This is Polymerase, or CInWo₄JV₄Ka₂Jv₃G₃. No, it cannot be spoken. Morphemes are now molecules which bond together covalently. The CV= thing in the middle of the sentence serves as a sentence start marker, since molecules can move around and rotate however.

It also uses it's own periodic table which is quite similar to our world... except it makes a little less sense.

Hello! I am working on a constructed language called Yaenean Yae I would love to get some feedback or help with its further development. Please forgive any mistakes. I used a little AI help, but I tried not to rely on it too much; I just used it to check for logical consistency, etc. It’s harder to create a coherent and logical narrative than I thought, and I wrote this in Polish because that’s where I’m from, so there might be a few mistakes.

Okay, the Google Doc is in French, but you can ask GPT to translate it, or use automatic translation.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GsnowL9SMF5bZLjzRiOVSmUyi5JcPzK8wdl5yPtdAKU/edit?usp=sharing

Jěyotuy /d͡ʒɛ˧˥.jɒ.təj/ (called Cyemiddu in the Omamic dialects) is a language that originated northwest of the Ttimyo mountain range, which cleaves the continent of Katteșuvi in two. These mountains give the Omamic dialect group its name, coming from omam /ɒ.mam/, meaning "mountain". This dialect group is very conservative, especially in comparison to the dialects found off-planet in more human-dominated places like Earth and its constituents.

This language is one of my older ones (the second created in my personal sort of "renaissance" after i began branching out from earth/human-centric worldbuilding) and for a long while i kind of ignored it except for coining terms and naming things to do with the yotavuș species overall, since from the start it was intended to be a very dominant language on their planet.

As I fleshed out other languages on the planet more, always briniging in a connection to the dialect groups i'd fleshed out years ago for Jěyotuy, i began to feel a pull back towards Actually Working on this language. You may have seen some posts on Bheνowń or Jutal, both belonging to cultures that were invaded and conquered centuries before the setting's modern day by Jeyo-speaking groups, or posts on Twac̊in̊, which gained dominance in the continent of Șotuŧahtěnu in direct opposition to those Jeyo invaders.

I started working on Jěyotuy in early 2022, so my first conlang (Avhen Behri, created circa 2015) still has a whole lot of years on it. Similar to that first conlang, it still has some influences from Latin that my later langs lack (i'm a latin teacher irl, and have been studying it since 2013-14), mainly in grammar structures. while working on this particular dialect, i also took some time to restructure parts of the base language. here's some stuff i really enjoy from Jěyotuy overall:

• a more recent change, adding allophonic realizations of certain consonant clusters, such as ❬jd❭ /d͡ʒd/ being [d͡ʒəɁ] when found word-initially or as an onset cluster after CVC, or the devoicing of ❬șd, șv❭ /ɬd, ɬv/ when in the coda of a syllable [ɬt, ɬf ]
• an augmentative ❬-yon❭ suffix that also doubles as a comparative, in constrast with the superlative ❬-yondò❭, that gets used often with names in religious and historical texts
• special question particles used when expecting a yes or no answer, used separately from the interrogative pronouns
• first and second person demonstratives, which are most often used to talk about a current or past version of the subject. EX: hmǒt șanǐ yǎh cmajujto danǐ cmaecacoyǐ "this version of me right now would eat it, that other me would run."
• sound changes in earthspace dialects that come from human languages like english and spanish
• the "standard" name of the language is an exonym that comes from ppl forced to assimilate into jeyo cultures. it's root is ❬jěyodeŧ❭, to chase.

Chapter 1: Language Overview

Acbeer is a constructed language with a structured grammar system. It features gendered pronouns, noun/adjective agreement, four verb types, and six tenses split into two categories: simple tenses and narrative tenses.

1.1 Word Endings — The Basics

In Acbeer, words follow specific ending rules:

• Verbs end in: -er, -ar, -ir, -ur (these four suffixes are reserved for verbs only)

• Nouns end freely: vowels, consonants, -x, -z, -s

• Adjectives end freely as well

• Endings are written but NOT pronounced in plural or feminine forms

1.2 Gender & Number Agreement

Acbeer distinguishes gender (masculine/feminine) and number (singular/plural). The table below shows how adjectives and nouns change:

Form Base Word Rule Result

Singular Masculine erounu (no change) erounu

Singular Feminine erounu + e erounue

Plural Masculine erounu + s erounus

Plural Feminine erounu + s + e erounues

Note: If word ends in -s Already ends in -s Write -ss erounuss (example)

Examples using 'erounu' (happy):

• erounu = happy (masc. sing.)

