velaraffricate

[velaraffricate]

hope you don't mind the ask but. what ARE some languages that feature the voiceless velar affricate? i am curious - person who's favorite phoneme is the open-mid front unrounded vowel ( aka ɛ :)

no problem at all! i don't actually know off the top of my head, but wikipedia lists a couple! i personally speak swiss german, in my dialect (almost?) everywhere there's a /k/ in high german we replace it with either /x/ or /kx/.

[velaraffricate]

voiceless velar affricate is FIRE amazing url we need more velar affricate love such an amazing beautiful awesome epic sound i love it so much voiceless velar affricate phoneme my beloved sorry i just love the voiceless velar affricate i put it in like all my clongs

FUCK YES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[velaraffricate]

Do you ever get nervous bc your conlang isn't as naturalistic or as well-thought-out as those of the literal masters of the craft and so that must mean it's Literally Garbage

[velaraffricate]

i think im kind of burnt out from worldbuilding/conlanging btw. idk, theres just so much stress in my life right now and all artistic ventures of mine have suffered. and i think - idk, i really wanted to make a proper naturalistic evolved conlang, cus it seems like that the pinnacle of conlanging, right - all the best ones in the business do it this way, and i wanted to be good at conlanging so bad, it's something i love so much, but this is the second time now ive sat down to really really try and properly evolve a conlang and i just get so burnt out. its mostly the grammatical and lexical evolution that are the problem. its just all so fucking complicated i dont even know where to start or how to document it.

i wanted so badly to make these super complicated naturalistic conlangs that you could write whole books about just explaining the grammar but i just can't. it's just not fun for me. and i think i'd rather have fun and make something mediocre, but still keep making conlangs at all, and just accept that theyre not gonna be as impressive. ive been doing this hobby for like over three years now but ive scrapped and reworked everything so many times that right now i have nothing to show for it, no language at all that im really happy with. wanting to improve is good obviously but i was chasing a perfection i was never going to achieve.

im still working on my worldbuilding and stories here and there. i reworked my spell and deity system a little bit and im rewriting the info for the spells, just chipping away at it slowly. but yeah im kinda doing it a bit uninspiredly. i just want to keep doing it so bad. i dont want to lose this

honestly this all was mostly fueled by linguistics being my autistic special interest. and dont get me wrong, ive always been interested in linguistics and it'll likely always stay that way, but in the past couple months or even just weeks music (and specifically metal) has kind of supplanted linguistics as my SI and so much brainspace is devoted to that that im not spending on linguistics anymore. it really does terribly pain me to say that im just not as interested in it anymore as i was a year or two ago.

so idk, all this to say that ill probably take a bit of a break from this blog, privately reassess how i wanna proceed with this hobby and try to get over my feelings of inadequacy and hopefully come back one day when im feeling more inspired and confident.

[velaraffricate]

So! I started a new thing.

No name yet, but I have incorporated both @velaraffricate and @niniralin helpful inspirations. Thanks for that!

The romanization is as odd as ever, and I really couldn't find anything better for the prenasalized stops, since /mb/ and /nd/ can easily occur as clusters between vowels...

[velaraffricate]

i am once again plugging arrernte....... prestopped nasals and prenasalized stops are just so wonderful. not something you see every day

Conlangers of reddit!

Tell me your favourite group of sounds / phonemic distinctions. I need inspo for a new lang...

Pretty please...🙏

[velaraffricate]

I'm finally committing to watching biblaridion's conlanging case study series start to finish and i swear i can feel my brain leveling up in real time. to be honest ive always had a bit of a problem with artistic jealousy to the point where it can be difficult for me to engage in hobby communities cus it feels like everyone is doing it so much better than me. but you cant really improve like that! this is something i wanna work on and i think this series is gonna help a lot.

[velaraffricate]

I just realized how few consonants my conlang had after sound changes (going from 26 -> 13 mostly thru loss of labialization) and I was feeling a bit unsatisfied with that until I remembered that it also goes from 4 -> 9 vowels which is kinda crazy. labialization causes a i e o > ɔ y ø u before being lost, and some diphthongs also simplify to ɛ and ɔ. im actually thinking of implementing some kind of rounding or height harmony. but yeah i think its fine if the consonants stay somewhat minimal if theres so much stuff happening with the vowels lol

[velaraffricate]

are ejectives kinda like saying a consonant and a glottal stop at the same time? cus if so i think i might be starting to get it

[velaraffricate]

finally done with drawing the coastlines for the map... now to decide where the biomes are gonna go

[velaraffricate]

initial stress is my favourite so now that im making a mostly final stress lang i constantly feel like a defensive cat, hissing at my words before remembering that they mean me no harm

[velaraffricate]

soooooooo now that i'm actually developing my conlangs more or less naturalistically i'm reworking my first conlang ke'eloom again. for the 3rd time now. one of its original main characteristics that i wanted to preserve was its "glottalized vowels", sequences of /V₁ʔV₁/. to develop this thru regular sound changes i've come up with the idea that echo vowels get inserted whenever a glottal stop is next to another C. so, for example, /sʔaˈni/ and /ˈsaʔni/ would become /saʔaˈni/ and /ˈsaʔani/. stress in the proto lang is on the rightmost heavy syllable (or the last syl if there are no heavy syllables), but in the modern lang this causes phonemic stress! quite pleased with this. ive never had phonemic stress in a conlang before actually.

