and am actively working on methods to create an ordered list of those (by either the proto-form's appeal or the modern form's appeal), a process which involves researching sorting algorithms. However, the details of that involve serious high math and are most likely far too technical for even the most seasoned of conlangers.

See you next Monday.

* no, Toki Pona is not an exception. Though it has ca. 140 words actually used and understood in the language community, those often combine to lexicalised compounds, as demonstrated by the fact that <jan pona> doesn't mean "simpleton" nor "Toki Pona speaker", and neither does <tomo tawa> mean "one of those witch huts on a giant chicken leg that is able to move on its own".

[madelinelovesick]

Introducing the Saraverse

As you might have noticed, I did not resume posting daily Madelineverse pages on July 1, and, indeed, never posted a single Madelineverse page since that date. While many of the causes are largely personal, at least some, I believe, are inherently structural.

Namely, I believe that certain key aspects of the Madelineverse are beyond my current skill as a worldbuilder/conlanger.

For this post, I would like to highlight just two of them:

The map

The mapping method I've chosen for the Madelineverse's primary habitable world (the *Earth) is the plate tectonics method posited by Worldbuilding Pasta and popularised by Artifexian, requiring one to go ca. 1 billion years back and simulate plate movements from that date, making sure that everything behaves correctly. Needless to say, this is a highly involved process, and many newcomers to the process find themselves constantly doubting themselves and having to redo large portions of their work, almost constantly.

Early Creole

Early Creole starts out with less phonemes than Proto-Indo-European had stops, and very simplistic phonotactics to match. While this is not completely unreasonable for a proto-language (Proto-Japonic, for example, is of a comparable complexity), it is still more difficult to work with than something like PIE's phonology. The process is made more difficult by the fact that the speakers of different ancestral languages would end up speaking different varieties of Early Creole, which need to be taken into account before a phonological evolution can even begin.

Taking a step backwards

My conclusion at this point is simple: if the Madelineverse is to simultaneously be my "perfect escape" and constructed according to the most advanced methods available to worldbuilders, then I have to pick it up when I'm more experienced. Note that the current progress does not need to be thrown away, but simply archived for future me.

Instead, to continue the output of this blog in any capacity, I've decided to create the Saraverse, a world that lets itself play "fast and loose" and acts as a test bed for some of the more outlandish Madelineverse ideas, as well as a way to "git gud", so to say.

So far, I've started with a single conlang, very creatively named Saraverse Language I, with a phonology/romanisation that makes it look like Latin, but intended to diverge from the Proto-Indo-European mould in grammar. There is not much work done on it so far, but I can show the ideas for the phoneme list for the original and modern forms:

From now on, updates should be coming every Monday at 17:00 UTC+2.

Thank you for your patience.

[madelinelovesick]

Sound Change of the Day - 2024 July 1

/iə/ becomes /ɪ/.

(presently occurring in American English)

Why are there no Sound Changes of the Day after this one?

[madelinelovesick]

Sound Change of the Day - 2024 June 30

/ɟ/ becomes /j/ intervocalically.

(Proto-Nyulnyulan to Bardi)

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Sound Change of the Day - 2024 June 29

/ɾ/ is deleted intervocalically if at least one of the vowels is nasalised.

(Pre-Bakairi to Western Bakairi)

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Sound Change of the Day - 2024 June 28

/ɴq/ becomes /ŋk/.

(Proto-New Caledonia to Nyelâyu)

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Sound Change of the Day - 2024 June 27

/ts/ and /dz/ become /s/ and /z/ respectively.

(Proto-Tanoan to Jimez)

[madelinelovesick]

Sound Change of the Day - 2024 June 26

/c/ and /ɟ/ become /tʃ/ and /dʒ/.

(most varieties of Gheg Albanian and some varieties of Tosk Albanian)

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Sound Change of the Day - 2024 June 25

/ʕʷ/ becomes /ɥ/.

(across the Abazgi family)

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Sound Change of the Day - 2024 June 24

/plv/ becomes /pf/.

(Proto-Slavic to Polish)

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Sound Change of the Day - 2024 June 24

/iw/ becomes /uj/.

(across the Philippine family)

[madelinelovesick]

Sound Change of the Day - 2024 June 22

/t/ becomes /c/ before front vowels.

(Proto-Oceanic to Proto-Southern Vanuatu)

[madelinelovesick]

Sound Change of the Day - 2024 June 21 (sorry for this being a day late)

/tʃ/ becomes /ts/ after /a/.

(Proto-Chatino to Yaitepec Chatino)