#constructing conlangs i actually get

[pajulintu]

gotta say i have, like, negative interest in conlangs

[crimeronan]

writing bilingual characters like "alright. so. i am 100% aware that characterization-wise and emotions-wise and narrative-wise, she'd be speaking spanish here. however. i am Also 100% aware of hOW SHIT MY SPANISH IS-"

[intuitive-revelations]

Headcanon: one of the reasons why Gallifreyan is a) so complex, and b) so inconsistent, is because it's less one language and more a complex mishmash of thousands of languages and dialects.

Think about how one of the reasons English can be complex to learn is because of the mix of Germanic and romance language roots, and now take it up to 11.

While one might expect Gallifrey to be monolingual, given its age and class structure, this probably isn't technically the case. After all, why limit your culture to one language when the average citizen is effectively panlingual (to the point that TARDIS translation circuits are actually dependent on their pilots' knowledge, rather than the other way round)?

Thus, if there once were distinct languages on Gallifrey, they probably have all been merged at this point into modern Gallifrey's super-Esperanto. Add in loan words from notable civilisations across all of spacetime (but likely primarily from Gallifreyan colonies and allies like Dronid, Minyos, Cartego etc.), and it quickly becomes quite unwieldy.

It's also likely that there's a lot of overlap between these sub-languages, which can make distinguishing meaning hard to an outsider. Gallifreyans likely get around this courtesy of their telepathic connections.

TBH, given Time Lord sensibilities, it's likely that every single word variation has its own delicate meanings, derived not just from their societal uses but also from the etymology and history of each one. Canonically (though I don't have a source) we know that there are 30 different words meaning "culture shock", for example, which likely have very minor distinctions in meaning. We also know, unsurprisingly, that there's at least 208 tenses to help in describing time travel.

As an example - imagine being a Sunari ambassador at an embassy gathering and accidentally offending every Time Lord in the room because you accidentally used a definite article derived from the memeovored Old High Tersuran colony dialect, now considered low-brow by association with modern Tersuran, when you intended to use a nearly identical form of the word originating from the Founding Conflict, a triumphant post-Rassilonian intervention, distinguished by a near-imperceptible glottal stop.

It's likely that some of these Gallifreyan sub-languages/dialects may still be spoken with increased frequency under certain conditions, such as in one's own House or when visiting other city complexes. We know, for example, that Arcadia seems to be associated with a "Northern English" accent (which Nine picked up subconsciously post-regeneration, with the Fall of Arcadia being one of the last things the War Doctor remembered before DOTD's multi-Doctor event - hence "lots of planets have a north") when translated, which may indicate some dialect differences in the original language. I suspect there is a societal expectation for Gallifreyans to code-switch depending on the situation, with Citadel business generally expecting the Gallifreyan equivalent of RP, though it's relatively common for Time Lords less concerned with respectability and politicking to not comply.

One nice benefit of all this complexity, and the reason I made this post, is that there's a good argument to be made that every fan attempt to construct a Gallifreyan language can be 'canon', contradictions and all.

Greencook Gallifreyan? A formal evolution of Pythian prophecy scripture into the post-Intuitive Revelation era (based on its similarities with the Visionary's scrawling in The End of Time).

Sherman Gallifreyan? A modern katakana-like phonetic alphabet for the rapid-onslaught of new loan words following President Romana's open academy policies. Recently adopted by the Fifteenth Doctor for writing human proverbs.

Teegarden Gallifreyan? An archaic but recognisable near-Capitolian dialect from the Prydonian mountains, once spoken by Oldblood houses like Lungbarrow and Blyledge.

Or, in a nutshell, the state of Gallifreyan conlangs (and maybe in-universe Gallifreyan dialects):

I guess the dream project would be to accept the complexity and create some sort of grand modular "meta-Gallifreyan" conlang, merging as many fan interpretations as possible with their own distinctions and overlaps, that can continue to be updated as new ideas come up and new stories are released...

[iislak-mewu]

Īslak Mèwu intro post

Shishīkwa prana!¹ Welcome, travellers! I'll try and keep this post friendly and readable to non-linguists, I just wanna infodump about my language lol. This post has gotten a little long though, so apologies! Hopefully it serves well to give you a feel of it <3

¹/ɕiˈɕiə̯kʋa pʁaˈna/ PL~foreigner.PAT welcome

Consider this a formal introduction post to the conlang (constructed language) i've been making for like, over a year now at this point? on and off, mostly off tho lmao. The vast majority of stuff i've made is the grammar (this is very much my favourite area of langs lol, closely followed by the phonetics side of things), and as a result i really don't have many words or actual forms for things lol

Īslak Mèwu² (lit. valley's language) (or just Īsla for short) is a language spoken by the fictional Rūsawlitwā³ people. While the majority of them are a vertical transhumance culture, living in valleys and farming cattle (herders move the flock up and down the mountains in line with the seasons, while the majority of people live permenantly in the village), some groups have moved further afoot and are living in a more settled way in towns and cities in neighbouring regions.

²/iɐ̯ˈsla-k mɛˈʋu/ valley-GEN language (lit. "valley's language") ³/ʀuɐ̯-ˌsaʋli-ˈtˠaː/ cow-herd-AGN (lit. "cow-herders")

I'll start with Īsla's sounds, then give a (not-so-brief) tour of the grammar.

Phonology / sounds

Īsla has the following consonants: (If you don't recognise these symbols, you can find and listen to them here. You won't find ˠ in there, but it makes things sound more "dark".)

Īsla has eight short vowels, /i e ɛ a y ø u o/, along with the long vowels /iɐ̯, uɐ̯, iː, yː, uː, eː, aː/ and the rather distinctive syllabic fricatives /ʝ̩, ɣ̩ʷ, ɣ̩~ɦ̩/. These syllabic fricatives are high pitch, and often realised instead as breathy voiced vowels depending on dialect.

The syllable structure is (C)(C)V(C). Stress is assigned to the last "heaviest" syllable.

I am currently in the middle of reworking the past maybe 100 years of sound shifts, so this is subject to change (especially the vowel system)

Grammar

For the linguistics nerds among us, Īslak Mèwu is a synthetic language that features noun incorperation, a pretty free word order, 3 grammatical genders, split-S alignment, converbs, a shitty verb agreement system that will likely fall out of use in a generation or two (role marking is mostly done by the case system and emphatic pronouns), and TAM is typically marked via auxiliary verbs (tbf these are a lot more irregular so you do get decent verb agreement thru this). I'll explain these features briefly and how they work in Īsla:

Noun incorperation is a process where nouns and verbs are put together (compounded) into one word. We kinda have this in English - think about mountain-climbing, berry picking, horse riding, dishwashing, etc. In Īsla, this is MUCH more common than in English - this is used for basically every conventional activity. Natives talk about dinner-eating, sheet-changing, cow-chasing, dust-sweeping, fish-chopping, etc. These aren't always obvious from the words they're made of though! "whisky-swimming" actually means "to have thrown, to have deliberately lost a game", named for drinking games where people deliberately lose for the aim of getting drunk.

Grammatical gender. Like in French, German, etc. Īsla has 3 of them, and verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and determiners (think English "some", "most", "the", etc) "agree" with nouns in gender. Case markers merge with the gender markers.

