sombra-conlangs

[sombra-conlangs]

if tumblr dies I'll post about my conlangs on whichever social media I end up using as a replacement, as always you can check my blog to see more info on my conlangs as well (I've been meaning to revamp some of my languages so I guess this could be a good opportunity to do that lol)

if any of my mutuals want to find me in the case of tumblr going down I'm on mastodon at lingo.lol/@SombraGlaze my reddit is u/SombraGlaze and I might make a bluesky in the near future since it's so popular (we'll see if I feel bothered enough to do it) the username is just going to be SombraGlaze if it hasn't been taken yet

oh and I guess you could go to either of my websites (tekseni.bearblog.dev or conlang-guide.bearblog.dev) and check the "contact" section to get updates on my socials, so that's another way you could find me, if I end up moving to another platform I'll repost my art and keep sharing conlang stuff!

I'd be pretty sad if tumblr actually goes down cause it's the one social media I use regularly and it's very fun to meet fellow conlangers and artists here. I haven't really talked to most of my mutuals but I guess it still gives me a sense of community and it'd be sad if I never got to see y'all again in my notifications

[sombra-conlangs]

I haven't posted anything here in over a month and I want to apologize for that, I fell way behind on the conlang year project cause things have been a bit rough for me, but I'll make progress on it eventually, even if it's not soon, and I also want to work on other conlangs as well and post about them here, I just gotta work on my mental health first

[sombra-conlangs]

Conlang year 2025 · Day 19 - 23

In these next few prompts we'll be coining a bunch of roots, but I think I need to consider the surrealistic elements of the language before coining roots because I want this language to be pretty different from natlangs, so I'll spend the first part of this post talking about ideas I have for this conlang before we actually move on to the prompts.

I may also change my mind and end up trying to make something completely different down the line if I don't feel satisfied with the result, I'm just experimenting with ideas right now.

Surrealistic elements:

The main idea I have is that I want this language to be inspired by octopuses (my favorite animal!) since the setting and creature design I made for this project already takes a lot of inspiration from sea animals I think that idea fits.

In David Peterson's essay about surrealistic conlangs he talks about how you can combine different things that are normal on their own and end up with a result that is unrealistic, in the same way that a lot of surrealistic paintings combine realistic things (like clocks and melting) to produce a result that is otherworldly (like the melting clock painting called "persistence of memory"), for example you could combine verbal conjugations and clocks to come up with a system where you conjugate verbs based on the time of day. I'm basically trying to use this approach by combining aspects of the language with octopuses.

So you know how octopuses have 9 brains? one on the head and one for each tentacle, I'm not a biologist, maybe that's not actually accurate, it might just be one of those factoids that gets passed around online but regardless, the idea that each of an octopus' tentacles has a mind of its own and can behave independently is very interesting to me.

The dream angels have multiples of 3 in different parts of their bodies, so imagine if every time you say a sentence in this language there's 3 independent messages that are being conveyed, that's actually another idea that David talks about in his essay (as a way to replicate an effect achieved in cubist art rather than surrealistic art, but whatever) I think that fits here with the multiple brain concept, so I'll use it even if I didn't come up with it on my own.

This might mean that roots have more than one meaning and so things can be interpreted in multiple different ways depending on which definition you're thinking of, e.g.

k͡ǃu˨˩˧ - ground, emotion, tool

Or maybe roots can be broken down into different components that mean different things, e.g.

plaw˥˨.ɸe˧ - ground, emotion, tool

In this case looking at all the consonants in the sentence will yield one meaning, looking at all the vowels and tones will yield another, and looking at both of them combined will yield yet another meaning. It would probably be useful if each of the meanings is pretty different from the rest, and the first two meanings should probably be more broad because their inventories are a lot more limited, whereas the last one could be more specific.

Or perhaps there's 3 word orders that apply to every sentence. Imagine if verbs and nouns look the same, so whether a word is a noun or a verb is entirely dependent on word order, in that case you might end up with something like this:

ɬa˧ ti˨˩˧.xe˧ ʈi˥˨ SVO: dog eat bone (i.e. a dog eats a bone) VOS: bark consumption bone (i.e. a bone barks at consumption) OSV: dog consumption support (i.e. consumption supports a dog)

Out of all of these options the 3rd one seems like a more original approach (I imagine something like it has been done before, but I haven't seen it before) but I might go with the second option because it will allow me to do something else with the lexicon.

People have made languages with no verbs (like Sylvia Sotomayor's Kēlen) or languages where all nouns are also verbs (like Pete Bleackley's Iljena) and I'm sure all sorts of things like this have been done before, but it could still be fun to experiment with it a bit.

I think it'd be interesting to make a language where most words are modifiers and you only have a small number of nouns and/or verbs, so it might take more words to say things, you have to paint a picture in order to communicate, you have to be descriptive, and in a way that feels a bit more dreamlike to me, like you're looking at vague concepts, as if everything is blurring together, not as clear as reality.

I imagine it would be interesting if you want to say something like "dog" and so the way you do it is like this:

fluffy loyal sharp animal

So there's just one noun that means "animal" or "living being" and to specify that you're talking about a dog you have to add adjectives, which show a more subjective view and make you emphasize certain aspects, you can't be super precise but it's still fairly expressive, like a dream!

I think I can take this one step further and instead of a small number of nouns we have zero nouns but adjectives can inflect to agree with a few different classes, e.g.

loyal(animal) - loyal(inanimate object) - loyal(material) - loyal(dangerous) - loyal(abstract) - loyal(structure) - etc.

so sentences could avoid nouns entirely and be mostly made up of adjectives and adverbs, maybe verbs are conveyed through participles, and so you describe things without any nouns or verbs, everything is a modifier, e.g.

fluffy loyal eating-ly (animal) white structural (inanimate) a dog eats a bone, or literally something like "fluffy loyal animal in the manner of eating white structural inanimate object"

So what I'll do is make most words adjectives or adverbs, still unsure of if I'll add verbs, we'll see, but for now every word or root I coin will be adjectival, and I'll try doing the thing where each word can be interpreted in 3 different ways, the first meaning is assigned to the consonants, the second to the vowels and tones, and the third is assigned to the whole thing together, I'm not sure how to assign the different meanings, so this is something I might come back to later and adjust.

There's another idea I have but it won't be relevant when coining words or roots, so I'll save that for later, I think I can start making words!

Day 19: Create five proto-forms for body terms

This might be a bit difficult, but I'll try to coin terms where at least one of the meanings would be useful when describing the terms the prompt suggests.

