#my conlangs

[velaraffricate]

so I've been working on my latest conlang, irkan osla (or just osla for short), for a bit now and would like to showcase its writing system in this post! osla has a syllabic alphabet, not too dissimilar to korean hangul, where letters are stacked according to certain rules to make syllable blocks.

osla's syllable structure is (C)(C)V(V)(C), here's how the stacks work for each type of syllable:

all letters have small, wide, and tall forms depending on their position in the syllable. here are all the letters with their IPA value and romanization:

and here's an example text! i translated parts of the minecraft end poem into osla. maybe i'll make another post just focusing on the grammar when it's more developed. the poem says in english:

What did this player dream? This player dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created. And it dreamed it destroyed. It dreamed it hunted, and was hunted. It dreamed of shelter.

Does it know that we love it? That the universe is kind? Sometimes, through the noise of its thoughts, it hears the universe, yes.

this post is getting long, so under the cut you'll find a "sans-serif" version as well as the poem in osla and its gloss if you're also a linguistics nerd and wanna know what's going on under the hood (the roman numerals stand for the 3 noun classes)! thanks for reading!

The way regular people would write something quickly on a piece of paper with a regular pen is an aspect of creating neographies that I feel is often overlooked, so I developed this sans-serif version that people would probably be more likely to use when writing their shopping lists or diary entries:

And, finally, here's the poem translation:

pak oṇḍul phan wimbakis?

DET.I.SG.PROX play-AGN what dream-PST.3SG.I?

pak oṇḍul lümaṇiuṣerothi han buloni an wimbakis. kaṣkhaothi han nilothi an. wimbakis, run sëmamkis. wimbakis, run xokthakis, han bumxokthakis. zöga an wimbakis.

DET.I.SG.PROX play-AGN sunlight-II.SG.DAT and tree-II.PL.DAT of dream-PST.3SG.I. Fire-II.SG.DAT and water-II.SG.DAT of. dream-PST.3SG.I, that create-PST.3SG.I. dream-PST.3SG.I, that hunt-PST.3SG.I, and PASS-hunt-PST.3SG.I. shelter of dream-PST.3SG.I.

ṭauraka, run kaak samare? run glutsüna flia?

know-NP.3SG.I, that 3SG.I.ABS love-NP.1PL? that universe kind?

imba ethamo, khaṣiŋli an ka’am hu’aŋni pitë, glutsüna ṣaraka, ti.

some time-NOM.III.PL, noise-ACC.II.SG of 3SG.I.GEN thought-NOM.III.PL through, universe hear-NP.3SG.I, yes.

[opashoo]

OCtober 2023: Shou, the Hidden Right Hand

A disillusioned fortune teller, scholar, and mystic, studied in old poems and proverbs. Their absent-minded demeanor belies a dangerous cunning and supernatural foresight with which they have cut down empires. Agent to a mysterious benefactor known only as "The Director".

Shou is nonbinary transfem (they/them)

The non-english text is in Caravan, a conlang I've been working on for about two years now. It reads from right to left:

"Hafii tokshj an, sa ejvo sheta-yjramea no / an im hafigaa eta shehn lumateh mu goro hjkkj."

There are monsters in the mountain, and we would seek shelter [from them] but / we will not find rest in the valleys.

EDIT: So I'm really indecisive and decided I really liked a dark background and no white outline, so I've replaced the original with that version. The original is below.

[jorisjurgen]

[spocks-kaathyra]

thoughts about the Cardassian writing system

I've thinking about the Cardassian script as shown on screen and in beta canon and such and like. Is it just me or would it be very difficult to write by hand?? Like.

I traced some of this image for a recent drawing I did and like. The varying line thicknesses?? The little rectangular holes?? It's not at all intuitive to write by hand. Even if you imagine, like, a different writing implement—I suppose a chisel-tip pen would work better—it still seems like it wasn't meant to be handwritten. Which has a few possible explanations.

Like, maybe it's just a fancy font for computers, and handwritten text looks a little different. Times New Roman isn't very easily written by hand either, right? Maybe the line thickness differences are just decorative, and it's totally possible to convey the same orthographic information with the two line thicknesses of a chisel-tip pen, or with no variation in line thickness at all.

A more interesting explanation, though, and the one I thought of first, is that this writing system was never designed to be handwritten. This is a writing system developed in Cardassia's digital age. Maybe the original Cardassian script didn’t digitize well, so they invented a new one specifically for digital use? Like, when they invented coding, they realized that their writing system didn’t work very well for that purpose. I know next to nothing about coding, but I cannot imagine doing it using Chinese characters. So maybe they came up with a new writing system that worked well for that purpose, and when computer use became widespread, they stuck with it. 