Auxiliary verbs are little "helping" verbs that convey grammatical info alongside a more meaningful verb. English has these - "I will do X", "I should do X", "i have done X". Īsla verbs operate in basically the same way, but they come after the main verb, not before:

/niəsɛ sˠɣ̩mˈmuːs-a ɫʋin/ 3M.SG:ERG cook_dinner-NOMIN 3M.SG.IMP "He should cook dinner" /niəsɛ sˠɣ̩mˈmuːs-a tˠʋo/ 3M.SG:ERG cook_dinner-NOMIN 3M.LOC.COP "He is cooking dinner (for a while)" (lit. "He is in cooking dinner")

Case marking: Like in languages like German or Finnish. Little suffixes added to words to show what their role is in the sentence. In Īsla, the cases are the agentive case (do-ers), patientive case (things that have things done to them), genitive case (possessors), dative case (recipients of things, destinations, also used for expressing opinions as in "to me, X is cool"), the locative case (locations), and ablative case (sources and instruments).

Split-S alignment. ohhhhhh boy. this is FAR too complex of a topic to properly get into in an intro post like this, but the short of it that, Īsla just, can't make up its mind about what case to mark Ss with? For ease of writing, I'm gonna use "S" to refer to the only noun in an intransitive sentence (e.g. in "he walks", S is "he", but in "he hits him", there is no S, because this is a transitive sentence)

In Īsla, the main verb chooses what case the S should be in. There are two (main) categories of this:

"Unaccusative verbs" - S is marked with the "patientive" case (the case given to e.g. "person" in "i chase the person") /ˈtaːmu-∅ miɐ̯ˈlij/ person-PATIENTIVE lie "the person is lying down"

"Unergative verbs" - S is marked with the "agentive" case (the case given to e.g. "person" in "the person chases me") /ˈtaːmy jeˈiɐ̯s/ person:AGENTIVE walk "the person walks"

However, this case preference is overridden by most auxiliary verbs. For example /ʀom/, the inchoative auxiliary (="to begin Xing"), demands an agentive S: /ˈtaːmy ˈmiɐ̯lja ʀom/ person:AGENTIVE lie-NOMIN 3N.SG.INCH "the person starts lying down" /miɐ̯ˈlij/ "to be lying down" is typically unaccusative, but the presence of the inchoative auxiliary means that /taːmu/ is marked with the agentive case, rather than the patientive case as in the earlier example.

On the other end of that, /xe/, the past tense auxiliary, demands a patientive S: /ˈtaːmu jeˈiɐ̯s =xe/ person-PATIENTIVE walk =3N.SG.PAST "the person walked" This is the opposite thing - "walk" suggests an agentive S, but /xe/ overrides that.

The actual system is ofc more complicated than this, but this is enough for a quick overview.

I'm gonna stop talking here, before I make a post so long no one will want to read it, but there's absolutely more posts coming! …when i can fit them in between coursework and the adhd distractableness ofc. Hopefully this has given you a decent feel for the language, and please send asks about stuff if you're interested!! (i hope i've explained things ok) There's a lot I didn't touch on here, and a lotta detail I've left out, and I'd love an excuse to talk more about this stuff <3

[vertexline]

I fucking did it

I got the conlang to a point where I really like it and I could finally write their names ;A; To the detriment of my sanity over the past 48 hours I suppose.

Also here's the full glyph chart (because I worked very hard on it by basically starting from scratch :)) )

[WIP] AU designs for V/Johnny/Kerry that'll make sense to no one except me because it's from my on and off worldbuilding project I've had for 8 years and get brainworms for once in a blue moon but more importantly...I've not put them side by side like this until now and V just looks so much bigger than both of them even though he's just tall and not particularly muscular??? I guess the 15cm he has on Johnny do make a lot of difference :II

[opashoo]

Do you have any advice on how not to get so overwhelmed when it comes to conlanging? I get overwhelmed way too fast with the information I read on the conlang subreddit David j Petersons book I have or YouTubers I just get burned out.

I start out on my phonological sounds and sometimes I add a new sound or get rid of a few I find unnecessary phonotactics is where I end up getting stuck/frustrated and stoping completely. I don’t know why but my brain just cannot compute when it comes to phonotactics no matter how many videos I watch of people explaining it or looking through Wikipedia just doesn’t register in my brain. I’m assuming this is happening because I’m autistic which is even more frustrating I’m so slow when it comes to learning or I end up comparing myself to others for understanding/learning things faster than me. I get motivated to make a language and then I get overwhelmed it’s just a repeat cycle to the point where I just want to give up. I’m not even sure if it’s possible for me to make a conlang at this point. And then I stumble across something I never heard before from someone else said and I stress about that too and I constantly worry I’m going to make a conlang I spent so much time on only for someone to point out that it’s a reflex and I need to scrap the whole thing and start all over :(

So I have two big pieces of advice that have helped enormously with this sort of thing and they are to work small (the big picture will come together) and to know your goals. It's gonna be a lot so I'm putting it past a readmore. I also talk a bit about my own project, but it's all the way at the bottom.

First, focus on one thing at a time and take small steps. As your familiarity with your own work grows, the bigger picture will start to come together, just focus on one thing at a time.

If there's a linguistic phenomenon or grammatical construction or concept or something that you want to explore but you don't understand it entirely, then just focus on that for a while. I like to make toy languages, really, really small and simple conlangs with extremely simply words and sounds that are meant to focus specifically on one or two concepts at a time. I don't worry about anything else but those concepts; no phonotactics, no worrying about how pretty or ugly the language sounds, I don't worry about naturalism or sound changes, I don't focus on any of these things unless those things are what I'm making the toy language to explore.

My current project, Yongasabi, has a consonantal root system inspired by Arabic, but understanding the concept in a satisfactory manner where I felt confident including it in a project that I plan on publishing took actual years. I made three separate toylangs, one of which I revised and overhauled three times before eventually using that as a basis for Yongasabi. I needed that time and work to focus on absolutely nothing but sound changes and how a system like this evolves in natural languages. While I was playing around with sound changes in one toy language, in another toy language I was also trying to figure out how a system of derivation like this could into systems of nouns, adjectives and verbs. I did not focus on anything else with those toy language but those core concepts because to do any more would be overwhelming and confusing.

It's the same when you're working on a more complete language project, you build it little by little. Focus on one aspect at a time, one concept at a time. As you become more familiar with your own work and you use and apply it, you will start to see the things that work and the things that don't, and you'll be able to make decisions accordingly. It'll happen over time, but you have to avoid stressing about the whole thing.

And if there's something causing you trouble that's stopping you from making the language, there's no one stopping you from avoiding it until you're ready. I never actually properly wrote down Yongasabi's sound inventory, assimilations, and allophones until the grammar document was at 204 pages because I hate working on that stuff. :huntershruggy: That's usually the first thing a lot of people like to work on for some reason, but I hate it and I just went by instinct for 204 pages and five months. If I let that stop me, I never would have made any progress. There were some things I had to go back and update because of it, and that took extra time, but extra work with progress is better than no work and no progress.

Second, understand your goals.

A piece of advice I got from David Peterson's videos and several other conlanging youtubers is to know why you're making your language and what your endgoal is. As long as you understand what your goal is, you can prioritize and decide what steps you need to take to get there. You need to understand what you want or else you'll never be able to work towards it, and you reduce the chances that you'll be happy with it.