I'll italicize the words that are meant to be useful in describing the vocabulary of the prompt.

t͡se˧ɳ - early, happy, flexible (like a tentacle)

k͡ǁe˧˥ - beautiful, clean, spotted

ɬi˧se˥ - dirty, sharp, strange

θu˥˨ - healthy, transparent, shy

ɸa˧˥ - soft, flat, simple

Day 20: Create proto-forms for terrain features

kʂa˧ - sad, dull, isolated

ɬa˨˩˧ - sick, hard, flowing

t͡su˧˥ - clean, linked, happy

ti˧˥ʂ - calm, large, wide

wu˥ - small, late, healthy

Day 21: Create five proto-forms for weather

mi˧ - large, early, cold

k͡ǃe˥ - loud, red, rainy

ki˥˨ɳi˧ - happy, freezing, calm

ʈu˨˩˧ɸi˧˥ - friendly, bright, warm

xnu˧ - dark, smooth, rough

Day 22: Create five proto-forms for flora

pʰi˥˨ - cold, warm, colorful

ħe˧ - rough, happy, juicy

pu˧θ - bright, smooth, tall

sla˧lu˧˥ - short, narrow, climbing / attached (like a vine)

wa˧˥k - red, flat, hanging

Day 23: Create five proto-forms for fauna

θu˧ħa˥k - white, afraid, long

k͡ǁiw˧˥ʈa˥˨ - black, old, peaceful

ka˥ʈe˧ - tall, new, winged

xe˧˥ - tired, clean, furry

ne˥˨θi˨˩˧ - round, floating, bug-eyed

I think this is interesting, it's definitely very different from anything I've ever done before with a conlang, but because of that I guess there's a small bit of insecurity popping up, I'm wondering how interesting or good this is to other people or if what I'm doing is too nonsensical or maybe not original enough, so it's a good time to remind myself that the goal behind this is basically just to have fun and experiment, the point of it is not necessarily to be good or bad or whatever, I'm enjoying stepping out of my comfort zone and that's what matters.

I definitely feel excited to try conlang year at some other point using a more regular language because that'd be a lot easier, but I also like this experience where I'm getting to experiment and try out things I wouldn't otherwise, I'm wondering what kinds of things I'll be able to do using mostly adjectives, limitations breed creativity so maybe I'll end up having to come up with interesting ideas when having to translate stuff from other languages.

The next few prompts are verbs, and I'm still not sure if I want to include regular verbs, meaning they might conjugate for TAM(tense-aspect-mood):

fluffy loyal (animal) eats white structural (inanimate)

Or if I want to use basically participles as verbs, so they're adjectives that express the action of the verb, agreeing with the other adjectives:

fluffy loyal eating-ly (animal) white structural (inanimate)

So I guess I'll think about it a bit more before I write the next post, that is all for now.

[sombra-conlangs]

Conlang year 2025 · Day 10 - 18

I'm gonna try to get through all of the phonology prompts in this post, I don't think I'll do anything too interesting with the phonology, the surrealistic elements of the language will mostly be in the grammar.

Before I start with any of the prompts keep in mind that the phonetic inventory I'm making here is for the "base form" of the language. As mentioned in a previous post dream angels change the sounds they use when they're talking to humans, so for example if you're a native Spanish speaker they will shift a lot of their consonants and vowels to match those that exist in Spanish, this is so that it's easier for you to pronounce their language and so that it sounds a bit more familiar to you, even though it will still sound pretty foreign.

Day 10: Choose “series” of consonants to incorporate

These are all (or most) of the sounds that are possible at the places and manners of articulation I picked. In the next few prompts we'll trim the inventory down to something more manageable, I'm not using all of these sounds.

A few things I wanna note:

I'm thinking there won't be labiodentals, only bilabials, even though I like [f] and [v] a lot I wanna change things up a bit.

I was considering adding a rhotic but I think it's more interesting if I don't have one, most of my conlangs have some sort of "r" sound (and in most of them it's a trill [r] or [ʀ]) so this one wont have one.

I like [θ] [ʂ] and [ħ] so that's why I added dentals, retroflex and pharyngeals. I assume it'll be difficult for these to get adapted into other language's phonologies but I'm fine with that.

Day 11: Decide if you want a voicing distinction

At first I wanted a voicing distinction but I ended up deciding against it mostly because that will make this language a bit easier to pronounce and easier to adapt into other phonologies. I also decided against it because I can add a bit of voicing distinction through allophonic variation later if I really want it.

I merged the lateral rows with their non-lateral counterparts to make the table more compact, so [ɬ] is next to [s] and [l] is in the same row as [w].

Some notes:

The only dental phoneme I kept is the fricative [θ], and the only pharyngeal I kept is also the fricative [ħ].

I added less distinctions in sounds made towards the back of the mouth, despite the fact that this language is not meant to be naturalistic I still feel like that makes for an appealing phonological inventory.

This ended up being a pretty fricative-heavy language, which I like because I happen to love fricatives.

Day 12: Research other consonant articulations

In this prompt Jessie tells us to research things like affricates, double articulation and non-pulmonic consonants (ejectives, implosives and clicks).

I added a handful of clicks mostly because I love the way they sound, I added dental [k͡ǀ], alveolar [k͡ǃ] and lateral [k͡ǁ], but I didn't add variations to them like aspirated or nasal because I struggle to pronounce those and tell them apart.

I imagine this is a feature that won't be easily adapted into other languages' phonologies, maybe these could be substituted with gemminates, affricates, ejectives, clusters, and other types of occlusive sounds, but a lot of languages might not have enough phonemes to cover all the occlusives that exist in the base form of the language, so the clicks might just have to remain as clicks sometimes or merge with other sounds when the phonology is being adapted to fit another language's phonology.

I added the alveolar affricate [t͡s] because I like it a lot, and I also added a couple of aspirated stops: labial [pʰ] and alveolar [tʰ], these could be substituted with other distinctions like voicing when adapting the phonology to other languages.

So we ended up with 22 consonant phonemes.

Day 13: Choose monophthongs

I'm going with a four vowel system: /a/ /e/ /i/ /u/, I was considering a system with height harmony (something like /i/ - /e/, /u/ - /o/, /ə/ - /a/) but I like the smaller inventory.

I also looked ahead a bit and saw that there's no prompt for tone, and I've been thinking that I want this language to be tonal, so I'm going to include tones here as well. I happen to really like how contour tonal languages sound and for some reason I feel like tone would fit the vibe of this language.

That's another reason why I went with the smaller vowel inventory, it's a pain to romanize tonal languages that have more than 5 vowels, you end up needing to put diacritics on special characters like <ø> or <ə>, or you could take a different approach like using digraphs for the extra vowels, or numbers to represent tone, but I think that makes the text harder to read (for me at least), plus I like this 4 vowel inventory.

I imagine the tones would be preserved when the dream angels speak to someone who doesn't speak a tonal language, they're too important to just drop entirely, and I'm not sure it could get substituted with a stress system in a way that doesn't merge a bunch of words together.

My girlfriend helped me to come up with the tonemes for this language, here's what we decided on:

There's 5 tones: mid (˧ - 33) rising (˧˥ -35) high (˥ - 55) falling (˥˨ - 52) and dipping (˨˩˧ - 213).

Day 14: Choose diphthongs (if any)

I was indecisive, but I included 3 diphthongs in my language: /aj/ /aw/ and /iw/, I'm thinking of using these kind of sparingly. Diphthongs don't get treated as if they were long vowels, there's just no vowel length distinction in this language at all (at least not phonemically).

Day 15: Compile IPA charts for your conlang

I've basically already done that lol

Day 16: Play around with syllable structures

The syllable structure will be (C)CV(C), I want consonant clusters to only be allowed in the syllable onset, and I don't want any syllables without an initial consonant, so the minimal syllable is of the shape CV while the maximal syllable is of the shape CCVC.

I want to allow most consonants to be codas, so all plain stops, nasals, fricatives, and the lateral approximant [l] can be in the coda position (so no affricates, clicks, or [w]).

In clusters I'm not allowing aspirated stops, affricates, clicks, glides or the fricatives [ɸ] and [ħ], plus all nasals get reduced to [n] (unless they assimilate, but the point is that there won't be contrasting clusters of [kn] vs [km] for example).

