#nonlinear conlang

[mc-conlang-alt]

Pronouns

(see my pinned post for vocab and other grammar)

this is a method to refer to the same instance of an already existing noun.

as of now, it is a block connected to another noun using a line of slabs.

this block is treated as another instance of the noun it is connected to.

“a player damages themself” vs “a player damages another player”

these can branch out in all different kinds of directions as long as the lines of slabs are unbroken.

“a mob (being referred to multiple times)”

the block at the end can be replaced with a stair to refer to something hypothetically while it still exists in reality.

“hypothetically, player A would attack player B. In reality, player B is just perceived by player A.”

[levunalangs]

It’s been tooooo long since my last post! I’ve done two different conlang relays with Valya, but neither has had their official reveal yet so I can’t talk about either one yet. However, one of the relays will be having its big reveal this Sunday, March 2nd, at 4:00 EST on the Let’s Have a Bouba channel, and you can join us live in chat here as we all find out what the text was and what it became!

In between all the Valya stuff and starting a new conlang (more on that soon, I hope!) I’ve been working on the nonlinear conlang I started a while back, and made a bunch of changes since the last post about it. It now includes color as a grammatical feature!

Above are two versions of (more or less) the same short text. They have the same meaning, with slightly different structures. There’s many more ways it could be laid out with the same basic glyphs, but some of the glyphs are there to show relationships between other ones, and the colors change as the layout changes.

Both of them translate to something like this: I saw a cat. Then it heard me, so it ran away, but I followed it.

Here’s another short text:

This one means: A person said, “Do you see a cat?” I said, “I don’t see a cat.”

At least two of the glyphs in this one are going to change, and maybe more. The language has been going through a lot of rapid changes recently!

Once I figure out what I want to actually call this conlang, I can start with the “official” posts and give an overview of how the language works. But for now: it’s a purely graphical language, so there’s no spoken component. It’s also nonlinear, so there’s no fixed reading or writing order. Everything fits into a grid, with colors and diacritics to show you how the different glyphs relate to each other (which noun is the subject of a particular verb, for example).

Alright, that’s it for today. Hopefully it won’t be so long before the next post!

[t6fs]

May I ask, what is the Scrimshander's deal? What is it doing in London?

The easy answer is that the Scrimshander is in London because it fell in and can't get out.

The complicated answer is that the Scrimshander is a spacetime traveller who does not control what space and time it travels to, partially annihilated by an eldritch horror, easily killed but unable to die or dream properly, fed by the fear of the inevitable end and a hunger that will never be satisfied. It roams the rooftops and breaks into people's homes to help them, ensuring it will be noticed, but on a personal level rather than a societal one, and slowly picks away at its ambitions.

The meta answer is that almost 6 years ago, I decided to make one character I'd play in everything, and for shits and giggles, there would be no AUs allowed; everything was to be canon. I built the Scrimshander, slowly, over the years, and gave it a curse: if it dies, or is not perceived for too long, it vanishes and falls into a new universe. I maintaun a timeline of places its been, starting with its home setting, and cateloguing its nonlinear meandering through spacetime and letting its experiences change it. I find this incredibly fun and rewarding, and have over the years built a home culture, ecology, and even a conlang, and I have used it in multiple settings. London is the last place it will ever go before it finally chances its way back home, and is annihilated for good.

The Poet is there, too. The Poet lives in the Scrimshander's memory, and has since forgotten his name. Since the Scrimshander cannot dream, the Poet dreams for it. The Poet cannot speak, cannot lie, and can only write in haiku. The Poet may escape, one day.

[the-never-ending-project]

The lang btw is Graphlang, & it's beautiful. It was made actually as not a language! Instead it was as a weird kinda, art study but for conlanging??? To investigate how one would make a truly nonlinear language, cuz the northern lycanthrope native orthography is gonna be nonlinear and time agnostic. Yes it's a joke about time blindness

This also leads excellently into the topic of genders across species and cultures!

WE'RE TRANSLATING THE OPENING LINES OF THE BEE MOVIE INTO ONE OF OUR LANGUAGES THIS IS AMAZING

[fadeintocase]

PAR is the first “codon” in the Etceteraverse, a sci-fi fantasy story told in Audio Logs and cryptic webpages. 

It corresponds with CROVSEYED, an album about the bird-dragon ruler of the  fifth dimension. 