For example, I've known some conlangers whose goal is to make some kind of secret, diegetically constructed language for a fictional setting, or maybe a secret language to use with their friends, but they get caught up on rules of naturalism and worry about naturalistic development. You don't need naturalism if the point of your language is that it didn't develop naturally. That's just a waste of your time.

Conversely, I've known some naturalistic conlangers who feel obligated to add every new concept they come across with the idea that "Well if it evolved in a real world language, then it must have some use to real speakers and thus belongs in this language" but they miss the point that a natural language doesn't need to contain every naturally developed phenomenon. In the end they're left with something bloated, hugely redundant, and incredibly disappointing to them.

I've also met conlangers whose goal is to make a naturalistic conlang for a fictional setting only to be hugely dissatisfied when they follow the rules of naturalistic development and it makes a language that doesn't sound the way they want, or it doesn't evoke the feeling they want, or they find that their progress is unnecessarily bogged down by learning rules they find boring, because they don't actually want a naturalistic language, they want an artlang that services their story.

In all of these cases, the authors of these conlangs didn't understand their goals. They did work they didn't like to make end products they were dissatisfied with because they failed to meet their real goals. These goals can shift over time, but in the end that's fine as long as it makes you happy. You need to be making your conlang for you and your purposes! You say that you've gotten stuck on phonotactics and that's stopped you before, but Yongasabi doesn't even have phonotactics outside of literally one single rule, and it's that there can never be more than two consonants in a cluster. I hate working with phonotactics too, so I made my language in a way that let me minimize that work. It doesn't interfere with my goal so I'm totally fine with that.

I know this is a lot but it really does boil down to those two points: work small so that you don't get overwhelmed, and know your goals so you can set your priorities. My goals with Yongasabi were:

Make a language that allows me to explore this fictional culture I made for the slugcats of Rain World

Derive sounds from Mongolian, Korean and Filipino (And a little bit of Vietnamese)

Explore grammatical concepts that I find cool from these languages and others (My main focus was converbs and agglutination in tandem with a consonantal root system, but in general there's a lot of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean in the grammar)

Make sure I like the sound of the language

My main guiding forces were:

Have a rough basis in naturalistic sound changes, but if it leads to sounds or situations I don't like, change it; the readers won't notice because they don't see the development process

If something starts to feel weird or stops fitting in with the rest of the language, don't be afraid to change it or get rid of it entirely because that in a way reflects organic change in the language (and extra work for progress is better than no work for no progress)

If there's an opportunity for the culture to express itself in the language, take it

If you want to judge how well I've realized those goals, you can check it out here (I'm making this post free to reblog unlike the last one because the link is hidden under all this text and 1st edition release is super close anyway I am so excited).

Anyway, good luck! I hope my advice helps!

[dedalvs]

My apologies, what I meant is that most of your languages are made for fantastic, fantasy worlds, as opposed to a fictional culture on Earth. If you're creating a language for a culture set on Earth, you'd probably incorporate features that tie it to a real language, am I correct?

I think you still may be misunderstanding what the key questions are and how they factor into language creation. There are two questions:

Is this language supposed to be descended from an existing language (or set of languages) on Earth?

Is this language spoken by creatures that are identical to humans in all the ways that play a crucial role in language use, comprehensijon, and transmission?

These are the only relevant questions. Notice I didn't say anything about where the languages are spoken. That bit is irrelevant. Language has its own geography and it's the only geography that matters when it comes to a posteriori language construction.

For example, looking at Dothraki, the answer to (1) is no, and the answer to (2) is yes. For that reason, Dothraki should be a language that looks entirely ordinary, in terms of how it stacks up with languages spoken currently on Earth, but its vocabulary and grammar shouldn't be directly related to any language on the planet. How could it be, if our planet doesn't exist in that universe? But since Dothraki are completely ordinary human beings their language should be a compeltely ordinary human language.

If you look at the aliens District 9, the answers to both (1) and (2) are no, despite the fact that the movie takes place in South Africa. And, in fact, you see some very interesting linguistic phenomena in that movie, where you have two species that understand but cannot use each other's languages. Its setting, though, doesn't mean that the alien language should be influenced by Afrikaans in any important way, though. It may have "borrowings", but even those would be strange (calques, most likely), since the aliens can't actually make human sounds—the same way the humans wouldn't have "borrowings" from the alien language.

On the other hand, if you look at Trigedasleng, the answers to both (1) and (2) are yes. But the suggestion you seem to be making is that I might kind of haphazardly "borrow" features from an existing language into a language that I'm nevertheless creating from scratch. That wouldn't make sense. Trigedasleng is simply an evolved form of American English with some specific constraints (some quite unrealistic, due to the scifi setting) placed on the evolution. I didn't "incorporate" features from American English: it IS American English, through and through, evolved in a way that makes sense for the setting.

There are certainly a posteriori conlangs where the creator approaches the creation of the language by saying, "I took the initial consonant mutation of Irish and combined it with the triconsonantal root system of Arabic and added the Turkish plural suffix (with vowel harmony) and added the accusative from Esperanto", and the like. This is one of the hallmarks of an amateur conlanger. Not even a creole language in the real world does this. Creole languages draw influences from many different languages, but the resulting system can't be divided up neatly into different linguistic sources. Furthermore, the result is a coherent system that doesn't look like any of the sources. Tok Pisin gets a lot of its vocabulary and grammar from English, but also gets vocabulary from German and other languages that were native to the region. When listening to the language, though, it's not like it sounds like English, then it suddenly sounds like German for a word, then it sounds like a Papuan language, then back to English: the whole thing sounds like Tok Pisin. It's a seamless, coherent system—just like any language, since all languages on Earth have borrowings and features from other languages.

Also, minor nitpick: "real" language doesn't make sense. We say natural language vs. constructed languages. Both are equally real, in that neither has any kind of material existence. A constructed language is a real language with a fake history.

Does this make sense?

[drakomachina]

Would LOVE to hear about your Mahana gender meta.

anon you indulge me so. this is quite the fun can of worms. im going to try my HARDEST to stay on topic here. gender as a concept however is related so intrinsically to other aspects of culture that i will have to go on several tangents in order to decently summarize some of this stuff SORRY IN ADVANCE. in order to start understanding whats going on here you kinda have to zoom out a lot to understand general mahanan belief systems. SO, mahana as a settlement is actually really old, and a lot of its belief systems are carried over from former wyverian inhabitants. gara himself is one of these wyverian inhabitants! today mahana has a much less sizeable population of wyverians, but there are still a couple left i'd imagine.

wyverians inherently have some different views on gender as a concept. their gender roles are a lot less strict, and as a species wyverians show a lot less dimorphism than humans or other animals might. wyverians are much more adjacent to reptiles in that way.