As for the clusters I'm allowing:

stop-fricative clusters, except for stuff where both sounds have the same place of articulation, so [pɸ] [ts] [ʈʂ] and [kx] wouldn't be allowed.

stop-/n/ clusters.

stop-/l/ clusters.

fricative-/n/ clusters.

fricative-/l/ clusters, except for [ɬl] because that's too funky for me.

Day 17: Create nonce forms of varying lengths

For generating random nonsense words I like using word generators like Lexifer online, I input the syllable structure I came up with in the last prompt and it output some words.

I will use diacritics to represent tone for ease of readability, here's the diacritics I'll be using:

mid - ◌ (no diacritic)

rising - ◌̌ (caron)

high - ◌́ (acute)

falling - ◌̂ (circumflex)

dipping - ◌̀ (grave)

I took the words Lexifer gave me and modified some of them, here's the result:

ħu tìxe ʈǐ lu wíɸu ɬa ʂně pʰá pʰǐnu ta sǎpʰá naħá k͡ǃù pɬiwħ xlíku ʈî tʰasí kà ník t͡sǔʈíɳ k͡ǀǎ ħéθǎ kě tûk k͡ǃaj ħek͡ǁaw plâwɸe ɸìt na ɬakûʈ

I'm feeling pretty happy with that, I like the way these sound and I think I can hand-craft some nice words using this phonology.

While some of these words might be a bit difficult to pronounce for me right now they're not unmanageable and I know I'll get better at it over time.

I will say, I can already tell this language is going to be a bit of a pain for most people to type because the romanization will need not only diacritics for the tones but probably some special characters to deal with things like [tʰ] vs [θ], the clicks, retroflex sounds, etc.

I tend to avoid adding too many multigraphs because it can make it a bit hard to read for me, we'll see how I end up romanizing this language. I have a custom keyboard layout that makes it easy to type all sorts of diacritics and unconventional letters, so I'm usually ok with adding weird stuff to my romanizations for the sake of legibility, but I'll try to make this usable for other people as well since I'm sharing it online.

Day 18: Write a section on syllables and stress

I basically already decided the syllable structure of my language, and it doesn't have stress. So I guess that's it for today.

As a little experiment I took the random words from earlier and "English-ified" them:

hʊ dɪ̀heɪ̯ dɹɪ̌ lʊ wɪ́fʊ flæ ʃněɪ̯ pǽ pɪ̌nʊ dæ sæ̌pǽ næhǽ kɹʊ̀ fljuːf slɪ́kʊ dɹɪ̂ tæsɪ́ kæ̀ nɪ́k t͡ʃʊ̌dɹɪ́ŋ tɹæ̌ héɪθæ̌ kěɪ tʊ̂k kɹaɪ heɪklaʊ plâʊfeɪ fɪ̀t næ flækʊ̂ɹd

And a (vaguely latin-american) "Spanish-ified" version

xu dìxe dɾǐ lu wífu fla sně pá pǐnu da sǎpá naxá kɾù fljux xlíku dɾî tasí kà ník t͡ʃǔdɾíɲ tɾǎ xésǎ kě tûk kɾaj xeklaw plâwfe fìt na flakûɾd

These are a proof of concept, I'm sure I could do a better job if I sat down and meticulously figured out exact rules for how to adapt the phonemes, I think there's some places where you kind of have to break the phonotactics of English and Spanish to make it work, and I did end up merging a few sounds in both examples (for example we lost the /x/ - /ħ/ distinction) but I just wanted to see how it would look and I think it doesn't look bad.

Next time I think we'll start actually making words! I hope this post wasn't too long hehe thanks for reading all that.

[sombra-conlangs]

Conlang year 2025 · Day 5 - 9

Thank you all for your support on my previous post! y'all are very nice 🩷 This time I'll finish the rest of the worldbuilding prompts so we can move on to the conlang itself in the next post.

This is part of a series of posts where I'm following the prompts for Jessie Peterson's conlang year, to see the rest of the posts search the #Conlang year or #Conlang year 2025 tags on my blog.

All the info from these posts is compiled on my website: tekseni.bearblog.dev

Day 5: Describe (or design) your conworld terrain

The speakers of my language live in a cluster of floating islands that are not too far apart from each other, a lot of them are relatively small, perhaps big enough for some sort of structure to be built upon them, like a home, there's also a few even smaller ones scattered all over the place, and there's a bunch of bigger ones where communal areas are built (though I imagine the dream angels wouldn't necessarily build things on every single one of these islands).

The ground of these islands tends to be fairly flat, some of the bigger ones can have small hills, but never mountains.

The islands are not all necessarily at the same elevation relative to each other, not all of them would even be facing in the same direction and some might even move slowly as time goes on, but none of these are issues for the dream angels because they just float to move around anyway. The top of these islands tend to have grass and vegetation on them, while the bottoms are mostly dirt and rock, but gravity is not really a thing here so things can be built and grow on the underside of the islands as well.

There is some water in the form of ponds, lakes, rivers and waterfalls.

One last thing I'll add is that I like the idea that some of the islands are connected to each other, perhaps through rivers or waterfalls that flow between them, or roots of trees that come out from the bottom or the side of the island and connect with other plants. There's some waterfalls that just fall into the void, and if you follow those waterfalls as if they were paths perhaps you'll end up in a different part of this surrealistic realm.

Day 6: Describe your conworld’s climate and weather patterns

The climate is cold but not usually freezing, I chose for it to be like that because I find the cold to be a lot more comfortable than warm weather. I imagine the dream angels don't really need to live in a specific temperature range unlike humans so they're fine regardless of the climate, they'd definitely be able to sense the temperature to some extent, it just might not be as noteworthy for them.

I like rain a lot so I want to include it here, perhaps this is something that can get triggered by emotions, so for example if a group of dream angels is mourning then their emotions might be strong enough to create some rain clouds that start releasing a bit of light rain towards the nearest island, as if the dream angels are crying through the weather. Sadness is not necessarily the only emotion that would make rain clouds happen, I'll come up with the specifics later.

There's never any thunder (at least not coming from the sky or the clouds), and in general the weather of this place can't harm anyone, it might be able to make you uncomfortable but because this is kind of like a dream world even if something would hurt you in real life (like excessive cold) it wouldn't be able to damage you when you're here.

Maybe one day I will come up with more specific details of the seasons, but for now let's just say that they have a "warm" season when things are just a bit cool or unremarkable and then a cold season when it gets cold enough that instead of rain you get snow, and perhaps the flora and fauna have ways to adapt to this colder weather.

One last thing is that the sky looks like you're in outer space most of the time, where you can see lots of stars, perhaps at some times you might be able to observe certain phenomena similar to the northern lights or slight changes in color that make it look a bit closer to twilight instead of night time, and once again these phenomena might be triggered by emotions rather than the seasons.

Day 7: Describe (or design) native flora

Not going to lie, I'm not very familiar with how different types of flora and fauna work in real life, this is not meant to be realistic anyway so it's fine but I'm going off of vibes here more than actual knowledge lol

In general most if not all fauna have bio-luminescence because of how dark it tends to be, and none of the plants or fungi would be poisonous, or at least not to humans or dream angels, like how chili peppers are meant to be harmful but we as humans just find it to be a pleasant taste, maybe smaller creatures have to be a bit more selective with what they eat in these islands.