In the year 8425, a group of formerly famous streamers reconnects in a voice server. An AI and its writer collect all the relevant information it can from the chat in an attempt to comprehend the effects the 5th dimension is having on their universe. Unfortunately, the effect involves making all their lives much more relevant than they expected.

A nonlinear collection of Sound clips, Chat logs, Conlangs, and Web-hunt puzzles peering into a moment of collision between several universes.

[sineconlang]

Language creation is a nonlinear activity! (ramble)

Hello, everyone! Creator Persephone here. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about how Síne has been developing so far and lurking in conlang groups on Facebook. One thing I’ve noticed is that a lot of conlangers develop languages in different ways. For me, I started reading a “how to build a language” article and it went waaay over my head, so I set it aside and went with what I had - a sequence of sounds that I had developed over a year ago for a project that never took off and one word in my future lexicon - aishtres. It was from there that the language started to find me. This project isn’t so much something I’m creating, I’m simply the vessel for it. 

The sounds came first, as we just covered, and the article discussed that. Then came a handful of words, then came grammar and more words. Then even more grammar (which I am still working on) and finally, a script and even more words. 

The script is very much so still in the works. I started on it a couple days ago in my notebook, then scrapped it because it looked too clunky, then began anew this morning. 

A note on tools:

Tumblr’s tag feature is indispensable because if I forget a word in my lexicon, I simply search for it in my tags and it comes up! While I love my conlang notebook, it’s easier to search for words electronically.

My conlang notebook is amazing, too. It’s a mess, but easy to sort out as I’m transferring everything here. It’s a wonderful tool for drafting and sorting things out. 

The Interactive IPA Chart is another wonderful tool for if you’re trying to help others pronounce your words. 

 My point in all of this is that you don’t have to do it in a certain way! Any way that works for you is the way to go. 

Love,

P

[script-a-world]

I want to create a world with new lifeforms in another universe. It doesn't have the elements we know so I'm also rebuilding the entire periodic table with my knowledge from Higher Level IB chemistry, but I think I dug myself into a hole here on how to then actually build on elemental properties and create things. I feel I'm doing a lot better creating conlangs on knowledge from a 16 hours linguistics interest course that counts for nothing academically.

Miri: You might be focusing too much on the hard science, to the detriment of your progress. Is there a reason you need to know the details to this extreme level? If it doesn’t come up in your story, you might not need to worry about it. Scientists know don’t know every thing about how every life form is made up. We’re still finding new things about ourselves.

Tex: You did indeed dig yourself into a hole. Unfortunately, thinking up new elements is not as simple as looking at a periodic table and throwing some ideas at it - for one, you've started several steps too far. A periodic table can only be created if the elements exist, and in order for elements to exist you need to know what makes elements - they're created from stellar nucleosynthesis, which means you need to take a look at physical cosmology , astronomy, astrophysics, planetary geology, and stars.

Light elements are formed from stars, and heavy elements are formed from supernovae, via neutron capture reactions ( http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/84-the-universe/stars-and-star-clusters/nuclear-burning/402-how-are-light-and-heavy-elements-formed-advanced  and  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_capture  ). If you look at the periodic table, you can see the pattern of atoms that may share the same amount of protons, but not the same amount of neutrons - this is where that difference comes from.

It sounds incredibly counter-intuitive - I know how well chemists and physicists enjoy posturing and claiming their view of the world is better - but in this, physics is your friend and will help you understand chemistry. Elements created from stellar nucleosynthesis are pretty set - 1+1, 2+1, so on and so forth, and only go up to a certain element, wherein supernovae take over for the higher-level elements. Most of the periodic table is going to carry over because of the nucleosynthesis, and it's the supernovae where you'll be best able to play around with new element formations. Chaos theory will reign supreme from that point, and you're going to be dealing with a lot of nonlinear complexity in order to create these new elements in such a way that they will harmonize with the rest of the periodic table in an ostensibly simple manner.

If you're feeling up for some legwork, you could feasibly create some formula to figure out the neutron-electron ratios for the heavier elements, which I imagine some teachers might be super excited to help you with (if you can't go to the ones in your school, a local university is also possible, as is NASA's "Ask a Scientist" and the Science & Entertainment Exchange.

Further Reading 

Quantum Chemistry - Wikipedia 

Wikipedia portals - Natural and physical sciences 

In A Quantum Universe, Even Mass Is Uncertain 

Fibonacci Numbers and the Golden Ratio in Biology, Physics, Astrophysics, Chemistry and Technology: A Non-Exhaustive Review by Vladimir Pletser (PDF)

Feral:    The level of worldbuilding you're attempting is pretty daunting, so I am not at all surprised you're feeling stuck. I honestly can't think of any examples of worldbuilding that is quite as ambitious. Maybe take a step back and ask yourself what you really need to know to write your story and also understand that you might need more than high school (even an IB program) could provide you with.