SO, mahana has a cyclic understanding of time. a lot of our society is inherently based on time as a linear function, but mahana views it a lot differently - everything is one big circle! the sun rises, it sets, it rises again. the tides come and go. everything in the world is one big cycle, and this is also reflected in views of individuality and life! humans are born, they die, and new individuals are born from the ashes of the old. a lot of this general philosophy is carried over from wyverian belief systems that have persisted throughout mahana’s lifespan as a society. mahana doesn’t really believe that people who die are gone forever. death is an inevitability, yes, but the circumstances of it feed into the lives of others. bodies decay and provide sustenance for the soil. and, to them, the individuality of a person isn’t lost either - nothing is truly “lost” from a death. no energy goes unused, it’s instead recycled by the environment and other individuals use it. the "mind" isn't lost either, the remnants of it are reformed into new individuals. this results in a belief system of separation of the body and the mind in a way that's kinda unprecedented in monhun terms. in mahanan belief systems the mind and the body are a lot less interconnected than we might view it. the body is the vehicle of the soul, essentially, and shall be molded as the individual sees fit. now THIS is where that gender meta starts to come into play. mahana is not rigid in gender expression, and AGAB is not inherently related to how one presents themselves in mahanan society. expression of oneself is fluid, and presentation is not locked into specific gender roles. there's a LOT of wiggle room here for people to experiment in both physical and social expression. there's probably multiple unique genders mahana has as a matter of fact. gender as a societal construct is a LOT more fluid than in other locations. additionally, mahanan language has room for lots of variation on pronouns. there's like, a hell of a lot of neologisms for mahanan linguistics that come into play here as descriptive terms, but as previously stated, i am not touching mahanan language with a ten foot pole until i get more experience with conlanging and sociolinguistics. i am not that powerful. Yet.

mahana as a society isn't really as individualistic as most modern philosophies, it's heavily based on communal living, and the idea of a "nuclear family" structure is foreign to them. the "dilution" of family lineages is also not much of a Thing. in fact, a lot of what we may consider "gender roles" are much more akin to lineage/patrilineal influence there.

you might look at this and go Ok And?? maybe a bit complicated but nothing to write home about right. but the thing is that the majority of the world here is affixed in a very rigid system of gender binary as is typical for many Vague Fantasy Settings to have. mahana is a HUGE outlier, and borderline unheard of in a primarily human population in monhun. its fun to think about.

[corvarrow]

Alright guys it's now time for a very exciting worldbuilding post: SETTING MAPS!! There are several in this post so I hope you enjoy the ride and please feel free to ask me if anything catches your interest.

I will start this off by saying these are very basic, and I only marked off a couple points of interest, but I still think there is some fun stuff to talk about here. Due to the massive amount of info I am also just going to have to skip some background info. Additionally: this continent is the main setting, but there ARE at least two more. It's also huge, like comparable to at least North America in size, so please imagine there are a ton of additional features (such as rivers, lakes, additional biomes, settlements, etc) here that I just didn't mark off.

Above is the very general Ancient Era map and we are just going to get really note heavy from here. Not everything is fully named and may or may not be adjusted later. One final note before I start is there is a conlang involved. I also haven't fully translated everything but I think in this case that works in our favor, which we'll get to in a sec.

Here is the map of ancient world sentient cities and a couple pieces of information. The four* sentient cities are called Sovereigns, and they all have avatar bodies (their original sion bodies).

*Ahveph, their creator, has a "spot" but at this point it's not acting as a sentient city and it doesn't have an avatar

Their language does makes a distinction between them as a location and them as an entity when using the full name. When dealing with shorthand though the first section of the name gets used to refer to the entity and the second for the location. For example, with Fatewinder's Beacon, "Fatewinder" = entity and "The Beacon" = location. I do have the first sections translated into conlang so we'll also start using them in this post, so if you see the conlang name I'm now talking about entities and the English names are locations. By the way, Fatewinder is Akiyohm, or "(to) wind fate". His siblings are Kantalys (Kanta), Sennamet (Sen), and Tenemohr (Ten).

Worth noting here that the avatar bodies can travel, but they ARE "tethered" to their main city bodies. They can visit each other, but they can't go much farther than that, meaning they have been locked to this continent and the waters immediately around it.

What is also really important to know is that they do NOT look like normal cities. They are actually complex megastructures, though they contain all things you would expect in cities including transportation systems. These megastructures are also shaped differently from each other. The Beacon is in a desert and is mainly vertical - about 10% of it is above ground and the rest is under. The Reach is across a mountainside and is built at an angle with the most terracing of the lot. Rest is in some riverlands and is mainly horizontal. Haven is on some heavily forested karst landscape - it's also horizontal but it has less levels than Rest does because Kanta chose to stretch it out farther.

Next we have the original territory map. When they first started here, they got along fine, but eventually when they figured out they could influence other magic wells besides the ones they lived in, they had some issues with who got what well. Finally they decided to split this out into roughly equal pies and for a while they were fine with that.

Influencing the wells into certain magic types also causes the area around them to have a magic bias towards that type. For example most of Aki's wells are wind type, so his whole region tends to have wind magic and they can construct lots of windmills to take advantage of that. If they change territory lines then the wells in that area will change as well, though they won't change easily if the area is under war.

From here on out you can consider these pies to be Kingdoms, with the Sovereigns being their capitals, and the Sovereigns also being Actual sovereigns.

Ahveph's "spot" (Seat of the Creator) remains a neutral event ground for the entirety of ancient history.

Also on this map I can point out Sunbath, which is a major story location. It is a remote village that ended up on Aki's trading route. It is also where Jas happens to live.

So yeah they still could not fully agree on territories which led to multiple disputes and actual wars over the millennia, until they finally ended up with this around the peak. Kanta has the largest pie by far, then Sen, Ten, and finally Aki.

At peak pre-cataclysm, this civilization had gotten quite advanced, as in "farther in the future than Earth" and "how are we feeling about the vast reaches of space everyone" kind of advanced. The major difference is that sions wield magic, so most of their advancements were heavily magic based rather than using physical science. Anl quick example of what I mean by that would be like, batteries - although they could make electrochemical batteries like we use on earth, they would more likely make them using lightning magic instead.

Well things couldn't stay good forever. Events led to the cataclysm and caused the plane split - literally there now three different planes are stacked on top of each other and they are not exactly the same.

First is the original Reality plane, now called Time's End. This plane has become, to put it politely, completely fucked. Although plants like it, and there are some leftover constructs like corvafex, there aren't any people or animals anymore. It is blown out with magic and very few natural processes work like they are supposed to. The time of day is locked in bands by region (see next map), time flows inconsistently, and the weather and seasons don't cycle, they are locked at random by region. This doesn't mean things are entirely in stasis though - the tides still move, which is quite clear in places such as the inland sea, and the shore near the Glassworks. At The Beacon, which had already been near a dune field, Aki's wind towers have gone without maintenance for so long that they stir up huge sandstorms every so often like clockwork.

Technically, it is still possible to reach this plane. It's most easily reached by (modern) sions because mirrors do exist here, but it is desolate. Non-sions can occasionally end up here too, but with the resonance levels and time fuckery it is not advised to stay too long.

This map is just to show how the time of day is locked. So for example, the Seat of the Creator is in perpetual midday, the Beacon is stuck in the afternoon, Rest and the glassworks are still stuck in the morning, and the Reach is at night.

The second plane is the Memory plane. It is called this because there are copies of settlements (mostly from the new Reality) on this plane, but not actually anyone in them. The plane is actually empty, like nobody ever actually lived here, as opposed to Time's End where it is empty because everyone is dead. It still remains quite eerie to explore however. It's just tons and tons of ghost cities essentially. Most of these copies look fairly normal (if not just eerie), but not all of them as the Memory plane still contains some resonance. It's not nearly as bad as Time's End but there are some cases where you'll have like, an entire empty city permanently covered in glowing fog.