You'd see a lot of mushrooms and other fungi, most of which are edible (I know they're not plants but I wanted to mention them here). You'd see lots of colorful flowers of different types, berries, trees that look like weeping willows and pine trees, tall grass, lilypads in the water, seaweed and vines that creep up trees and rocks.

I like to think there's some plants with huge leaves that can be used for building things, unsure what type of plant they are, I just know I like the idea.

I imagine some plants are used for making dyes or for getting building materials and whatnot, but the dream angels try to live in harmony with nature as best they can, so if they cut down a plant they plant another one, and they don't live outside of nature, even around their houses they can have lots of tall grass, mushrooms and all sorts of things.

Day 8: Describe (or design) native fauna

Since the dream angels in this area are mostly based on aquatic creatures I think it makes sense for a lot of the native fauna to also be similar to fish, and while they may have some features that set them apart from real animals they are close enough where I will probably just describe them in terms of the fauna that exists in our world.

The animals are not hostile, they may not all be the friendliest but they tend to be pacifists and relatively sentient, not enough to be able to speak but enough to where dream angels can communicate with them a bit. This also means that all fauna in the islands is herbivoral (even if their real life counterparts aren't), instead of eating one another they forage for plants and they purposefully help the plants to spread their seeds to other islands.

I'd like to include some coral, perhaps these are the home of some other animals. I imagine a lot of small fish would be swimming around in the islands, including some mini squids and octopuses.

I don't like most insects but I will include a few, mostly the ones I think are cute or cool, like bees, butterflies and beetles. I like to imagine there's these super long eels that just swim around and you see their tails winding around the landscape, and whales may be heard in the distance every now and then, but they don't appear very often. I also think amphibians are awesome, so there's definitely frogs and axolotls in there somewhere, and you might see some more mammalian types of creatures occasionally, I think mostly stuff like otters and jerboa because I think they are adorable.

There are other types of dream angels that look very different from the ones that speak my language, but it would be very rare to come across one of them in the island and they are incredibly varied in the way they look, so I think for now I'll just focus on the dream angels that speak my language.

Day 9: Summarize your speakers and their world

I've already been compiling all of this stuff on my website, which I think counts as finishing this prompt maybe? I will update it with the new info soon but first I should rest, I'm pretty tired.

I think I should probably write down an abridged version of all of this information in the dictionary for this language as well. I usually make my conlang documentation in spreadsheets because I find it a bit easier to manage a dictionary that way, but for the sake of share-ability I think I will try to make a more normal dictionary that I can export as a pdf, so I guess before posting the next set of prompts I think I should get started on that document.

[sombra-conlangs]

Conlang year 2025 · Day 1 - 4

I decided to try out @quothalinguist's conlang year, it is basically a series of daily prompts that guide you through the process of creating a new language, by the end of the year you will end up with a conlang that is developed enough to participate in relays and lexember, you can find it on quothalinguist.com

It looks like conlang year is mostly geared towards creating languages that are naturalistic and evolved from a proto-language, and the concept I have for this is not going to really fit into that, you'll see why once I start describing it, but I don't imagine that'll be too much of an issue, it's still useful to have a guide for the different aspects of the language I should focus on. I'll try to adapt the prompts to work with my idea and I guess I'll skip the ones that I can't figure out how to adapt.

I'll be combining many prompts together into single posts for convenience, I'll tag these posts as both #Conlang year and #Conlang year 2025 so you can search those in my blog to see them all if you want (once I name the language I will also add it to the tags, but the language doesn't have a name yet).

If you want to see all of the information from these posts compiled into one place I will be adding all of the information about the conlang I create on my website: tekseni.bearblog.dev

Day 1: Set an intention for your language

(warning: this gets a bit heavy, but I try not to make it too dour)

I haven't been feeling great lately, I won't go into details, I'll just say that it can be difficult to manage your emotions when the world seems to be in such a terrible state, living through historical events is not easy.

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

I know there's some people who say you have to be constantly staying informed on every bit of news because if you don't you're a bad person, but that's not a sustainable way to live. It's important for us to keep ourselves sane, if you're going to help others through turbulent times you have to make sure you have your own feet on firm ground. I won't be of much help if I'm having a crisis, so taking care of my own mental health is important, and for many of us that can include a bit of escapism and using art as an outlet, using art as motivation to keep going and enjoy life despite the circumstances. This conlang is my escapism.

With all of that being said, here's my 2 main goals for this conlang:

1: I want this language to make me smile

I want to create something that helps me to find some beauty and hope in the world, I want the choices I make with the language to make me smile, and I want to be able to have fun while working on it, without having to worry too much about how naturalistic it is or anything like that, so ideally I'd also avoid comparing this to other conlangs.

If we compare this to visual art, I'd say this is less like trying to create an awesome painting with perfect perspective, colors and composition, and it's more like me doodling in a sketchbook that is meant primarily for me, but I also want to share it with others in case they find it to be at least mildly interesting or it helps inspire them in some way.

It's not like my other conlangs don't bring me joy, I guess what I'm trying to say is that this time I will try to design the language without worrying about things like naturalism or trying too hard to make my worldbuilding interesting or deep, it's just a canvas where I can throw paint and let myself go wild, trying out things I normally wouldn't, and making choices based on my personal preferences instead of what I think I "should" do, so I guess that makes this is a personal language.

2: This is going to be a surrealistic conlang

I have already decided who the speakers of my language will be, I'll elaborate more in the following prompts but I currently call them "dream angels" because they're basically benevolent beings that exist in the world of dreams, and because of this I want to try my hand at making a surrealistic conlang, @dedalvs wrote an essay on fiat lingua about what such a language might look like, and I keep coming back to it every now and then because I love the concept.

Even before that essay was posted I remember thinking of what conlangs might look like if they were inspired by different art movements, and a surrealistic one fits particularly well into the dream world idea, it will also allow me to fulfill my first goal fairly easily; making something that makes me smile without having to worry about naturalism and letting myself experiment. I've always been drawn to surrealism for one reason or another, not entirely sure why but I know this is something I'm excited to work on.

I'm not expecting this to be the best surrealistic conlang out there, but it doesn't have to be, it just has to be fun for me, and it will work as a learning experience regardless, so if I want to try again at some point I will have a better idea of how to approach it. I'm sure someone out there will make an amazing surrealistic conlang one day and I'll be excited to see it when it happens.

Day 2: Set an intention for sharing your language

Basically the main audience is me, I hope that future me will be able to look at all the different translations, grammar choices and vocabulary I made and feel like it's a fun language that still brings me some joy in some way or another, even if I don't keep working on it for much longer after the conlang year has ended at least I hope it was a positive experience.

I also want to share the language online (on this blog and on my conlang website) mostly because I'm hoping that at least one person is going to look at my conlang and feel inspired, or maybe it will make them smile too, so I'm going to try to describe all the features in a way that is understandable for other conlangers.

Day 3: Determine your speakers and conworld

The basic idea is that there is another plane of existence, one we can't see when we're awake, and the world where dreams exist is connected to this other realm, so when we dream we sometimes come into contact with the ethereal beings that speak this language, and they are kind and loving.

The dream angels usually don't interfere with human affairs too much, but they sometimes help us by making nightmares go away and soothing the people they see, at least while the people are asleep (since they can't interact with us outside of dreams).