I can definitely see how the properties of the elements you're creating (once you follow all of Tex's lovely steps) would change how life evolves and therefore how your characters would look and live, so that's what I would focus on. 

I recommend looking at theoretical non-carbon lifeforms for inspiration. Silicon-based lifeforms are of course the most discussed. SciShow breaks down what this would be like nicely [ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fQCrrPohyts ]. Wikipedia is also a great jumping off point for other potential elements that life could evolve from and has an extensive bibliography. 

Remember that immersive worldbuilding doesn't necessarily require that you actually know the entire universe down to a atomic level. It's about whether or not you can experience the world as we experience our world. 

Saphira:   It sounds to me like you took something that thrilled you and wanted to replicate it, as a base for a world that was utterly and phenomenally new. That is a good feeling, and a good thought! As others have said, it seems you have taken on Titans with a Stick. Is it possible? You bet your bottom dollar. It would take a lot of work and first and foremost, a lot of organized project planning, but yes it can be done. 

Feral wanted you to ask yourself why dig yourself so deep into an aspect? I have a couple of guesses.   

My first guess is that you want to share your enthusiasm for the potential of the sciences- the periodic table in particular. You find it exciting and baffling, and those around you seem... Passive. You are working with your own table because the idea of showing others how important and awesome the elements are is within grasp. Just... Not as close as you thought.

Thought B? You wanted to build a world that is fundamentally different from ours. You wanted to show that the elements themselves create a whole other experience, a whole new world to explore.

If these are true, I have a couple of suggestions. For the first, don't drive yourself nuts over the whole table. You might want to make a few new elements and a scientist who discovers them. Use familiar elements as a bridge our understanding, and the scientist's enthusiasm, their attempts to explain to their loved ones (and readers!) the gravity of the discovery. Remember, even if you are working with HS Level of Science, HS is a genuine hellhole. People repress the heck out of it and straight up  forget the rest.

If it is the latter, then don't focus on the Table first. Focus on the table later. To create a unique experience, think of a handful of really cool, super surreal ways a planet could work. Look at Jupiter! All gas! Still has storms! What the hell. What was it, Uranus that straight up rains diamonds?? When creating a new world, your options are all over the place. I haven't even mentioned fantasy. Think about the experience first. Think about what your reads will see, and your characters will inevitably suffer. Once you have a feel for your world, a concept, then you can design the elements that make up these experiences. 

Take a deep breath. You have a super cool concept. You also gave yourself an entire library's worth of work to do. Step back, make the big picture, then work the details. 

[mc-conlang-alt]

Minecraft Conlang!

I recently started making a conlang in minecraft which will technically be my first “real” conlang.

It is still unnamed and mostly unfinished.

let me know if you have any questions, tips, and or suggestions in my asks.

goals:

my goal for this conlang was to make a system of writing / preserving information in a way that felt more like it was part of the world as opposed to just using text on signs.

I also thought it'd look cool for worldbuilding purposes.

It is meant to be accessible to those who are in the early stages of the game. If they have a crafting table and access to any type of wood and or stone, they can write in this conlang. (I try to avoid using stairs and fences/walls too much since those cost a lot of blocks and can't be substituted/remade into full blocks like slabs can).

this post covers basic grammar and vocabulary. For more, see these other posts:

Causality

Pronouns

Nouns

(from left to right)

-any type of block—also used to describe structures: (a block)

-a player: (two block pillar)

-a mob: (three block pillar)

-a projectile: (a two block pillar with one block adjacent to the top one)

-item / tool: (two blocks placed adjacent to each other on the ground)

Verbs

Verbs are placed such that the verb is above and adjacent to the uppermost block of the noun (subject) they are connected to on the side that points towards their object.

(left to right)

-to exist (at); to be still: (one block)

-to create: (two block pillar)

-to attack; to damage; left click: (a slab)

-to consume; to use; right click: (slab with another slab a half a block above it)

-to emit any type of (sensory) information; to be perceived by something: (a slab that is up by half a block)

-to turn into; to become: (one block with a slab that is half a block above it)

-to jump (over/towards): (a slab with a block above it)

-to move (towards): (a slab that is up by half a block with a block on top of it)

-to sneak (past/towards): (a block with a slab on top of it)

Simple Structures

in a simple sentence, the verb is connected to the subject and points to the object.