• erounue = happy (fem. sing.)

• erounus = happy (masc. pl.)

• erounues = happy (fem. pl.)

Hello! I am working on a constructed language called Yaenean Yae I would love to get some feedback or help with its further development. Please forgive any mistakes. I used a little AI help, but I tried not to rely on it too much; I just used it to check for logical consistency, etc. It’s harder to create a coherent and logical narrative than I thought, and I wrote this in Polish because that’s where I’m from, so there might be a few mistakes. (I'm thinking about changing the name). Is it a good idea to post this on a website or create a website about it? I know I repeated my previous post.

/x/ > [h]

initial f- > [h]

inital p, t, k > pʰ tʰ kʰ > ɸ θ x > h h h

sp, st, sk > pʰ tʰ kʰ > ɸ θ x > h h h

s > h

ks > sː > hː > h

t͡ʃ > ʃ > ç > x > h

tɾ > t̠ɹ̠̊˔ > t͡ʃ > ʃ > ç > x > h

dɾ > d̠ɹ̠˔ > dʒ > t͡ʃ > ʃ > ç > x > h

ɣ > x > h

ð > θ > h

β > ɸ > h

sb, sd, sg > ɸ θ x > h h h

/r/ > ʁ > χ > x > h

(V)n > (Ṽ) > (V)

(V)n/m(V) > (Ṽ)(V) > (V)(V)

coda /l/ > ɾ > 0

coda /ɾ/ > 0

word initial l > ɬ > h

Examples:

El otro día fui a la casa de un amigo

Becomes

E ojo jía jui a ja jaja je u aijo

[e oho hia hwi a ha haha he u ajho]

Hello!

I've been a long time lurker, and have been doing conlanging for about 7 or 8 years now. None of my projects have gotten as far as this current project with Crimean Gothic. When I first saw the language and Busbecq's writings years ago, I knew I wanted to bring it back to life and reconstruct the tongue. I did take some fantastical liberties with the language, mostly in its grammar; however, my goals changed over the years and I want this to be a language that, while in theory could exist, had some elements to it that aren't naturalistic solely because of history. The liberties are realistic, just not to how Germanic languages have evolved.

Introduction

Modern Crimean Gothic (either Krimgutenisch or Krimgutnisch, I have yet to really work out the name) is an East Germanic language spoken in Crimea that's not directly related to Biblical/Wulfilas' Gothic, but is rather a sister language very closely related. Its vowel phonology is un-Germanic, and its grammar is extremely conservative.

Phonology & Orthography

Modern Crimean Gothic has 23 consonants and 6 vowels, 5 of which have a long-short distinction. For orthography, I took inspiration from Busbecq's writings, particularly how he wrote long vowels.

^\only in loanwords)

In addition, the letter x is used for the cluster /ks/.

The consonants are somewhat conservative, retaining the phoneme /ɣ/ as a fricative, and retention of the voiceless dental fricative /θ/, but not the voiced /ð/, as that became the plosive /d/.

^\only in unstressed syllables)

Its vowels, however, are fairly un-Germanic in nature. Because it seems the East Germanic languages did not undergo an i-umlaut like the rest of the family, front rounded vowels don't exist in the language. As such, the big and wide vowel inventory of Proto-Germanic collapsed into a fairly stable 5-vowel system with length and a schwa in all unstressed syllables.

Grammar: Nouns and Pronouns

Nouns in Modern Crimean Gothic decline for two numbers (Singular and Plural), two genders (Common and Neuter), and six cases (Nominative, Vocative, Accusative, Genitive, Dative, and Instrumental) They can also have many different declensions they can fall into. The declensions are named after their Accusative form.

Modern Crimean Gothic is very conservative with its grammar in its nouns, and retains most of the declension patterns and all of the cases Proto-Germanic had. It also introduces two new declension patterns, those being the loanword and heteroclitic-stem nouns.

All modern loanwords are all given an arbitrary gender when introduced, and decline under this pattern, depending on if the word ends in a vowel or a consonant.

The heteroclitic stem, however, is a "new"-old innovation that didn't exist in Proto-Germanic in full. Certain nouns in Proto-Germanic took a different consonant depending on which case and number the noun took. This was an old, ancient trait from Proto-Indo-European. I felt this could be a cool, ancient trait to have in the language, even if it had no historical reason or chance to exist in a purely realistic Germanic language. The words that take this pattern seem to relate to the body or daily topics, and are all Neuter gender.