Or maybe the script was invented for political reasons! Maybe Cardassia was already fairly technologically advanced when the Cardassian Union was formed, and, to reinforce a cohesive national identity, they developed a new standardized national writing system. Like, y'know, the First Emperor of Qin standardizing hanzi when he unified China, or that Korean king inventing hangul. Except that at this point in Cardassian history, all official records were digital and typing was a lot more common than handwriting, so the new script was designed to be typed and not written. Of course, this reform would be slower to reach the more rural parts of Cardassia, and even in a technologically advanced society, there are people who don't have access to that technology. But I imagine the government would be big on infrastructure and education, and would make sure all good Cardassian citizens become literate. And old regional scripts would stop being taught in schools and be phased out of digital use and all the kids would grow up learning the digital script.

Which is good for the totalitarian government! Imagine you can only write digitally. On computers. That the government can monitor. If you, like, write a physical letter and send it to someone, then it's possible for the contents to stay totally private. But if you send an email, it can be very easily intercepted. Especially if the government is controlling which computers can be manufactured and sold, and what software is in widespread use, etc. 

AND. Historical documents are now only readable for scholars. Remember that Korean king that invented hangul? Before him, Korea used to use Chinese characters too. And don't get me wrong, hangul is a genius writing system! It fits the Korean language so much better than Chinese characters did! It increased literacy at incredible rates! But by switching writing systems, they broke that historical link. The average literate Chinese person can read texts that are thousands of years old. The average literate Korean person can't. They'd have to specifically study that field, learn a whole new writing system. So with the new generation of Cardassian youths unable to read historical texts, it's much easier for the government to revise history. The primary source documents are in a script that most people can't read. You just trust the translation they teach you in school. In ASIT it's literally a crucial plot point that the Cardassian government revised history! Wouldn't it make it soooo much easier for them if only very few people can actually read the historical accounts of what happened.

I guess I am thinking of this like Chinese characters. Like, all the different Chinese "dialects" being written with hanzi, even though otherwise they could barely be considered the same language. And even non-Sinitic languages that historically adopted hanzi, like Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese. Which worked because hanzi is a logography—it encodes meaning, not sound, so the same word in different languages can be written the same. It didn’t work well! Nowadays, Japanese has made significant modifications and Korean has invented a new writing system entirely and Vietnamese has adapted a different foreign writing system, because while hanzi could write their languages, it didn’t do a very good job at it. But the Cardassian government probably cares more about assimilation and national unity than making things easier for speakers of minority languages. So, Cardassia used to have different cultures with different languages, like the Hebitians, and maybe instead of the Union forcing everyone to start speaking the same language, they just made everyone use the same writing system. Though that does seem less likely than them enforcing a standard language like the Federation does. Maybe they enforce a standard language, and invent the new writing system to increase literacy for people who are newly learning it.

And I can imagine it being a kind of purely digital language for some people? Like if you’re living on a colonized planet lightyears away from Cardassia Prime and you never have to speak Cardassian, but your computer’s interface is in Cardassian and if you go online then everyone there uses Cardassian. Like people irl who participate in the anglophone internet but don’t really use English in person because they don’t live in an anglophone country. Except if English were a logographic writing system that you could use to write your own language. And you can’t handwrite it, if for whatever reason you wanted to. Almost a similar idea to a liturgical language? Like, it’s only used in specific contexts and not really in daily life. In daily life you’d still speak your own language, and maybe even handwrite it when needed. I think old writing systems would survive even closer to the imperial core (does it make sense to call it that?), though the government would discourage it. I imagine there’d be a revival movement after the Fire, not only because of the cultural shift away from the old totalitarian Cardassia, but because people realize the importance of having a written communication system that doesn’t rely on everyone having a padd and electricity and wifi.

[charseraph]

Tigers are solitary hunters with a presence in Firish folklore. They can quickly ascend trees by attaching their fire to trunks and shooting along them.

Firefowl pick at seeds and burning insects. They gather in small flocks with equal populations of males and females. The smaller and brighter burning males compete for mates through displays of their sustained, energy-intensive raised temperature.

A firefowl egg appears as a dense charcoal with an internal ember, which ignites and consumes the egg within days, forming a new fowl.

The Tsí’tsà’sh word for ‘boat’, êbshà, originates from the name given to the shape of a beetle’s shell. It’s an orange-color orange-fruit situation. Burning boats are named as such for their flecked elytra and two whirling antennae.

Red princes will occasionally emerge from the charred forests to roam villages. They are only rivaled in strength by the tigers.

The Firish horse is short and stocky. When not at work, it will graze and clear dried vegetation to allow for new growth.