(left to right)

“mob is perceived by player” or “the player perceives the mob”

“player becomes items” or “the player dies”

Multiple Verbs & Multiple Objects

a noun can have up to 4 verbs connected to its main body. Below is an example of a noun with 2 verbs connected to its main body.

both of the above structures say “player-A hits player-B and consumes an item”

verbs can also be strung together as seen below.

this structure (also) says “player-A hits player-B and consumes an item”

these strings can be any length but it’s better for them to be shorter (2-5 blocks long).

placing a stair in a string of verbs means to skip the noun that the stair would’ve been applied to if it were a verb.

“the projectile damages a mob” (the player is skipped over)

strings can even “overlap” and form structures like this:

these events do NOT occur in a specific order. I’m just describing it this way so it’s easier to follow.

(if read from left to right) this structure says:

“projectile-A damages mob-A.

mob-A attacks player-A and creates mob-B.

player-A creates projectile-A (skipped mob-A because of the stair).

mob-B damages player-A.”

this could be describing a fight between a bow-wielding player and an evoker (since evokers “create mobs” (vexes) )

Describing Things by Using Hypotheticals

this part of the language takes inspiration from UNLWS and is also kind of like of how someone might describe particularly complex things in toki pona.

hypotheticals can be used to add context to what something is by placing that thing in a hypothetical scenario.

like the most recent sentence, one can imply what is being spoken about through context (that the above sentence could describe a fight between a player and an evoker).

but, if someone feels as if there isn’t enough information to imply things through context or that they just want to describe a standalone thing in detail, they can use hypotheticals.

all nouns have an alternate form for when they are being used in a hypothetical scenario.

(left to right)

Hypothetical forms:

-any block: (a stair)

-player: (a slab with a block above it)

-mob: (a slab with a two block pillar above it)

-projectile: (a slab with a block above it and another block adjacent to the above block)

-item / tool: (two slabs that are adjacent to each other and half a block above the ground)

when real nouns are used alongside hypothetical ones, the hypothetical nouns add context which describes the real noun.

the above structure says "a mob (which attacks a hypothetical player)" which could describe a hostile mob.

the above structure says "a mob (that attacks a hypothetical player and damages hypothetical blocks)"

this could describe a creeper (since they both destroy blocks and attack the player).

notes

this is pretty much all I have right now. This language is 3 dimensional but most of the examples are 2D since it's easier to take pictures of them that way.

this is a shortened version of what I have as of now and I left some things out.

things that I made for this language but I left out/might change:

number system

ways to describe coordinates

describing the size and shape of terrain and builds

a crude way of ordering nouns chronologically

things I might want to do:

time (night, day, etc.)

tenses

negation

some of the current verbs seem basically useless so may I want to either change their functions or alter their meanings

[mc-conlang-alt]

Causality

(see pinned for vocab and other grammar)

for cause and effect, there are two “affixes” that must be used in tandem.

the affix goes under the verb it modifies. The affix’s position in relation to the uppermost block of the noun that itself and the verb are connected to determines wether it is a ‘cause’ or ‘effect’ affix.

-cause affix: (a slab that is aligned with the lower half of the topmost block of a noun)

-effect affix: (a slab that is aligned with the upper half of the topmost block of a noun)

How it works

imagine an affixed verb has 3 lines that each point to the front, the left and to the right sides of it.

any verb that lies above one of these lines and has the affixed verb’s complementary affix (cause -> effect; effect -> cause) is now linked to the affixed verb through a cause and effect relationship.

[note that the VERB is what needs to be in line with the other affixed verb. NOT the noun]

above is a verb (the glass) connected to a noun (“mob”). The verb has the ‘cause’ affix below it.

If another verb with the ‘effect’ affix were above one of those three lines, this verb would be the cause of the newly placed verb.

“mob-A’s verb (clear glass) causes mob-B’s verb (green glass)”

[mob-B’s affix’s range is added as well]

basically, affixed verbs become linked when in line with each other. Their respective affixes tell you what role they play within that relationship.

Here are some examples:

“mob-A attacks player-A. this was caused by player-A attacking mob-B”

this could describe a player attacking one mob which angers other mobs.

(If read from left to right) this says:

“mob-A attacks mob-B. this was caused by mob-B attacking player-A”

this could be describing a player’s wolf defending them from a mob.