They also shift the way they speak to be a bit more familiar to the person they're encountering, so I imagine the phonology of their language might shift a bit from its default form depending on what your native language is, the language would still be unintelligible to you but it would sound a bit like someone speaking your L1 in a weird way (which also means that it will be easier for you to pronounce the language if you are able to speak back at them because you will at least get to use sounds you already know how to pronounce, though you're welcome to pronounce it in its original form).

These beings are very surreal in their appearance, there's probably different types of dream angels but the ones I'll be working with are kind of like a mix of various sea creatures, drifting through space peacefully, building all sorts of things and admiring the nature that exists in their world.

I imagine their settlements are built on floating islands full of all sorts of critters and nature, and their world as a whole is probably a bit weird and doesn't always seem to follow logical rules, in keeping with the kind of things you see in dreams, so they might look a bit like something you'd see in an M.C. Escher artwork, where you're not exactly sure what you're looking at, but it has a certain beauty to it.

Day 4: Describe (or design) your speakers

And finally here's a picture I drew of a prototypical dream angel:

They might look a bit intimidating or scary to you, but I chose to take inspiration mostly from various sea creatures because they help to convey this kind of ethereal and weirdly beautiful aesthetic, when I look at jellyfish I often wonder how those are living beings that exist in our world, they look more like they're inanimate objects drifting in the water and yet they're alive, and they're so mesmerizing and fascinating, like a living nebula.

I imagine different dream angels would have different characteristics, but in general they're basically like some sort of jellyfish with 3 main tentacle-like appendages, many thin tendrils, 6 insect-like arms, 6 little wings (because it makes them look a bit more angelic lol) and they have one eye, but no human has ever seen their eyes because it is always covered by something, in this case it's a butterfly, but whatever is covering their eye it does not prevent them from seeing, this is the dream world after all.

I think there might be other types of dream angels, and they're all able to speak a human-like language because they don't need a mouth to speak, they just telepathically send sounds to other beings, so the speakers of my language will be characterized by being similar to sea creatures, perhaps there's other dream angels that are more similar to other types of animals, or inanimate objects, maybe some are just completely out there and don't even look like anything we're familiar with as humans. By the way if you feel inspired to design your own dream angels go ahead! I think it'd be nice if I was able to inspire creativity in others with my work.

I'm also choosing to use a human-pronounceable phonology because I enjoy pronouncing the words and sentences of my conlangs, but perhaps at some other point I will make a different register of the language that uses different noises as phonemes, maybe sounds of water and nature, or maybe something like one of those really peaceful synths, after all their phonology is not limited by their physiology or even things like logic.

But anyway that's it for now, I feel a bit vulnerable putting myself out there so much, this feels a bit more personal than my other conlangs I've shared, it's not like a regular fantasy worldbuilding project or a fanlang or an a posteriori language, this one is very out there and weird, but again I want to share it in case other people find it interesting, and hey, we need more examples of surrealistic conlangs, so I'm more than happy to contribute to that.

[sombra-conlangs]

I haven't gotten to work on my conlangs much recently, but here's a simple example sentence I translated into Kxënt'exo (the enchantment table language):

wëtsna yök t'eko mem

/wət͡sˈna ɥɵk tʼeˈko mem/

A bird carried the rock

(bird carry.PST.PFV rock the)

I made this sentence to illustrate a few things

1: The default word order is SVO (Subject - Verb - Object)

2: There is a definite article (the) but there isn't an indefinite article (a), so nouns are assumed to be indefinite when they're on their own

3: Despite the fact that Kxënt'exo nouns have different cases inanimate nouns don't have an accusative case, this is because they're rarely ever subjects in the sentence, so their default uninflected form is used when they're the object, which means that both "wëtsna" (bird) and "t'eko" (rock) are nominative

Extra note: inanimate nouns don't inflect for grammatical number, and the verb "xë" (inflected as "yök" in the example) can mean to carry or to transport, but also to have or to possess, so the sentence could be translated as "a bird had the rocks" as well, it just depends on context.

[sombra-conlangs]

The orthography for my enchantment table conlang (Kxënt'exo)

As you may be aware the "enchantment table language" in Minecraft is not actually a language, instead it's just a simple substitution cipher known as the Standard Galactic Alphabet, or SGA for short, it was originally created for the Commander Keen series of games but it got added to Minecraft as an easter egg.

Substitution ciphers replace an already existing alphabet with different symbols, so the SGA is just basically a different set of characters used to represent the letters of the roman alphabet.

(image from the Commander Keen wiki)

Ciphers are used to encrypt text in an already existing alphabet, so in Minecraft when you click on the enchantment table the SGA text you see is usually just random English words like "fiddle" or "water" or references like "cthulhu" or "xyzzy".

When I started turning the "enchantment table language" into an actual full fledged conlang I decided to use the SGA in case other Minecraft fans became interested in my work, I wanted the symbols to still be recognizable to them so I didn't want to change things too much, I avoided doing things like adding new letters, diacritic marks or removing letters, I wanted to use all 26 base glyphs to write the words in my language (though I slightly modified the appearance of some of the symbols to make it flow a bit better).

But of course, as a conlanger I didn't like the idea of my language being written with what is essentially a copy of the roman alphabet, I still want to give it its own identity so it feels a bit more original, so I'm going to explain what I did to turn the cipher into something that is hopefully more interesting (I'll let you be the judge of that).

First let's look at the names of each character, similarly to some roman letters the name starts with the letter itself and if it's a consonant a vowel sound gets added (like the letter T just getting "ee" added onto it) but in this case every letter gets the same vowel, so all consonants are just (consonant) + a.

Some of the letters are used to spell identical sounds though (more on that later) so for example the equivalent of roman {j} and the equivalent of roman {x} are both used to spell the palatal glide /j/, so they are both called "ya" /ja/.

To disambiguate, speakers add nouns that start with that letter, similarly to how in Spanish <b> and <v> are both pronounced the same and sometimes they both get called /be/ so some people might say "v de vaca" meaning "v as in "vaca" (cow)" to make it clear they're talking about the letter <v>. This is also basically what Thai does with its letters: ข kho khai (egg "kho") vs ค kho khwai (buffalo "kho").

Then let's look at the order they come in, I ended up changing the alphabetical order because I think that also helps to make it feel a bit more unique, I'll link to a longer explanation later but in short these are actually organized based on where in the mouth the sound is produced, the letters come in the following order:

labials like /p/ /m/ /f/

coronals like /t/ /n/ /ɬ/

sibilant-like sounds like /t͡s/ /s/

dorsals like /j/ /ʀ/ /k/

vowels

But ultimately the biggest difference comes in the way the letters are mapped to sounds.

When choosing the sounds each character was going to represent I didn't want to make it completely arbitrary, like assigning the {a} glyph to something utterly different like /χ/, but I also didn't want to make it completely like Latin or English, so I avoided just mapping all the letters onto their obvious equivalents, this way hopefully it will feel a bit more similar to when people try to map roman letters onto Arabic letters, some have clear equivalents like <م> - <m> but some require special markings and things to more accurately represent their sound, like <ظ> - <ẓ>.

I evolved the conlang from an ancient stage of the language known as Proto-Kxënt'exo, and in Proto-Kxënt'exo each letter was used to spell a different sound, hence why there are some sounds that can be written two different ways: they used to be pronounced differently way back when.