[aeriona]

HI HELLO! Welcome to my completely unnecessarily detailed analysis on how I think Inkfish languages could work! + with art! yay! This is all pretty rough and not fully fleshed out (I don't have the time or patience for that lmao). THIS IS A LONG POST.

Okay, so there's dozens of languages spoken by cephalopods in the Mollusc Era but the main two I'll talk about are Inkling (or Inklish) and Octarian, spoken mostly by Inklings and Octolings respectively. 

In cephalopods, speech is formed using the syrinx and larynx, two fancy vocal organs that most other species don't have together. The larynx makes sounds using the radula (tongue) and vocal folds in the throat, it's clear and pretty easy to understand as the sound itself resembles human speech, albeit warbled. The syrinx makes noise by vibrating air at the base of the trachea, it's often trickier to follow as it can sound more like droning background noise than words sometimes.

An inkfish can use both of them at once, resulting in an EXTREMELY complicated language system where words can be made up of multiple layered syllables, and several words and sentences can even be said at the same time.

As you can probably imagine, all of this is LITERAL HELL to learn for species who don’t have both a syrinx and a larynx (so basically anyone who isn't a cephalopod). But fear not! There are many simple and more inclusive alternatives, dialects and other cool stuff like sign language and instant TTS technology for people who physically can't pronounce Inkling/Octarian or even vocalise at all (eg. jellyfish).

Both main Inkfish languages can be broken down into laryngeal words (made with the larynx), syringeal/drone words (made with the syrinx) or a combination of both, called dual-toned/layered words.

Keep in mind that both word-types can be spoken at the same time. Layering can be used to add additional connotations to a word, or to even make a new one entirely. For example, the laryngeal noun ‘bird’ combined with the syringeal noun ‘metal’ spoken together will create the layered Inkling word ‘aeroplane’, like a compound word in English.

Dual-toned stuff is more common in Inkling than in Octarian, as the language is older and has more loanwords. Inklish's dependence on the larynx gives it a higher-pitched, clearer sound whereas  Octarian's more monotone syrinx-based structure results in a deep, almost guttural sound.

Both cephalopod languages are heavy on tone and pronunciation, resulting in a plenty of accent indicators in written scripts. I used the in-game fonts for the art but if I were to rework it, each letter would probably be more complicated than traditional Mandarin on steroids. So hell on earth, basically.

On a side note, all of these language features open possibilities for some very cool poetry and literature. An inkfish author could write a poem with two lines of thought occurring at once, or a book with vivid emotional undertones written inside the prose. Pretty cool.

OKAY that's all I have to say thank you for reading! Hopefully this makes sense, feel free to send asks or whatever if it's confusing and I'll do my best to explain it better!

[gay-ass-worldhopper]

Hey Stormlight people! I’ve had this for a while but finally managed to recreate it digitally!

This is my unofficial script/language/alphabet (+ user manual because I made it far more complicated than was probably necessary but whatever) that I created for the singer/listener people, and I thought some of y’all might enjoy!

Couple of notes:

the rhythm symbols have no actual basis in anything, I just tried to make something that captures the feeling of the word. “Tension” is one of the more obvious ones but the others are vibe only so

Apologies on the handwriting, it’s not the greatest but oh well

If you have any questions on how to use or just anything in general I am willing to answer!

All credit goes to me please don’t claim this as your own (ik it’s whatever but this did take me like actually ~14 hours total so please be kind)

[sheliesshattered]

[tickfleato]

hmm it's friday right

[deadlydelicious]

Everytime The Witcher appropriates the welsh language but the has the GALL to mispronounce it, the power of my rage grows

do you know how seldom Welsh gets a fucking look in?! and the you have the gall to pronounce it like its fucking English

[velaraffricate]

kaiaŋ! this is the script for my new conlang din ɛgwa :D it's written top to bottom, left to right. everything is connected, so you could technically write an entire book in one long line if you had a really long strip of paper. theres a round and an angular version.

(<gw> is /gʷ/, <y> is /j/, <r> is /ɹ/, <VV> is /Vː/)

and here's a little text written in the script! at the points where one line ends and where another begins is a little dot to show continuity.

Translation under the cut! thanks for reading :)

What did this player dream? This player dreamed of sunlight and trees. Of fire and water. It dreamed it created. And it dreamed it destroyed. It dreamed it hunted, and was hunted. It dreamed of shelter. Does it know that we love it? That the universe is kind? Sometimes, through the noise of its thoughts, it hears the universe, yes.

wɛs obayarɨ raamsa sul? wɛs obayarɨ raamsa ug bɨgwɨniilwɔ yɛ ɔrewo. ug dɨrwɔ yɛ luuswɔ. din raamsa, ide din modena. yɛ din raamsa, ide din gwɨgna. din raamsa, ide din ebigna, yɛ ide din ebigsa. din raamsa ug ɨlsɨlaiwɔ. din ɔdiman ai, ide gom mɔnan din? ide wiisru naugwɔ? ins lɛbɛno, oden rugwu ug yawɔsɨwo ug dɨl, dim legwun wiisru, mai.