So as far as Ahveph goes - it is an entity integrated into the whole planet, and it COULD manipulate things where ever, it just chose to focus on the areas the ancient sions lived in. After the planes split it was almost completely immobilized except for this one location. It can still sorta see things but it cannot do shit unless it's here. What it has currently chosen to do is to act as a city and build modern sions to live in it. It's success at being a city like the Sovereigns is kind of debatable but to be fair it is really a different beast entirely anyway.

Named characters that actively live here are Cavi, Torch, Tower, and the Daydreamer. While it is mostly populated by sions it does sometimes allow non-sions as well, like Subore actually lives here. He is also is one of the only humans that has learned modern sionic.

This is also probably a good time to mention modern sions are fairly different from ancient sions. Ancients are all sapient automatons - they have A Process to build some more (there is in fact some "genealogy" and "genetics" involved but it gets...kind of wacky) but they are 100% new builds every time one gets made. On the other hand, Modern sions are not 100% new, they are kind of doppelgangers - specific humans/shifters from reality are identified, their essence copied, changed up a bit, and then the copies are stuffed into a new construct body and let loose in the city. A good example of this is Sy and Tower, Sy being the original guy (a "Source"), and Tower being the sion that was created.

Aaand finally we have the current new Reality plane. It has been entirely repopulated by humans and shifters. The ancient sions have been largely forgotten except for whatever archaeologists dig up. Since they don't have any way to translate the relics being dug up they are just called "The Lost Race". Modern sions are basically a crypid at this point that everyone calls some variation of "mirror demon" and there is no connection that these two are actually related.

The overall technology level is similar to Earth. Maybe slightly ahead, but it is mostly based in the physical sciences with some augmentation with whatever magic relics they've figured out how to work.

Ahveph can technically manipulate things at Five since it's at the same location, but it generally does not. It has however, made a very convenient shortcut for explorers to travel back and forth between Reality and Memory.

Character locations on this plane:

Five - Sy's family had moved here from overseas when he was young. He grew up here but moved somewhere between Calanom and Five. His mom, dad, and older brother still live here though.

Calanom - Yeah so the kids (Cody, Mady, and Static/Shaun) all live here. Jack (Cavi's Source) was from here as well.

Mercury Falls - Subore and Riley (Torch's Source) are from here, though Subore didn't want to stay after Riley passed away.

[kiragecko]

@lordlyhour asked me for suggestions about how to get into linguistics. I'm too wordy to stuff all my thoughts into a reply, so here's a post!

Figure out what you're curious about and look into it casually. Don't take it too seriously. Linguistics is a huge field, and it can take a while to figure out which parts really resonate, so explore!

-

You want to understand more about how language changes and develops? I suggest looking up various words on Wiktionary, and clicking on various links in the "Etymology" section. Stop in the middle of thoughts to see if random words could be connected. Read through a page of words on Old-Engli . sh and see which ones you recognize. Look up a list of English prefixes and learn about where they come from and their subtleties of meaning.

Or look up Creoles and Pidgins! They are really cool, and also, because of the way they develop to bridge communication gaps, can work is interesting primers to a lot of concepts.

If you're interested in sounds, I suggest going to a site that shows an interactable IPA alphabet, and just listening to the various sounds and trying to interpret all the gobbledy-gook describing them. I mostly just use Wikipedia these days, but IPAChart is also pretty good, and there are a lot of other sites online with similar things.

Try to transcribe your own words in IPA. (You WILL be wrong, especially if you don't speak General American or a prestige British English dialect. Accept that and have fun doing it anyways!)

Watch some videos by Dr. Geoff Lindsey or Tom Scott's Language Files.

Find a bunch of pictures of your mouth and throat when forming various vowels. Read up on all the structures in your mouth/throat and how they affect sounds.

If you have fun getting thrown in the deep end, Index Diachronica has a lot of good info about historic sound changes, and PHOIBLE has a LOT of info about what sounds languages are actually likely to use, and how complex they can get. Neither is even slightly designed for newcomers, but it can be fun to play with stuff that only sort-of makes sense!

Conlangers (people who design artificial languages) also have a lot of good beginner resources! The Language Construction Kit covers all the basics in an interesting and accessible way.

Getting a book about historical linguistics from the public library can also be a great start. It will go over all the various things about language that can change, and give you a pretty good primer to the broader field while doing it. Also, you get to read about sound changes, and how sounds diverge as languages split from each other, and I LOVE that sort of thing! It's really really neat!

Also, look up the inflection systems of at least one language, because English's case system for nouns is pathetic, and our conjugation of verbs still leaves a lot to be desired. This leaves English speakers at a disadvantage when learning linguistics, because that stuff is kinda fundamental and instead we're heavily relying on word order.

I'm not nearly as interested in syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, but look into them enough to see if anything catches your eye.

-

If there's something that seems cool, look into it more. Read up on Latin, or Proto-Indo-European, or explore the Austronesian Comparative Dictionary. Look up the Indigenous languages in your area and try to learn how to actually pronounce the street names and other locations that everyone butchers. Listen to the people around you and notice the variations in dialect. Look at ALL the various meanings of 'for' or some other tiny particle, and try to understand the nuances. Whatever it is, dig in. If something is confusing, look into that. If something is distracting, note it for later, or let yourself get sidetracked.

There are fundamentals in linguistics. It helps to learn them at some point. But please have fun first! Then you'll get a better idea of which type of fundamentals you want to invest in. Because if you're interested in word change, you want to focus on very different things then if sounds systems intrigue you, or you want to understand what's happening in your brain.

[linearao3]

hello! quick question: how do you conduct your research regarding languages? Like which sources do you use to find accurate translations of different words in different languages? i so admire the way you use languages in your fics; it’s so impressive! please share your wisdom, linny, i would greatly appreciate it! :)

(aka a struggling writer that has found that googling just doesn’t cut it)

I am flattered by this ask but feel the need to emphasize that much of the language stuff in my fics is totally made up! Like, I do often use real words, and try to mimic the sounds of some real words sometimes but especially in the case of Suli I am imposing a pretty much entirely fictitious grammar. I also take real words and declare them to have alternate meanings. I am neither doing pure conlang nor representing authentic languages.

All that said! Wiktionary is my best friend. I often use an online dictionary (Cambridge has a good selection of languages and will often save you from, for example, wanting a translation of “give up” and unwittingly getting words that mean “[hand over] [opposite of down]” instead of “surrender” or “leave off”) to get either a word I want or a close relative. Then I take the word the dictionary gave me to Wiktionary to see things like its grammatical construction, its etymological root, or its cousin words, and then I fuck around until I get a sound I like.

(For example, the Dutch word “to fuck” is “neuken.” I didn’t like the sound of that, so I took it to Wiktionary and found the slang synonym “batsen,” which also means to bounce or slap. I wanted to mimic the hard sound of the English “fuck,” so I switched the s and the t, and so when Kaz is talking dirty in the Ballads fics, he uses a lot of words with the root “bast-” including “verbast” to mean “fucking” in the sense of a gerundive intensifier, though literally meaning something like “befucked.” (Actual Dutch doesn’t use profanities as English-speakers think of them as intensifiers.) The ver- prefix as a gerund is parallel to when Kaz asks Inej not to leave him— “jet kennet me verzaken,” with the last word breaking down literally to ver-zak-en, something like “do leaving to, make left.” But also cognate to the English “forsaken,” which is really why I did it.)