[levunalangs]

New conlang!

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

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

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

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

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

[levunalangs]

Sdefa Sdaturday #13

This is another draft of the text from the last Sdefa post, now the entire text. I’m not quite settled on the whole structure, especially the word order. More importantly, I decided it wasn’t working as a duet so it is now a quartet. It may be a while before I have a recording, unfortunately.

In the meantime, I want to talk a little bit about UNLWS and one way it’s influenced Sdefa. UNLWS is a conlang created by Sai and Alex Fink; I learned a little bit of it for the LCC10 conlang relay and liked it a lot so I stuck with it afterward. It’s a written conlang without any spoken component, and it’s nonlinear, meaning there’s no single order in which to read any given text; you can start in any part and move around in any direction. You can read more about it here!

One key feature of UNLWS is that all of the basic glyphs (essentially, words) are verb-like; even the glyph which expresses the idea of “cat” is defined as “be a cat.” Sdefa doesn’t go that far—it still has nouns and verbs as distinct classes—but there are some concepts which tend to be expressed as nouns in other languages but as verbs in Sdefa. One such is “parent/child,” D G E♭ C, as used in this recent relay text. Rather than a pair of nouns, it is a single verb that expresses a relationship: subject is a parent of object, or object is a child of parent. Most often when you use the word you’d be saying who is the parent of whom, but if you just want to say that someone is a parent or a child, you can use the impersonal pronoun suffix as a placeholder, which is like saying “they’re someone’s child.” This is a totally distinct word in Sdefa from “child” as in “young person,” by the way—that is an actual noun, B A G E.

Another such word in Sdefa (B A B A) is “home” or “reside,” also used in the relay text. For that verb, the subject is the home of the object, or the object lives in or at the subject. I used it to translate the concept of “beehive” without having to come up with a new word for it: a beehive is the place where bees live.

When writing the above text I needed a word for “goal.” As all Sdefa words are four- or five-note quotes of other music, I thought about what I might want to reference for this word and decided on E F♯ E G, a four-note fragment from the song “Last Midnight” in Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods: “if that’s the aim.” As I was working more on the text, though, I realized that treating “goal” as just a noun wouldn’t really work—it would have to be in the same category as “parent” or “home.” So now E F♯ E G is a verb meaning “to intend,” and “goal” or “aim” is that which is intended.

The irony of all this is that I may restructure the end of the text such that this word doesn’t even come up at all—but even if I do, I got a new word out of the experience!

[levunalangs]

T’owal T’uesday #6

So approximately forever ago I posted that I would be participating in the conlang relay at the 10th Language Creation Conference, and a little later I did a practice translation of a previous relay’s text. I had been a little nervous going into the relay, not knowing what the language I’d have to translate would be like, or if my language would be adequate for translation.

As it turned out, the whole experience was nothing like I’d imagined. The language I followed was UNLWS, a nonlinear written-only language that is about as far from a natural language as you can get. It was intimidating at first, but I absolutely fell in love with the language and continued to learn it after the relay was over. I’ve since written several things in it myself!

This is the document I got to translate. The first page is the text itself, and everything that follows is info on the grammar and lexicon. The text was quite long for a conlang relay! Here’s what I ended up with after translating it into T’owal:

This uses the older T’owal alphabet, which has had multiple revisions since. I thought about rewriting it in the newest version of the alphabet but that would take quite a while, so here’s just the first paragraph instead, both handwritten and with the font that I’m still working on (kerning takes forever … )

That says:

E sonden do fyonte le hú mínol. Bmétho minol hu Lok’a há hyán hontsu pasyo mo.

In a large forest of birch trees there was a kingdom. The monarch, Lok’a, had a knife that was hidden in their crown.

It’s a bit of an odd beginning to a little fantasy story—I’ll post the rest of it soon.

There won’t be another LCC for a while but if any other conlangers have thought about doing a relay and weren’t sure if it was for them, I would highly recommend it. Of course it’ll be different for everyone and highly dependent on the text and who you’re following, but I had a great experience and enjoyed it a lot!

[levunalangs]

Sdefa Sdaturday #2

Last week I introduced Sdefa (aka E♭ D E F A), my musical conlang. This week, I’ll explain a bit about how it works. There are a few major aspects to the grammar of Sdefa that are heavily influenced by UNLWS, a written-only nonlinear conlang that is extremely cool. I’ll definitely be talking more about UNLWS in later posts.