In the roman alphabet there are voicing distinctions in the stops: unvoiced <p> <t> <k> versus voiced <b> <d> <g>, in Proto-Kxënt'exo that distinction was actually between emphatic and plain stops, so the {p} {t} {k} symbols were pronounced /pˤ/ /tˤ/ /kˤ/ and the {b} {d} {g} symbols were pronounced /p/ /t/ /k/, these evolved into ejectives /pʼ/ /tʼ/ /kʼ/ so in the romanization I represent these as p' t' k' vs p t k instead.

I also added the affricate /t͡ʃ/ and it too has an emphatic equivalent /t͡ʃˤ/, to spell them I used the SGA letters for {c} and {q} respectively, this is because the letter <c> is sometimes used to spell that affricate sound (like in Indonesian: kucing /ku.t͡ʃiŋ/) and the letter <q> is used to represent a similar sound in Mandarin Chinese romanization: qin /tɕʰin/, but <q> is also used for uvular sounds, like in Arabic romanization: qaṣr /qasˤr/ so it doesn't feel completely arbitrary to use that letter for the /t͡ʃˤ/ consonant, and then both of these sounds evolved into alveolar affricates /t͡s/ /t͡sʼ/ romanized as ts ts'.

The fricatives used to have a voicing distinction (except for /ɬ/) so you had {f} {s} {x} representing unvoiced /ɸ/ /s/ /ʃ/ vs {v} {z} {j} representing voiced /β/ /z/ /ʒ/, but this is one of the things that got lost in the evolved language, these consonants merged, so now {f} and {v} are both pronounced /f/, {s} and {z} are both pronounced /s/, and {x} and {j} not only merged but ended up becoming the palatal glide /j/.

There's also some sounds that aren't represented with a single letter, for example the vowels /ɵ/ /ʉ/ and /ɯ/ are all represented with digraphs (letter combinations), because these sounds didn't exist in the proto-language, and once they started to exist people just repurposed the letters they already had to represent the new sounds.

Then there's a couple digraphs that sound identical to single letters: {dx} used to represent a /tç/ cluster, but it ended up merging with the alveolar affricate /t͡s/, so now that sound can be spelled two different ways depending on the origin of the word.

There's even more details, and the post is getting a bit long so to see more go to the Kxënt'exo orthography page on my conlang website.

The last thing I want to highlight is the fact that the spelling of words is also tied to grammar.

There's a lot of silent letters at the end of words, for example the word for cat "yak'e" /jaˈkʼe/ is spelled like {jakex} with a silent {x} representing a lost /ç/ consonant, and this is significant because that actually marks the noun as animate, a large portion of animate nouns were suffixed with *-ʃi in Proto-Kxënt'exo.

Another example is infinitive verbs, they used to end in *-βu in Proto-Kxënt'exo, so now they're all spelled with a silent {v} at the end, and that marks the word as an infinitive. This helps to disambiguate between some words, for example the word lhëxu /ɬəˈχu/ can be either an infinitive meaning "to see" or an adjective meaning "that stands out", word order and context are usually enough to disambiguate, but if you look at the words written down it becomes clear which is which because the former is spelled {lyhuv} and the latter is spelled {lyhul}.

This type of phenomenon happens a lot in different types of words, and I think it also helps to further distinguish this script from the roman alphabet, the way it's used makes sense for Kxënt'exo, the spelling of words isn't what you would expect from a simple cipher, there's nuance to it that comes from its phonology and its history.

So that's basically what I wanted to share, I think I succeeded in making the SGA at least a bit more interesting for my conlang, I had never done something like this before because this is my first fanlang, so let me know how you think I did.

Also if you have any questions feel free to ask! or you can also check out the Kxënt'exo section of my website for more information!

(oh yeah, if you notice that the phonology described in this post is different from what you can see in my Lexember entries for last month it's because I changed some sounds, those Lexember posts are no longer up to date, so yeah)

[sombra-conlangs]

This is less conlang related and more of a worldbuilding thing, but I was thinking about how the enchanting table language (Kxënt'exo) would be used in universe, I'm designing the language to be naturalistic under the assumption that it was once spoken natively in some sort of empire that has fallen, and now only scholars know how to read it (it's fantasy Latin basically, I know, a completely original idea™ never done before™)

This means that there's nothing inherently magical about the language itself, it was just another natural language in this setting, I mean if it was magical everyone would be going around accidentally casting spells when they were just trying to say "good morning" right? so there's got to be things that separated enchanters from non-enchanters back when it was a living language (and presumably to this day still)

And I mean, it is the language used in the enchanting table still, so there's gotta be something that makes it special, some reason for why a dead language would be used for magical purposes instead of a living one

There's many ways of approaching this but I decided to do the following:

My idea is that the language itself may not be magical, but most people think it is, at the end of the day the reason Kxënt'exo gets used in enchantments boils down to either a misunderstanding or convenience, what do I mean by that? well picture this scenario:

Imagine most people aren't able to read these ancient codices left behind by the fallen civilization, but it is known that they contain a lot of useful knowledge, including incantations that require carving glyphs into items or chanting words out loud, so there's an incentive for people to dedicate their lives to learning this dead language

Once they actually learn the language they might be tempted to simply translate the books into whatever modern language is spoken in their town, and that's useful for books detailing things about medicine or astronomy and such, but they soon realize that the enchantments only seem to work if the rules are followed exactly as written (as in, you have to chant the ancient words, not just a translation of the meaning behind those ancient words, otherwise the magic won't work)

This leads many to make the simple assumption that it's the language that is inherently magical and so it is only possible to make incantations in Kxënt'exo because it is Kxënt'exo

What these scholars don't know however is that there's a lot that goes into crafting an enchantment, you can't just say what you want the enchantment to do and then expect it to do it, you need to know which parts of the utterance you need to emphasize and which parts to say first and which later, etc.

Enchantment text would not be the same as a regular conversation or prose, it has this whole pseudo-poetic structure to it, but most of the codices on how to actually craft enchantments have been lost to time, what survives is more like compendiums of incantations with instructions for how to cast them and not much else

Theoretically if someone had that knowledge they'd be able to make enchantments in any language, adapting the different requirements based on the syntax and morphology of each language as necessary, but again, no one really knows how even the Kxënt'exo enchantments were put together

So at the end of the day the reason why Kxënt'exo would be used as the enchanting table language in universe is partially because some people believe its an inherently magical language, but also partially because even the people who figure out it's probably possible to enchant using other languages know that it would take far too much effort to figure out how to actually translate an enchantment properly when they could just read the Kxënt'exo one, I mean, they already learned to speak the language in order to access all of the ancient literature, so might as well just chant the Kxënt'exo phrases

[sombra-conlangs]

made a wiki for my conlangs!

I always thought it'd be awesome to have a wiki style website where I can share all the main features of my conlangs, so I made one: tekseni.bearblog.dev That'll be the place where you can find the phonology, orthography, grammar, etc. of each of my conlangs.

It's still a work in progress, half of the links lead to empty pages, but I'm in the process of putting all of the information for Osrican and Kxënt'exo there, maybe I'll even add some other languages eventually.

btw I'm also kind of abandoning my wordpress site, it was fun but I think I prefer a more wiki style format rather than a blog for storing my main conlang info, and my advice style posts could also probably work better on a separate site, I'll move those posts to another bearblog website eventually because bearblog is pretty accesible.

oh I should probably mention that I'm not abandoning this blog at all, this has always been more for casual posts, Lexember, random thoughts, interesting tidbits and stuff, so I'll share new info on my langs as I create new features, but the more detailed, long explanations will be on tekseni.bearblog.dev.