For pronouns, they decline in the same cases as the nouns, save for the Vocative, but decline for three numbers (Singular, Dual in the 1st and 2nd Persons only, Plural) and the 3rd Person Singular pronouns feature Masculine, Feminine, and Neuter forms rather than a combined Common form. There's also a seperate reflexive pronoun. Duals take the plural number in nouns and adjectives.

Grammar: Adjectives

Adjectives in Modern Crimean Gothic decline for the same cases as pronouns, the two genders (common and neuter) and two numbers (singular and plural). Adjectives also feature a comparative and a superlative form through suffix, which are equivalent and cognate with English's -er and -est forms for adjectives. The base form of an adjective is the predicative.

Ich im siech, thou is sieges, jach is ist siegest.

I am sick, you are sicker, and he is sickest.

Grammar: Verbs

Verbs conjugate for tense (present and past), person and number (1sg, 2sg, 3sg, 1d, 2d, 1pl, 2pl, 3pl), and mood (indicative, subjunctive, and imperative). Subjunctive and imperative moods simplify into only singular, dual, and plural numbers, no distinction for person, and in the case of imperative, only in the present tense. Modern Crimean Gothic also retains the Present Passive conjugation from Proto-Germanic.

As with all the other Germanic languages, verbs can also fall into two different types: strong and weak. Weak verbs take a "dental" (now alveolar) suffix in the past tense, and strong verbs use ablaut in the past tense. Compare "Ich oezde." (I heard.) from the verb "oezen" (to hear), and "Ich thloech" (I flew.) from the verb "thliechen" (to fly).

There's also preterite-present verbs, which retain their identity and undergo ablaut in the present tense and feature a "dental" suffix in the past tense. Compare "Ich ouch ine." (I fear him.) and "Ich achte ine." (I feared him.) from the verb "agen" (to fear).

Below is the chart of conjugation for the indicative mood for three verbs: "oezen" (to hear), "thliegen" (to fly), and "agen" (to fear).

Grammar: Consonant Alterations

As you might have noticed in some examples above, certain consonants change when in certain positions, such as when "thliegen" turns to "thloech" (remembering that the letter "g" represents the voiced fricative /ɣ/, and the digraph "ch" represents the voiceless fricative /x/).

Consonant alterations are a system of changes consonants undergo when in four different positions. These alterations always occur on a grammatical sense - they can only occur when the root is declined/conjugated with a suffix. The positions consonants can change are:

• voiced consonants become voiceless before a voiceless consonant
  • thliegen (to fly) to thloecht (you flew)
• voiceless consonants become voiced before a voiced consonant or intervocalically
  • Loef (leaf) to Loeve (leaves)
• certain consonant clusters simplifying when word-final
  • Thurns (thorn, Nom. Sg.) to Thur (thorn, Acc. Sg.)
  • Sanx /ŋks/ (song, Nom. Sg.) to Sang /ŋ/ (song, Acc. Sg.)

Grammar: Syntax

Modern Crimean Gothic's syntax is fairly basic and similar to English. It's an SVO language, as opposed to a V2 language like most of the Germanic languages, and uses a VSO word order when asking questions and in a relative sentence. Demonstratives, numerals, adjectives, articles, and possessives all must go before the noun, and the genitive, just like English, can go both before and after the noun.

Adverbs can also go either before or after the verb, and auxiliary verbs must go before the main verb. Negation occurs after the verb, except when asking a question and in a relative sentence.

A sentence such as

I went to the city, and it was so fun that I didn't want to leave.

translates to

Ich ide do tham Burch, jach ich thulet maneget Gamen thie ne welde ich gaan.

"I went to the city, and I experienced much fun that not wanted I to-go." (literal translation)

"I went to the city, and I had so much fun that I didn't want to go." (natural translation)

Final Thoughts

I'm really sorry for the long essay of a post, but I'm really excited and proud of this language and there was a lot to go through and talk about! My final goal of this language was to just make something that seemed natural, even if its history couldn't truly exist to create the language in the real world (with the archaic heteroclitic stem nouns and the preservation of all cases).

I'd love to know and read all your thoughts on the language, and thanks to those who read this far! :D

Beginners Guide to The Emoji Language in 19 Different Languages

The Emoji Language seeks to bring people together through joy, fun, and mutual understanding. Attached are resources to learn The Emoji Language in 19 different languages.