I hope this confession of my tangled and honestly somewhat whim-and-aesthetics-driven methodology doesn’t diminish me too much in your eyes! I am so, so serious about my apologies to languages.

I have now edited this twice for clarity; I am so bad at this; I’m sorry.

[cellarspider]

Qunlat 2/12: Canon, and its various disagreements

⭅ Previous =⦾ Index ⦾= Next ⭆

Before I can dig into the actual sound and structure of Qunlat, I have to first dig into the structure of Dragon Age itself, because… well, the sound and structure of Qunlat changes depending on when it was set down. Whatever version you like is totally up to you–I’ll be trying to document all of them, but also begin explaining how to curate the language to your desires. 

I want to preface this: anybody who prefers what goes on here is totally valid. But I am going to get into some analysis of why, from a conlang hobbyist’s perspective, a fair chunk of later Qunlat doesn’t feel like the same language we’ve previously been presented, and why certain sources should be treated as less authoritative than others.

And I will begin with a comparison: Star Wars. No, no, come back, I promise this won’t hurt!

During the reign of George Lucas, Star Wars continuity and fandom explicitly drew distinctions between levels and eras of canon: The movies were the prime source that could ignore all others. Tie-ins could expand the setting, but due to less centralized direction, they could vary wildly in depiction of everything, including “facts” of the setting. How does the Force work? Are microbes involved? Any cosmic beings or liminal spaces? Do any of them seem suspiciously influenced by Dave Filoni’s wolf obsession? Even the movies don’t always agree!

Fans and official lorekeepers also recognized the difference between when something was made, or which publisher was involved: Tie-ins from the early years were less likely to be compatible with those from later times, and different production houses had their own internal continuities. Did Han Solo fight alongside a giant carnivorous rabbit in a red onesie? Well, he didn’t mention that when interviewed by a monk from a religious order where the enlightened masters become mecha-spiders! Did an omnipotent, insane entity once kill Princess Leia by turning her heart into a diamond? Maybe we could find out, if someone decompiled the memory banks of her assassin droid double who was sent to marry and shoot a three-eyed fake heir to Palpatine’s throne! Did a trans-dimensional scaly jello cube once run a faith healing scam? It’s been banished from the continuity of most tie-ins since then, but it was published under the official Star Wars license! I haven’t made up even one of these!

Equally, fans might also freely decide to ignore earlier or later aspects of canon, because they had their own sandbox they liked to play in. Even parts of generally beloved stories may be generally ignored (hello, Luuke). And all that was common long before you even get to the Disney takeover, when much of the creative direction changed. 

Dragon Age, as a fifteen year old franchise (ow, my bones) that has attempted to be aggressively multimedia and has not maintained a single, unified creative team, is prone to these same eccentricities and inconsistencies. Sometimes things happen for no serious reason whatsoever. Remember when baby Superman landed in Ferelden? I remember that. Doctor Seuss is a dwarven Paragon, by the way.

These are meant to be jokes in the games, sure, but the rules around magic and lyrium change with every game, and on the subject of languages, we also don't have a consistent writing system for the Common Tongue.

Throughout the series, early material conflicts with later, tie-ins conflict with games, individual games may be internally inconsistent, and a sole truth fundamentally does not exist for the canon. 

This is particularly true for ancillary material, which Qunlat can be counted as. It’s a constructed language that isn’t from the main setting. Even when lead writers have been involved in its depiction, the results have sometimes been completely incompatible with the rest of its appearances. 

I am attempting to document this language in a comprehensible fashion. You can see how this might cause problems.

So I am going to try and draw some distinctions. This should be particularly useful for anyone trying to reconstruct things from the wiki’s dictionary and phrasebook, which does cite sources, and includes everything, regardless of linguistic and stylistic incompatibility.

Dragon Age: Origins and Dragon Age II have a relatively high level of internal consistency in their spoken Qunlat. Things Sten says seem mutually intelligible with what we hear from the Arishok. There are exceptions–a couple rogue words in DAO and Warden’s Keep that indicate some level of uncertainty about the overall shape of the language, and Mark of the Assassin has a few eccentricities, but is largely in line with the two. A large portion of our dialog in DA2 and its DLC has never had a translation provided, but the sound of the language remains consistent. Mary Kirby (formerly of BioWare) was Sten’s writer for DAO, so we can guess that she was the primary source for these games.

Grammar-wise, more complexity might exist in some of the Arishok’s untranslated lines, but my best attempts to analyze them indicate they may be on shaky ground, detail-wise. Words slide around each other in strange ways, though they all sound like the same language.

The one major exception to that unity: DA2’s Qunari armor and weapons. These include some extremely strange additions that are not reflected in the spoken language. New sounds and letters enter the language that were never there before. I’d hazard a guess that either a different writer got involved with naming these, and/or the documentation available was not well-organized or transmitted. When finally defined for certain in World of Thedas Vol. 2 some years later, many of the equipment terms have mistaken etymologies.

Dragon Age: Inquisition continues that trend. There’s more words that have spurious etymologies. Some words have inconsistent spellings. Some sentences accidentally a word. The wiki’s does not help matters, with some statements from the Iron Bull taken as definitions when it doesn’t seem like they’re supposed to be.

During this period, Mary Kirby and Trick Weekes started answering questions about the language on twitter. For our Qunari-focused purposes, Kirby started out the series as Sten’s writer, and Weekes was Iron Bull’s writer, and so we may see differences in authorship between the two. Kirby answers most of the questions about vocabulary, and the answers mostly fall in line with previous Qunlat.

The same goes for Tresspasser. While its new Qunlat vocabulary is unfortunately minimal, the contents largely have the same linguistic feel as the rest of the language, grammar is consistent, and new words make etymological sense. A convert practices their conjugation tables, much to my delight. The language does strain against the relatively limited grammar it contains, though, with Viddasala’s lines in particular feeling like they’re missing connective tissue.

Secondary material far less consistent. Web series and comics like Redemption, Those Who Speak, and the currently-releasing Vows and Vengeance podcast* all are produced with less direct oversight or restrictions of medium and resource availability, tend to be highly divergent in general, and that definitely includes their Qunlat. Tie-in books like Tevinter Nights are only slightly more consistent, but are still of variable quality.

And then there is The World of Thedas.

That's not great.

While the two volumes of WoT scratch the itch for Delicious Lore, Volume 2’s unique additions to Qunlat are contain some glaring incompatibilities with the rest of the series. Volume 1 has a bit of in-universe disclaimer near the start of it, that all sources are biased and imperfect. Volume 2 includes errata from the previous book, including a walking back of ideas like “The Antaam stages duels to the death for promotions”, replaced with “actually the Orlesians made that up during the Exalted Marches to scare their kids”. So, we can see that real-world creative decisions were changed between the two books. That’s understandable.

Unfortunately for our purposes, Volume 2 also includes the largest corpus of grammatically complex Qunlat sentences in the entire series, and they appear to be deliberately sloppy.