[sombra-conlangs]

like I mentioned last month, I decided to change the phonology of Osrican and Kxërt'exo because they felt a bit too similar to each other for my liking, so I finally got around to doing that. I don't know if I'll update my Lexember 2024 posts anytime soon because I'm lazy, I might re-post them somewhere else when I finally get around to it, but for now just keep in mind that those posts are not fully accurate anymore

I described the changes in more detail on a post on my wordpress site, but here's the quick version of what I changed:

Osrican

Got rid of the lateral fricatives [ɬ] and [ɮ], they merged with the non-lateral alveolars [s] and [z], which further obscures some cognates with other germanic languages

Got rid of the allophone [χ] for the /x/ phoneme, it used to be the case that /x/ turned uvular in stressed syllables, but not anymore (this way the /x/ phoneme is always pronounced differently between Osrican and Kxërt'exo)

Affricates [t͡ʃ] [d͡ʒ] [t͡s] and [d͡z] can only appear in more limited environments now, they can appear in stressed syllables or when they cluster with a fricative (like in the word for 90 νεβιυγȷwι · (nebüdjvi) /ˈne.bʏd͡ʒ.vɪ/), when they're in unstressed positions and not clustering with a fricative they turn into fricatives [ʃ] [ʒ] [s] and [z]

Kxërt’exo

The /r/ phoneme is now split into 2 sounds: the tap [ɾ] that only appeared in clusters has now merged with [n] which actually means that the name of the language is Kxënt'exo now! (I'll update my tags later, I'm lazy)

The trill [r] which would appear in non-clustering positions is now pronounced as a uvular trill [��]

The allophones [b] [d] and [ɡ] no longer exist, plain stops are now always unvoiced [p] [t] and [k] (the rule was that plain stops become voiced in stressed syllables, which was always a bit of a weird rule, probably not very naturalistic at all, glad I got rid of it tbh)

The allophones [c] [ɟ] and [ɥ] no longer exist, velars are now pronounced [k] [ɡ] and [w] regardless of if they're before a non-open front vowel (I believe [ɥ] still exists as an allophone of /j/ though)

/j/ can't cluster anymore, there's an epenthetic /i/ inserted to break up the cluster, same goes for /w/, getting an epenthetic /u/ to break up the cluster (this didn't show up in the Lexember entries but there's a conjugation that added the prefix /pja-/ to words, and now the prefix is /pija-/, or maybe I'll shorten it to /pa-/ or something else, we'll see)

Front rounded vowels <ö> and <ü> are now central [ɵ] and [ʉ]

Emphatic [pˠ] [tˠ] [q] (which come from pharyngealized stops [pˤ] [tˤ] [kˤ] in the proto language) are now ejectives [pʼ] [tʼ] [kʼ]

and finally the pharyngealized affricate from the proto language [t͡ʃˤ] won't merge with the plain affricate anymore, meaning that the evolved language now has ejective [t͡sʼ] as well! (it's spelled with the letter that corresponds to the in the Standard Galactic Alphabet, in case you're curious, I think some Lexember entries like the word for "creeper" use it)

[sombra-conlangs]

ιδwι ψαγγκυ · (idvi danku) /ˈid.vɪ ˈdɐŋ.kʊ/ - thank you all!

I want to thank everyone who followed my Lexember posts! I appreciate it a lot, it was a lot of fun

I also enjoyed seeing everyone else's entries, the main thing I like about Lexember is that it lets you engage with other people's work in small bite-size pieces, and it's also this big community thing where you get to see a ton of variety and sometimes even meet new people, I'm already looking forward to the next one! ⸜( ´ ꒳ ` )⸝

[sombra-conlangs]

Lexember 2024 day 31: Osrican

Text in the image transcribed below:

LEXEMBER 2024 ΑΥΣΡËΚΦΙΝ - OSRICAN

δαγχë 31

Νευȷëν v. /ˈneu̯.jən/ to renew, make new again, make fresh, to repair, replenish, to restart, repeat.

From Proto-Germanic *niwjaną to make new, renew.

Sombra Glaze

[sombra-conlangs]

Lexember 2024 day 31: Kxënt'exo

The image is outdated since the language has been changed a bit

Text in the image transcribed, amended and updated below:

Sora. adj. ANI (animate) /soˈʀa/

New, in good condition, pristine.

From term meaning "new".

From the proto-word *soraɬu (new).

Lexember 2024 Day 31

Kxënt'exo (Galactic)

Sombra Glaze

[sombra-conlangs]

I just had a thought I want to share: I don't think the conlang community is great at helping beginners to get into conlanging, and while the art form is kind of esoteric and requires lots of knowledge I also think there's probably better approaches for tackling the huge task of learning how to create an entire language.

I can't figure out a way to say it concisely, I'll just spew out all my thoughts on this so hopefully others can see where I'm coming from and share their thoughts, I'm curious to hear what y'all have to say.

First let's look at something that I've noticed is pretty common in other artistic hobbies and communities:

When people decide to learn a new skill there can be a lot of excitement that builds up initially, they may have never touched an instrument in their life but they have this burning desire to jump right into writing and recording an awesome guitar solo, just like the ones they hear in their favorite songs, or they may not have any drawing and writing experience at all but the first thing they wanna do is start working on an entire webcomic series drawn in a highly detailed art style because they came up with an idea for a story that would be amazing. Whatever the skill is, it happens often that someone sees a work of art that is so inspiring that they want to make something just like it themselves.

Of course, when people try a new art form for the first time the results don't tend to be very good, when you've never done a thing before it's unrealistic to expect yourself to be able to replicate the stuff that people with a few years of experience and practice can make.

And that can be a pretty frustrating experience because if someone tries their hardest to create that dream project of theirs with no experience it'll inevitably end up taking a huge amount of effort (due to the person not knowing how to do things in a more efficient way) and then it won't even be as good as they envisioned anyway, and some can walk away from these experiences with the impression that music is simply too hard or they're just not made to be artists or writers or game designers or whatever the craft is.

I think this is why when you take a class on the subject or you hear advice online people often try to get you to lower the scope of your first projects, they emphasize the importance of practicing your fundamentals first, because you may be super excited to jump right into painting hyper-realistic portraits, but if you don't build any familiarity with your tools and you don't train those basic skills you're never going to be able to turn the awesome idea in your head into a reality, and your expectations are going to be too high for you to enjoy the process because you just won't be able to meet those expectations.

Starting with a scope that is far too big ends up just being a frustrating experience that doesn't actually teach you a whole lot, you gotta work on a bunch of smaller, simpler stuff first before you move on to making more advanced things. In other words, you gotta build up to the higher levels, you don't start at level 100, you start at level 1 and then you slowly go up from there.

You may see where I'm going with this: we don't tend to do that in the conlang community.

People who become interested in making languages may be familiar with the concept of conlangs from hearing about Klingon, High Valyrian, Sindarin or similar works, and so they get excited to jump right into making a naturalistic artlang as their first conlang, or they may not even know what the term "naturalistic artlang" even means but they try to make a detailed, fully speakable language for a fictional setting, which is kind of the same thing, or at least it's in the same spirit.