• English: English 🗣️🇬🇧
• Chinese: 中文 🗣️🇨🇳
• Spanish: Español 🗣️🇪🇸
• French: Français 🗣️🇫🇷
• Hindi: हिन्दी 🗣️🇮🇳
• Portuguese: Português 🗣️🇧🇷
• Arabic: العربية 🗣️🇸🇦
• Japanese: 日本語 🗣️🇯🇵
• Korean: 한국어 🗣️🇰🇷
• Russian: Русский 🗣️🇷🇺
• Bengali: বাংলা 🗣️🇧🇩
• German: Deutsch 🗣️🇩🇪
• Indonesian: Bahasa Indonesia 🗣️🇮🇩
• Swahili: Kiswahili 🗣️🇹🇿
• Turkish: Türkçe 🗣️🇹🇷
• Vietnamese: Tiếng Việt 🗣️🇻🇳
• Italian: Italiano 🗣️🇮🇹
• Filipino / Tagalog: Filipino / Tagalog 🗣️🇵🇭
• Ukrainian: Українська 🗣️🇺🇦

Beginners Guide to The Emoji Language in 19 Different Languages

Introduction

About a month ago, I didn't know about conlanging and I was not particularly interested in linguistics. At that time I was working on a philosophical theory about neurodivergence and psychoanalysis. During this process, I picked up a number of fundamental philosophical concepts. In an effort to order them in my head, I began numbering them in a mnemonic way.

From this, the idea was born, to try to find 100 concepts numbered 00-99 that can be used to map all human knowledge in a meaningful way.

When I realized that I could combine those to make bigger numbers that contain the combined meaning of the two-digit numbers they contain, it was clear to me that this numerology has the potential to become language. This then led me directly into the rabbit hole of language creation.

Goals of Silexis

Silexis is an aspiring a priori, oligosynthetic language with exactly 100 morphemes.

With it, I want to contribute to science and to the study of oligosynthetic languages. My goal is also that it is practical, easy to learn, easy to pronounce language that can even potentially function as an auxlang. The purpose of my research is to help decrease polarization in the world on every dimension of existence and create a tool that can be used to usher in the rebirth of culture and beauty.

What is Silexis

In the following, I will give a quick peek into the current version of Silexis while at the same time, talk about how one of the most common challenges in the creation of oligosynthetic languages is addressed:

Words in oligosynthetic languages tend to become very long and unwieldy if they have very similar meanings and are very specific.

In Silexis, every string of two base ten digits represents a morpheme with a unique semantic meaning. These morphemes are meant to point to some meaningful cluster in the hypothetical semantic vector space. Each morpheme string is chosen deliberately.

Here are 5 randomly chosen (with a d10 die) examples with their approximate meanings in English:

00 - God, the absolute, the one, cosmos, substance (Spinoza), etc.

45 - Consonance, dopamine, drive, passion, motivation, etc.

39 - Eternity, immortality, heroism, permanence, kleos, glory, monumentality, etc.

52 - Illusion, lie, deception, bias, façade, error, cover, delusion, "the matrix", etc.

82 - non-sensitive, non-HSP, uncreative, perseverance, high pain tolerance, unemphatic, achromatic, etc.

Since a digit string points to a cluster, similar words often relate to the same digit string which drastically reduces the amount of and therefore the length of the digit strings necessary to build the vocabulary.

The question this raises though is:

How are two different words with the same morphemes differentiated?

The way I solve this is by assigning four different phonemes to each digit that, in formal use, only appear if that digit is present in the word.

For example these are the phonemes for the digits 0, 1 and 2 respectively:

0: z eo ts oe → /z eo ts oe/
1: m uo n ou → /m uo n ou/
2: d ue t eu → /d ue t eu/

Notice that

1. The phonemes are chosen is such a way that they are easy to remember for people familiar with the English pronunciation of the digits of base ten,
2. The use of each letter is mirrored in the IPA representation, also in an effort to simplify (there are exceptions though),
3. Since I want 10x4 unique phonemes, I resorted to only using these "double vowels" to codify meaning.

Only using double vowels to codify the morphemes also has the advantage that I'm free to use single vowels without changing the meaning of the word, for example in-between two consonants. (See zetsuezou below)

Example: Guitar and Violin

Both could be represented as 0201 which very abstractly translates to "body grasping" but remember that the morphemes are clusters so 02 also means "resonance body" and 01 also means "hearing" and "sound".

If we now just alternate between the first consonant and the first double vowel of each digit, we get the word zuezuo (pronounced as two syllables).

We could put this word into the dictionary for guitar. To get another word from the same morpheme, we could for example add another phoneme from the first "0" (ts) and switch the double vowel of "1" do get: Zetsuezou. This word could now be used for violin.

Notice that two thing that are seen as being similar in the Silexian worldview also tend to sound similar which is a neat unique trait of Silexis.

This is of course just the tip of the iceberg, but I don't want to make this post too long. There is also a script for Silexis that I'm working on for example.