I now have to introduce you to my nemesis, Philliam, a Bard!.

This poxy little creature is a character credited in The World of Thedas, Volume 2 as transcribing and “loosely translating” phrases spoken by Qunari soldiers at rest. These sentences are of variable quality, featuring misspellings of pre-existing words, absolutely bizarre sentence structure, and words that previous Qunlat simply can’t support. It’s like reading English and then suddenly you appear to have stumbled into a rogue word in Sḵwx̱wú7mesh.

I focus (saltily) on this for two reasons: First, Philliam, a Bard! is treated explicitly as an unreliable source. I have seen some folks reference his vocabulary in other contexts before, and it shows up in several dictionaries, including taking cues from his pronunciation guide. Do not trust anything found exclusively in his excerpts to fit with the rest of the language: he is intended to be a foreigner who may not fully understand the language, and may, in fact, just be making shit up.

Second, and I may be reaching a little here: as a constructed language hobbyist, I know how things go sometimes. You’ve come up with some sentences you want to translate into your conlang, but you realize you’re lacking vocabulary for it, or worse, you don’t have enough grammatical complexity to even structure the concepts you want to convey. …But you’re really tired, or only have a few minutes to poke at it, so you just fling down some new words and grammar that conceivably look like a translation, though you’re not quite sure how. This is especially common for new conlangers.

These sentences feel like that kind of thing was going on there. I’ll get into the details of why much later, but for now: If something you like in Qunlat contradicts Philliam, a Bard!, don’t feel wedded to stuff from him. He is, both in and out of continuity, an unreliable source.

But if you like Philliam, a Bard!? Go for it! My grumbling is entirely immaterial, DAI and WoT2 add in a bunch of vocabulary that people may want to draw from. Hopefully this post has provided some pointers on how to tailor Qunlat to your own interests. For those who may be interested in further tweaking Qunlat, I’ll give advice later, when we dig into some changes I personally made while trying to expand the language.

The one piece of advice I’ll give now: Beware the wiki’s dictionary. It’s a heroic work to source as many words as they did, but I’ve noticed some typos in their Qunlat (ex. Aqaam written as “Aquaam”), some definitions include irrelevant and misleading information (maraas-lok is the name of a strong alcohol that literally means “no(thing)-thought(s)”, and does not seem to be a verb for “drink”. Bull is just drunk and trying to get you to drink.), some words are fully unsourced, some are missing (placenames especially), and the citations are not comprehensive and do not necessarily list the first time a word appears in canon.

So I have made my own dictionary. It’s mostly based off of theirs, and retains the wiki’s definitions for those who want those. But it also features an accounting of which words show up in which sources, as well as my own notes, which include further definitions based off of verifiable context, etymologies of compound words, corrections for wiki or canon errors, and my suffering through the works of Philliam, a Bard!. I’ve gone through all of DAO and DA2’s subtitles, and World of Thedas Volumes 1 and 2 to verify the vocabulary they include, and at some point I will probably do the same for DAI and Trespasser. Tie-ins are lower down the list, for the reasons I explained above.  

Qunlat’s phonaesthetics will be covered this time, as this is what drew me in first, and laying them out will help readers create names or new words that sound Qunlat.

⭅ Previous =⦾ Index ⦾= Next ⭆

Footnotes

* I haven’t been following Vows and Vengeance, but the only Qunlat in the transcripts is all stuff we’ve heard before, the rest is simply glossed over as stage directions of people chanting or yelling a “FOREIGN TONGUE”. Someone in the YouTube comments identified Taash's chanting as the prayer we hear Sten recite in Origins, so that's almost all of it accounted for. I may listen and see if I can make any sense of the rest of it later, but I have a questionable ear for transcribing languages, so if it's new content, my results may not be 100% accurate.

[yersina]

a linguist plays chants of sennaar (pt 5)

[pt 1] [pt 2] [pt 3] [pt 4]

the home stretch!!

disclaimer: can't promise that i'll have any insights that a layperson wouldn't have, this is kinda just me thinking through the grammar of the language out loud haha.

this post covers the fifth and last language in chants of sennaar and will contain spoilers for both the language and the endgame! it also assumes you know what the symbols mean already.

i.... to be completely honest with you, i did not enjoy this language 😂 i think the experience of deciphering it got lost in favor of the storyline, which isn't necessarily a bad thing for everyone, but hey, i am the one going through each of these languages like a linguistic bloodhound here lol. because of that, i'm not as familiar with these words as i am with the other languages.

before we get into anything else, and also because i imagine that this will be a shorter post because the game itself tells you what patterns to look for, i do want to say that this language strikes me as being incredibly artificial. which is a good thing! it emulates the digital apocalypse vibe that exile gives. but a language that leans so heavily into being constructed and recombined and modulated so easily really gives me the impression that it was created and not organically developed. the only other irl example that comes to mind at the moment is korean hangeul, which was purposefully created by king sejong and is an alphabet, not a logography. like, this is a language that i would make for fun in high school (which is to say, it gives a kind of overly grammatically strict, awkwardly too regular vibe?).

it's kind of funny that this language is where i'm starting to get reminded of conlangs, especially when, well, everything in this game is a conlang. but if we take each of the radicals in this language as affixes/morphemes when they're being combined into one character, then this actually reminds me of a specific conlang (ithkuil, i think?) where you can convey incredibly complex ideas through very few words.

the language of the anchorites isn't quite this complex, but hopefully the comparison gets my point across?

i’m curious if only certain elements can be combined with each other or if there’s a certain order to them, but it’s hard to tell when there’s such limited evidence in the game. interestingly, i believe the anchorites’ language is the only one in this game that makes a distinction between “die” and “death/dead” by combining the noun with the verb “go”. not sure why the developers suddenly made that decision haha.

this language, like most in the game, is an SVO language, which we can see below:

but i think also they (the developers) were trying to convey more complex sentence structures than their language was designed to communicate??? so then you end up w smth like below:

which, if you translated literally, would actually be “you man i wait”. again, super interesting bc i think an actual, more accurate anchorite sentence should be “i wait you man”. they have a more complex sentence here bc of the predicate (“you’re the one”) and the dative (“for”), but really the sense that they’re trying to go for is “i was awaiting the one [who is you]”. i guess it’s possible that different grammatical cases are treated differently in this language, or that, like english, word order is occasionally variable (even tho that option seems iffy bc we haven’t really seen evidence of it before), but tbh i suspect that really it’s that the developers wrote the dialogue and then brute forced it into the anchorite language haha. no shade! (and also impossible to confirm either way lol) just kinda amusing and also it makes sense when it’s p obvious their focus shifted from the language to the story.

this trend continues throughout all of the anchorite dialogue (imo) and makes it kinda slow and awkward to read if you don’t have all of the characters translated. in my opinion, the way that the language functions in the last part of this game makes it pretty clear that the developers meant for you to rely on the given translations during this potion of the game, especially when the translation mechanic is mostly through the matching terminals in exile, rather than speaking with people.

annoyingly, the anchorites’ language is also the only one in the game that doesn’t have words for the other people/cultures in the game (demonyms), which also doesn’t give much to work off of in terms of cultural context, relationships, etc.

again, i’ve decided not to get into an in-depth orthographic analysis of this particular language bc the game itself introduces you to them. one that i noticed that wasn’t specifically addressed in-game is the similarity between “open” and “key”, which is something that i actually also noted before in the devotees’ language. i’m sure there are others, but i’m also sure you can find them yourself!

all in all, a strange ending to this game. if you’ve made it this far in all of my posts—thanks for hanging around! hope you were able to learn smth new :)

[do-you-speak-this-language]

hello and welcome to do-you-speak-this-language!