I also want to mention that Sdefa is a particularly inefficient way of communicating information. Almost everything takes quite a few notes to say, to the point that even I’m often surprised at how long things end up being.

All Sdefa words are composed of a single lexical root (either four or five notes long), at least one suffix, and optionally one or more prefixes and/or more suffixes. All affixes are exactly three notes long, and are quite different from roots. While roots have fixed pitches, the pitches of affixes depend on the note they’re affixed to. A given affix is defined with two intervals, which themselves are variable. One suffix is defined as “two steps down,” but that could be a whole step and a half step, two whole steps, or two half steps. The first note of the suffix is whatever the last note of the word was: the last note of the root, if it’s the first suffix, or the last note of the previous suffix otherwise. So this one suffix has many possible realizations: C B A, G♭ F E, B♭ A♭ G, and many more, all depending on the root word and how you want it to sound.

The reason for the variable affixes is musicality. Although I have some restrictions for making Sdefa roots, if I were to just string roots together the results would tend to sound very random unless I got lucky. So the affixes have some built-in flexibility to join together different words in a way that makes musical sense. When you factor in the addition of rhythms and a flexible word order, that combines to give a Sdefa sentence a better chance of sounding like music instead of a jumble of notes.

Verbs in Sdefa have one suffix for each nominal argument. The first of these is subject agreement, then object agreement if applicable, and a second object suffix for ditransitive verbs. Prefixes have some other grammatical functions that I’ll get into in another post.

Here’s an example: the word “sit” is F♯ G A G, and the suffix for the first person singular is a third up and a step down. So to say “I sit,” you start with F♯ G A G, then add the suffix as G B A. It could also be G B A♯, G B♭ A, or G B♭ A♭; as long as it starts with a G and consists of a third up and a step down, it means the same thing.

For another example, “remember” is C G F E. To say “I remember you,” you start with C G F E | E G F (the word plus the first person singular suffix), then add the second person suffix, a step up and a fourth down. So that would end up as C G F E | E G F | F G D. Again, there are several possibilities for the notes of the suffixes.

Nouns always have one suffix, and these work a little differently. There are a handful of “fixed” suffixes, meaning they have fixed meanings; this includes the two defined so far. However, the majority of possible suffixes are “free” suffixes, which don’t inherently refer to anything. Instead, whenever you introduce a new noun, you pick one of the free suffixes and stick it on the end; then, when that noun is the subject or object of a verb, you use the same suffix on the verb to show its role.

I had at one point considered a system of noun classes for Sdefa, but with any such system there’s always still the possibility of needing to talk about two things in the same class. So instead there are 29 different pronouns to choose from for each referent, so you can almost always avoid ambiguity. Like I said at the top, it’s inefficient to have to assign a pronoun to every noun you use, but Sdefa isn’t about efficiency. In fact, repetition is at the core of almost all music, so having that built in grammatically is a bonus in my book. (There are some other advantages to this system, which I’ll talk about another time.)

All that covered, let’s talk about the header image. It consists of three words. The first is “Sdefa” itself: E♭ D E F A. The next three notes are A G F, which is one of the free suffixes. So the next time we see a suffix that’s two steps downward, we know it refers to Sdefa. After that is the sequence A B G D, which means “Saturday.” It’s followed by the notes D C♯ D, which is another free suffix (step down, step up). Then comes C B C B, which is a general locative verb, i.e. “to be on,” “to be in,” “to happen during.” It’s a transitive verb, so it has two suffixes. First is B A G, two steps downward (referring to Sdefa), and second is G F♯ G, meaning “Saturday.” So the meaning is “Sdefa is on Saturday.”

Sdefa doesn’t make any distinction between finite and non-finite verb forms, so that could also just be translated as “Sdefa on Saturday(s)” or, of course, “Sdefa Saturday.”

Now, since it’s kind of silly to have a long post about a musical conlang without actually demonstrating it, here is the header text, arranged for piano!

[mdogatinlayothree]

Oh my god minecraft conlang

Pronouns

(see my pinned post for vocab and other grammar)

this is a method to refer to the same instance of an already existing noun.

as of now, it is a block connected to another noun using a line of slabs.

this block is treated as another instance of the noun it is connected to.

“a player damages themself” vs “a player damages another player”

these can branch out in all different kinds of directions as long as the lines of slabs are unbroken.

“a mob (being referred to multiple times)”

the block at the end can be replaced with a stair to refer to something hypothetically while it still exists in reality.

“hypothetically, player A would attack player B. In reality, player B is just perceived by player A.”