I think tons of conlangers start that way (myself included), it's super common, but I had the realization earlier that starting with a naturalistic artlang is actually kind of crazy, that's a project with a huge scope, it requires you to have so much knowledge beforehand that I'd argue it's the equivalent of trying to play a Paganini piece live in front of an audience on your first time playing the violin ever, of course it's gonna be seen as an impossibly difficult or complex hobby, you're jumping into level 100 right off the bat, no wonder lots of conlangers end up hating their first conlang.

I legit had a moment earlier today when I was thinking "conlanging is not that hard, you just gotta learn the basics of IPA, then learn about syllable structure and phonotactics, then become acquainted with the different mechanisms of how sounds can change over time, then learn what a romanization is and how to make one based on your phonology, then learn how words get grammaticalized.. then learn about all the different types of writing systems... then... huh wait a minute..."

I had this realization that the amount of knowledge you're expected to learn on your first conlang project is kind of ridiculous, it's easy to lose track of how advanced the stuff you're doing is when you've grown so used to it, it's like that xkcd comic.

Yeah this one. Like, the diachronic method of conlanging might not seem that complicated if you're using it for the 47th time, but for a newcomer there are a ton of things they need to learn first in order to even start using the diachronic method.

And even if you don't evolve your conlang from a proto-language there's still a ton of details and moving parts in a naturalistic language: the syntax, the morphology, the phonology, the different levels of formality and social aspects, writing systems, etc.

I feel like trying to capture all of the different nuances of a natural language on your first attempt at a conlang is just too big of a scope in the same way that making your first videogame an open-world RPG with multiple endings tends to result in people quitting game development because they get overwhelmed with the amount of new information that they need to learn and so they lose all their motivation.

All of this came to my mind because I was having a conversation with someone who doesn't have a background in linguistics and I was trying to help them figure out how to make their first conlang, and as the conversation went on I realized that even the posts aimed at beginners I write on my wordpress site are actually way too detailed and complex, like, my post that teaches you to read IPA- let me stop right there, the fact that I have a single post where I expect people to be able to learn IPA just so that they can start conlanging says it all.

And ok, you may be thinking that's just a me issue, but honestly I started to re-watch various youtube videos on how to conlang aimed at beginners and I feel like if I had zero knowledge of linguistics I'd struggle to follow along with the majority of them, in each video there's usually multiple new concepts being introduced at a very rapid pace and a number of things that you're already assumed to be familiar with.

No shade at people like biblaridion and artifexian, I personally find their content helpful, my point is that most learning resources for beginner conlangers (including the stuff I make on my website) do this thing where they infodump a ton of technical information and introduce a lot of new jargon fairly quickly and while that can work for some people I'm starting to think that that's not the best way to go about things.

This may seem kind of random, but I remember this very old video by extra credits where they explained how a good tutorial in a videogame doesn't front-load all of the information you'll ever need, they segment it into smaller chunks so you only learn the few bits of information that are immediately relevant, you get to immediately apply that knowledge, familiarize yourself with the concept at your own pace, and then once you've had some time to play with it you are introduced to a new small bit of information. I know learning an artistic skill is not identical to learning how to play a game, but I find that I learn better this way in general, the knowledge just sticks more, I think that introducing concepts in more bite-size, applicable chunks would probably go a long way to make this hobby more accessible to more people.

Maybe we should be recommending newcomers to practice with naming langs, minimal conlangs, personal conlangs, relexes, ciphers, codes, or idk something else to let people become acquainted with the dozens of concepts that show up in languages in a way that doesn't immediately become overwhelming.

Like, maybe this is a hot take, but I feel like in order to make your first conlang you probably shouldn't even worry about what a place or manner of articulation is, you probably don't need to evolve it or add any irregularity or allophones or any of the stuff we're so used to including as conlangers, you can slowly learn those later.

Think about it, in order to learn how to draw realism you practice the most basic fundamentals first; drawing circles and cubes in perspective over and over again, trying to break down complex images into simple abstract shapes, etc. I think we could do the same in conlanging and teach the necessary skills with projects of a smaller scope.

I just remembered about quothalinguist's choose your own adventure type book for teaching beginner conlangers and I think that's awesome, I haven't read it but I definitely will, we should probably get more introductory material like that, stuff that's more manageable and doesn't require a huge time investment in order to teach you a lot, I think that's a really good approach.

And for that matter I've been curious about the conlang year thing, maybe that'd also be a more manageable way to introduce someone to conlanging.

Just spitballing a few ideas here but imagine teaching about basic morphology by encouraging people to make a sketchlang where they only use sounds present in their native language. Without needing them to know any IPA or anything about phonology you can get them started on experimenting with certain things, like putting words together, compounding, affixing, etc. Remember that the results don't have to be naturalistic, that's not the point, the point is to avoid the situation where people need to learn a thousand concepts before they can even set pen to paper, they get to start experimenting and playing with different concepts in a more manageable way.

Maybe as a way to slowly introduce people to the idea of phonological evolution someone could make a small set of proto-words using a very basic inventory like /p t k m n s j w a i u/ and then you give people a set of pre-designed sound changes to pick from, and they can mix and match which changes to apply and in what order, so this could be an exercise to get acquainted with the way that sound changes work and the way the order in which they happen matters.

Y'all can let me know if I'm not making any sense or if my ideas sound weird or bad, the main point that I want to make is that the way we approach teaching beginner conlangers seems to require a lot of front-loading of information, which is not great.

I honestly forgot how long it took me to learn everything that I currently know about conlanging, I only stuck with it because I had actually consumed a lot of pop-linguistics content before getting into conlanging, so I already had a lot of the knowledge you're expected to learn as a beginner, meaning that the infodumps weren't as much of a brickwall for me as they can be for other people.

I feel like with the way things currently are there's probably a subset of people who have tried to get into conlanging at some point but then gave up and left with the impression that it's simply too complicated and nerdy for them when that may not be the case, I don't think making a naturalistic conlang is that much harder than learning how to draw realistic portraits of people; sure it's hard and time-consuming but it's definitely doable if you practice all the fundamentals first.

In the art community there's people who try to keep their sketchbooks all pristine and perfect looking, but that's not actually super helpful for learning, sketchbooks are meant to be where you practice and get to experiment, it's ok if it's messy or ugly or disorganized, it's not meant to be where your masterpieces come from, it's generally understood within the art community that in order to make drawings that are very well made you have to go through a loooot of crappy, low quality drawings first.

I think that essentially what I'm saying is that there should be a way to encourage beginner conlangers to do the same, make the equivalent of little sketches and practice basic doodles instead of jumping into a highly detailed complex naturalistic artlang right off the bat, that could demystify the wonderful art that is language creation for newcomers.

[sombra-conlangs]

Lexember 2024 day 30: Osrican

Text in the image transcribed below:

LEXEMBER 2024 ΑΥΣΡËΚΦΙΝ - OSRICAN

δαγχë 30

Γχυγγχρυ n. /ˈwuŋ.xɾʊ/ hunger.

From Proto-Germanic *hunhruz the East Germanic form of the word for hunger.

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[sombra-conlangs]

Lexember 2024 day 30: Kxënt'exo

The image is outdated since the language has been changed a bit

Text in the image transcribed, amended and updated below:

Rakuxo. n. INA (inanimate) /ʀaˈku.χo/

Year, a count.

Related to the word for ring / circle, originally an abstract noun.

From the proto-word *rakuxo (cycle, a count, year) which in turn is the abstract form of the word *rakunu (ring, circle).

Lexember 2024 Day 30

Kxënt'exo (Galactic)

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