[velaraffricate]

nevermind my last post i think i found a better map lol. wonder how many more iterations of this ill go through

[velaraffricate]

thinking ill maybe go with this map... but its so terrifying having to Settle. what if i decide in 2 years i dont like it anymore. also i think the water/earth ratio is closer to 50/50 than id like cus i already started with 60% water and then added another continent so its probably not super realistic. maybe ill play around a bit more but i like the general shape of this a lot

i am finally working an actual world map and its only taken me uh. three years of working on this project

[velaraffricate]

i am finally working an actual world map and its only taken me uh. three years of working on this project

[velaraffricate]

Fiat Lingua Top 10 for 2024

It's time for the annual Fiat Lingua rewind!

Background: I created Fiat Lingua over ten years ago with the idea that it could be something like the Rutgers Optimality Archive: A place where conlangers could post work that they wanted to showcase, or work that was in progress. We've had tons of contributions over the years, and some standout work I'm really proud of.

Using our fancy statistics program (you know, the free version) we're able to determine the top 10 visited posts for this year (though, note, the numbers for the current year's December post will always be down a little bit, since it didn't have a full month. If you'd like to take a look at it, Carl Buck created a new workable orthography for Klingon from the original!). Here they are!

NUMBER 10

We have a tie...

"A Naming Language" (November, 2016) by Jeffrey Henning: A fantastic (and short!) essay about how to create a conlang sketch (or naming language) specifically aimed at authors. The author, Jeffrey Henning, was the most important person in conlanging from the 90s through the mid-2000s before his seminal website, Langmaker.com, died.

"Down with Morphemes: The Pitfalls of Concatenative Morphology" (March, 2014) by David J. Peterson: Honestly, I'm touched. And baffled. Why this paper, published ten years ago which hasn't touched the top ten the past two years, is suddenly on it is absolutely beyond me.

NUMBER 9

"Afrihili: An African Interlanguage" (April, 2014) by William S. Annis: Afrihili is an a posteriori auxlang from the late 60s that uses Bantu languages as its source. If you haven't read about it, you must. This article took sixth place the past two years, but this year dropped to ninth!

NUMBER 8

"Tone for Conlangers: A Basic Introduction" (April, 2018) by Aidan Aannestad: This is the third time this article has been in the top 10, but it slipped one place to number 8. Conlangers continue to find this introduction to tone quite valuable.

NUMBER 7

"Names Aren’t Neutral: David J. Peterson on Creating a Fantasy Language" (March, 2019) by David J. Peterson: Down two spots from last year, this is my article on best practices when coming up with names in a fantasy setting—even when no conlang is present.

NUMBER 6

"Introduction, A Note on the Terminology and Linguistic Methodology of This Paper, and Section I" (February, 2012) by Madeline Palmer: So...this came out of nowhere. This was an early series that helped me avoid having to do a bunch of work for Fiat Lingua in the early years. I was grateful for the runway! I have no idea why, after more than ten years, the dragon language Srínawésin is now getting attention after getting next to none in the past, but…it's getting attention—in a big way. Anyone know why?

NUMBER 5

"Patterns of Allophony" (April, 2015) by William S. Annis: Definitely one of the most popular papers on Fiat Lingua, William illustrates graphically a number of very common sound changes. This article has been at #3 the past two years but tumbled two spots this year to #5.

NUMBER 4

"Hieroglyphs of Fneise" (April, 2024) by Jason Lynn: New to Fiat Lingua this year and new to the top ten, everyone loved this new article about the hieroglyphs of Fneise, created by Jason Lynn, friend of LangTime Studio!

NUMBER 3

"A Conlang-Venture: A Select-A-Feature Adventure" (January, 2024) by Jessie Peterson: This MAMMOTH .pdf is honestly one of the greatest conlang achievements ever. Clocking in at over 700 pages, Jessie created a hyperlinked choose-your-own-adventure demonstration of how to evolve a naturalistic conlang. This document is nothing short of amazing.

NUMBER 2

"Grambank & Language Documentation: Zhwadi and Its Features" (June, 2023) by Jessie Peterson: Even her massive conlang-venture .pdf couldn't top her incredible resource from last year. This is a short description of how to use Grambank in conlanging with a link to a fillable Google spreadsheet any conlanger can copy and use to introduce their conlang to others. Last year this made #4 on the list, and this year it jumped two spots!

And now for the top viewed article for 2024 on Fiat Lingua...

NUMBER 1

"A Conlanger's Thesaurus" (September, 2014) by William S. Annis: The king is back! Last year my article on how to create a surreal conlang took the top spot. This year? Not even in the top THIRTY! It's like it was wiped off the face of the internet! Whether it's top spot or not, though, William Annis's resource on how to create unique words with unique interrelationships and associations has proved useful to conlangers of all stripes. As a reference work, it is unparalleled in terms of usefulness modulo brevity.

* * * * *

And that's it for 2024! I'm looking forward to posting more conlang articles next year. If you are a conlanger, a conlang-researcher, or conlang fan who has something to say in .pdf format about a specific conlang or conlanging in general, please consider submitting something to Fiat Lingua! We take any and all articles related to conlanging in whatever form you have them. I'm also happy to help you think up ideas, or refine those ideas you have. There is no strong review like in a fancy journal: I just want to get what you have up. I'm especially in interested in hosting personal conlang stories—stories about how or why you started to create a language, or your experience creating your own language—personal stories that are often lost, but are so vital, as there is an absolute dearth of literature about conlangers! If you think you have even the seed of an idea, please get a hold of me! I want to share as many stories and ideas as I can.