Conlangery Shorts 33: More Personal Conlanging
George shares some ambitious plans for a new world with lots of naming languages. Map of the migrations in this conworld. Darker color is the urheimat, ligher is my first stage migration. The story is planned to take place near the triangular sea in the southeast quadrant. Natural color map of my conworld as it stands now, to give a clearer idea of the environments involved. Links: Ankong Family Ingar Family X Family Lexifer Phonix Songs of the Eons Script: Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley. I’m doing a short this month, as being at home for me actually means I have less time, mainly due to small children. In what time I have, I’ve been able to do a little bit of conlanging, and I wanted to share a little bit about my plans there. Before we get to that, Conlangery is entirely supported by our patrons on Patreon. I know that there’s a lot of uncertainty right now, but if you like Conlangery, and you’re able to throw a buck at us, patreon.com/conlangery is where you can do that. Recently, I have been working on writing what now looks to be a novella. It’s set at a fantastical university with the equivalent of graduate students preparing for their final test by inventing new spells. One thing I want to do with this world is to create a number of naming languages. The primary characters come from two different cultures, and one of them has ancestry from another one. Currently all of the characters have placeholder names, some of which are fantasy names made up on the spot, like Hregan, Chan, and Siira, which may or may not survive, and some of which are just variables like Masters A, B, C, D, and E. Those will not survive. My aim is to create enough naming languages with enough history that I can expand them into full languages later without losing continuity. As such, I’m doing a lot more historical work than you would necessarily need with a naming language. I want these languages to have evolved and branched off into families to generate a ton of different names I can work with, and I want an idea of what cultures were in contact when, so that I can later figure out loan words and influences. Right now I have a number of proto-languages started. I started off generating a bunch of phonologies in gleb. Then, I selected a few that I liked and came up with a few initial sound changes just to give them a little bit of allophony. From there, my plan is to evolve each language in stages, going around 1,000 years at a time until I have 3-5 millenia covered. It’s a bit ambitious, but I want the option to have large, deep language families where I want them. As far as tools I’m using here, in addition to gleb, I’m also using William’s lexifer to generate words and JS Bangs’ Phonix to apply sound changes. I did a short about Phonix some time ago, and I believe lexifer has been mentioned on the show. They’re both command-line tools that work from a text-based definition file. I also inform my sound changes with Contrastive Hierarchies, like those that Joey Windsor discusses in his LCC talks. I do things a bit differently from him in that I use a different feature set, based on work by Avery and Idsardi, which combines with the Contrastive Hierarchy to leave me with really seriously underspecified segments. I may do a future episode on these features. They’re interesting to use, but not necessarily for everyone, and there are some tricky bits and some things they don’t do perfectly. For one thing, you need to be okay with the fact that one segment ends up with no features at all. I’m going to link to the Google Docs where I’m working on these languages so people can look at what I’ve done so far. The first one, labeled the “Ankong” family has a three-way laryngeal distinction (plain, voiced, and aspirated). I plan on having tonogenesis develop in the branch of this family that I will be using, and I can already see the avenues for that. I like the prospect of th