[opashoo]

Saint says a mantra about snow. Pardon my dust while I try to refigure some things about my art and plan an upcoming askblog.

I'm using a current conlang project as a stand-in for Ancient.

Chulkanamgui can be broken down as chul (snow) - kanam (action as ability) - gui (without, negates actions) akenimtaar can be broken down as ake (Spring) - nim (arrival) - taar (without)

Literally, the phrase is something like "Unable to snow, not have Spring's arrival"

[singsofecho-misc]

Me, an hour into explaining the plot of the first third of CoH: and then he goes with this elf guy to this other elf guy, his name is Thingol-

My sibling, only paying a little attention: wait isn't that the guy who banned quinoa

[igamer12]

her: you better not be igamer12's okay-ish toki pona cover of "remember you" from adventure time

my goofy ass:

[cynautica]

I've come to the very reasonable and sane conclusion that the architect language can *potentially* be translated.

I'm not that smart though, I may just run with the bullshitting it method for my fan content if I don't hit a breakthrough.

SBZ doesn't really give us much material on the tablet alphabet beside Al-an's caller ID, his scan presents a small tidbit that suggests at least one additional alphabet/glyph set. The glyphs shown in the scan are notably more dainty and would not necessarily translate well to a carved surface. It would make sense for a species as advanced as the precursors to have more than one alphabet.

(More below cut)

What I found most interesting is that the tablets suggest the letters are mathematical logographs that correspond to (potentially) auditory frequencies. Which tells us yeah, these are graphemes. I was also surprised to realize that there appear to be around 24-25 unique letters present in the tablets which is good and bad news to us English speakers.

Its good because it suggests these letters are just mappings on to the english language and if scrambled correctly would just give us english words.

On the other hand it's bad, because it implies that the tablets function as a rosetta stone. unu Why is that bad? Because I am not smart enough to translate it.

There are notable letters that occur more frequently than others which may be analogous to vowels. In particular, letter 5, the one that resembles に or ni, appears 4-5 separate times. Letter 2, the one that resembles 川/kawa (I've been calling it h or highway), appears 3-4 times towards the "end" of these strings (not included, but are present on Al-an's call/decline).

Because the calls with Al-an show shifting letters with seemingly no rhyme or reason, I'm leaning towards this language being untranslatable by design. Even the PDA can't seem to distinguish the logographs.

The biggest problem I had was that the resolution on the tablet language was so low that many letters looked identical, while identical letters looked wildly different in a different lighting. What was a unique letter and what wasn't was difficult to discern.

If anyone has any tips or suggestions for a fake architect language hmu ig

I'm a big fan of conlangs but most of my experience comes from creating, not translating

[spocks-kaathyra]

Cardassian conlang (part 1?)

Finally started making my Cardassian conlang and I'm having so much fun already. Get this:

There's a distinction between alienable and inalienable possession, something that occurs in many natural languages. An example is, like, "my nose" vs "my hat". My nose is inalienable because it will always be mine, while my hat is alienable because it can stop being mine. So in languages with this distinction, you'd use different words for "my" in those two situations.

In my Cardassian language, possession is indicated with suffixes attached to nouns and people's names. People are "possessed" in the sense that, y'know, they're your mom or your friend or your orthodontist or whatever. Generally, you'd use the alienable form for people. Your orthodontist might not always be your orthodontist, your friend might not always be your friend. The exception is that you always use the inalienable form(s) for family. Your mom will always be your mom.

So, to use the inalienable possessive for a friend would be to say that they are as close to you as family, that you trust that they will always be your friend. This is often, like, a milestone in dating. To start saying "my girlfriend (inalienable)" marks that your relationship is serious. (Traditionalists will say that you shouldn't use the inalienable form until you're properly betrothed, but kids these days have their own ideas.) In this way, it becomes a pretty straightforward term of endearment (or, rather, grammatical particle of endearment).

Since there's no equivalent in Federation Standard, the translator often renders it as "my dear."

Here's a table of the 10 different words for "my"

So, presuming that the speaker is a man, and the person they're referring to is also a man who they don't have to use the honorific form with...

/alʊk/ - "friend"

/alʊkɬei/ - "my friend"

/alʊkxa/ - "my dear friend"

/ilɨm̥xa/ - "my dear Elim"