REQUESTS ARE CLOSED ❌ they will open back up again soon i promise!!

if you haven't seen the description already, i started this project to examine this userbase's linguistic diversity, generally speaking. as of now i am the sole moderator of this blog. :-)

you can call me c! my pronouns are she/her and i am under 18. i have a strong interest in linguistics and language learning and have made varying amounts of progress on more than 40+ languages, but am currently focusing on esperanto, spanish, japanese, and russian.

this blog was inspired by blogs such as @haveyouheardthisband , @haveyouseenthismovie-poll , @haveyoureadthisbook-poll , @haveyoueatenthis , and more!

click "keep reading" for more information about language requests and the general rules of this blog.

REGARDING REQUESTS AND ORGANIZATION: when indicated so, you are very very welcome to submit your own requests for languages you'd like to be seen in a poll. i will accept requests for any widely-recognized language, including conlangs (constructed languages) and other minority and endangered languages. i do my best to research every language i make a poll on, but if somehow i cannot find any written information on a language i have received, i will NOT make a post for it and will do my best to inform you of this.

once i have received enough languages to make polls for, i will create an online spreadsheet that you can access to see what languages have already been done and submitted. right now it doesn't exist. however, when it does, please read and check the spreadsheet for the language you wish to request before actually sending me an ask about it!

languages will be tagged by the most commonly written English version of their name (ex: Spanish will be primarily referred to as Spanish, Japanese as Japanese), but i will also mention names of languages as expressed in their native languages, both in the body of the post and in the tags (ex. Spanish will also be referred to as español, Japanese as 日本語).

REGARDING BLOG RULES & BOUNDARIES: for the sake of maintaining a large sample size for each poll i post, anyone who encounters this blog is allowed to participate and reblog my posts if they so wish.

if you make the decision to comment on a certain language on any post, PLEASE be respectful of the language and culture you are talking about, as well as any other people that may have contributed their own view/experience with the language. nothing like "[x language] is so ugly-looking/sounding" or "[x language] sucks because etc etc etc" or "people from [x country] are so rude/weird/annoying/etc" or anything similar. such comments will be immediately removed and, in more severe cases, the user will be blocked from interacting with further posts.

also, do not start arguments or discourse about any language. this could also have you end up blocked.

lastly, please be patient with me and my posting schedule. i am currently preparing for community college and i usually have a lot on my plate offline. i promise i will get to your request or respond to any questions you may have eventually!

[dedicatedfollower467]

recently finished re-reading "Oh, Son of A---" by StrivingArtist, aka the best isekai fanfic ever written but it got me to thinking

what would happen if i was dropped into the shire at the beginning of the hobbit knowing only what i currently know of tolkien's languages and nothing else?

and honestly the answer is, i would know a smattering of endearments and obscenities in a bewildering mix of neo-khuzdul and sindarin, with a side helping of random words like "monster" and "leech" in quenya.

and names, theoretically, but this is assuming that it works like in OSoA where the names stick and thorin is actually called "thorin" and it's not a translation of his "real" name in westron. like how tolkien says in the appendices that frodo is actually "maura" and merry is really "kali" and sam is actually "ban". or maybe it was his father who was "ban" and sam was "ran" i don't actually remember, see i'd be fucked!

i can also theoretically say "friend" or even "my friend" in sindarin but somehow i feel like the dwarves would not be pleased with that.

and again: probably not pleased with me spouting off random khuzdul phrases that might not even be accurate because neo-khuzdul is a reconstruction based on what little material we do have from tolkien and wild theory and conjecture. also again; like 90% endearments and probably incorrect conjunctions of a few random words and phrases.

i'm also like. trying to think through if there are any other fandoms i've been a part of with constructed languages where i could get by and like.

star trek canonically has both english AND universal translators, so i wouldn't actually need klingon, probably, which is good because i can't even pronounce Qapla' correctly, let alone say anything else in klingon.

i never did game of thrones so that's useless to me, the na'vi have a robust conlang but i couldn't give less of a shit about avatar or be bothered to learn any of it.....

holy fuck. i think apart from LOTR the only conlang where i know phrases off the top of my head is Lapine from watership down, and the main phrase i remember from that is "eat shit and die stinklord". and i don't even remember most of the names, just thlayli and hyzenthlay and hrairoo and hlaoroo and i don't even remember if "hrairoo" or "hlaoroo" are actually correct.

[dreamcrow]

the rules: list the last book you read, and/or the one you’re currently reading and/or what you’re planning to read next and tell us a bit about them and whether you’d recommend them.

i was tagged by @falling-hand-in-unlovable-hand (thank you!).

ough… i feel like i've fell off a bit on my reading recently, though looking back over my reading log that must not be true. i've been averaging a pretty solid book per week so far this year (HE SAYS, AVOIDING EYE CONTACT WITH THE NARRATIVE) but mainly by accident as opposed to a deliberate goal. anyway.

just finished: mark rosenfelder, advanced language construction. a followup to the same author's language construction kit, this is likewise a broad-scope reference book meant to be revisited. i didn't get as much out of this one as i did from the lck, but mainly because my current conlang project is fantasy indo-european; it's a great window into non-IE possibilities, and even occasionally funny. i really look forward to starting the author's religion construction kit, hopefully this weekend!

finished earlier last week: emily wilson's translation of the odyssey, which. hm. i, uh. over the course of reading this, i found myself frequently wishing i'd just read the poem in greek, which seems to defeat the purpose of a translation tbh. readable, i guess, but disappointing considering how hyped up wilson was. my better nature is telling me to give her a second chance with her translation of the iliad, but if she messed up the homer poem i actually like, i'm going to have classics opinions in public, which nobody needs. (much as i would love to read the whole iliad in greek.)

currently reading: PLINY THE ELDER'S NATURAL HISTORY… (penguin translation). pliny the elder. my best beautiful friend pliny the elder. it's slow going because it's a huge book (even in selections) and i try to make sure i really understand what he's saying, which is sometimes rather circuitous, but. it's my second time reading it and it feels cozy, almost. encyclopedic, as indeed he is. pliny knows exactly how many kinds of fish there are (74). he describes ruina montium, an absolutely terrifying thing that blows my fucking mind the romans could do. he keeps offhandedly insisting on how badly the earth loves us, how this is such a patently obvious fact even an idiot could not try to deny it, and i want to cry every time.

want to read next: i had a terrible craving for romans about a month ago, so i dug up a respectable mountain of my old roman history penguins. hence the pliny. (i must have gotten most of them in undergrad, but—these tacituses look untouched…!) i want to read suetonius next (his stupid anecdotes about augustus' quaint folksyisms) but who knows? maybe i should try all the various fantasy holds i've requested and let lapse in libby. or maybe 2025 will be the year of mark t. garbanzo?

tagging @niemalsetwas, @phthalology, @sidhewrites, and... @corvidfeathers? only if you like, no pressure :3c