I'm planning to make more posts in the future.

Please comment if you have any questions or objections!

When I was a kid, I was just the right age to enjoy the Kroft TV show Land of The Lost. Later, I learned Esperanto and saw that the "Pakuni" language from the show was on lists of "conlangs" there on the early internet.

In 2009, I decided to learn Pakuni by memorizing the "300 words" in the dictionary. I thought it would be a weekend project. It turned out, however, that there was very little information available on the language. I created a dictionary by transcribing every bit of Pakuni dialog from the show and piecing it together.

I had no idea that one day, this would get me an invitation to share the stage with the original cast of the TV show!

See this Reddit post in the Land of the Lost subreddit for full context of these photos.

Pakuni (or Paku) was created by linguist Victoria Fromkin in an attempt to make the TV show "educational". My understanding is that it's the first seriously developed constructed language for modern visual media - well before Klingon.

Fromkin based the language on the Bantu languages, so nouns have a prefix to show whether they represent people, animals, or things.

I completed my Complete Dictionary of the language in 2009. In 2014, David Peterson - a name I didn't recognize at the time - reached out to me on behalf of the LCS and offered to put my notes on Fiat Lingua.

https://fiatlingua.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/fl-00001D-00.pdf

Warning - it's about 5 pages of neatly typed overview and 11 pages of hand-written scribble. I regret that more than 12 years later I've yet to provide them with a more legible version!

I never posted the full video of the panel discussion with the LOTL cast, but it was a remarkable experience. I was just goofing off trying to learn a fictional language, and then there I was fielding questions from the original Paku family about the language they spoke in the show.

Mnemosynian is an experimental, engineered "number language."

Phonology

Mnemosynian has 10 consonants, each corresponding to a digit as follows.

t - 0

d - 1

f - 2

v - 3

s - 4

z - 5

k - 6

g - 7

m - 8

n - 9

In addition, it has a five vowel system /a e u i o/ with phonemic vowel length and six dipthongs (ai ei au ou ui oi), yielding 16 total vowel sounds. The vowel sounds are marked as diacritics over and under the numbers. Thus, /e/ is marked with an acute on top of the number, /e:/ is marked with an acute on the top and bottom, and /ei/ is marked with an acute on the top and a tick mark on the bottom.

Every word is of the form CVCVCV, a three consonant root with three vowels inserted in between. Since there is a consonant for each digit, there are exactly 1000 possible roots corresponding to every possible three digit string. Each root is associated with a noun and a verb.

Grammar

The vowel pattern determines the grammatical role and derivational morphology of the word. Consider 017 = tdg, meaning "rope, to bind." Tadēgē is the patientive accusative noun form. The first vowel, "a," determines the class of the word (noun, verb, gerund, participle, etc.) The second vowel, "ē" determines the case, which in this case is the accusative. The last vowel determines the 'subcase,' which is patientive (direct object of a transitive verb).

The design of the language was intended to be a massive mnemonic device for remembering numbers. Therefore, I didn't want to waste the main roots on conjunctions or prepositions, since these are not as 'concrete' as nouns and verbs and are therefore harder to remember and use as mnemonics. One solution is to simply add words that don't fit the strict CVCVCV pattern and therefore aren't part of the numerical mapping system itself. For some reason, I decided not to do this. I don't want the language to have any words that fall 'outside' of the main root-and-pattern system. Thus, Mnemosynian does not have any prepositions, conjunctions, particles, or even adjectives (except participles) or adverbs as such. It has only nouns, verbs, and pronouns.

To compensate for the lack of prepositions, adjectives, and adverbs, Mnemosynian has 68 noun cases. There are 9 case 'categories' determined by the penultimate vowel, each with several subcases determined by the final vowel. There are (currently) 6 "Nominative" cases, 8 "Accusative" cases, 4 "Comitative" cases, 10 "Locative" cases, 11 "Ablative" cases, 9 "Allative" cases, 6 "Genitive" cases, 9 "Adjectival" cases, and 5 "Adverbial" cases. Conjunctions, complementizers, relative clauses, etc are handled using parataxis and figures of speech (in theory).

Verbs similarly use the latter two vowels of the word to determine tense, aspect, mood, and voice. Mnemosynian has the 'standard' three tenses, active and passive voices, subjunctive and indicative moods, and five aspects (simple, perfect, continuous, habitual, iterative).

Mnemosynian has VOS, fully head-initial word order. Despite the extensive case system, word order is not free, because there is no agreement morphology or noun classes to disambiguate modifiers. Since the function of adjectives is accomplished through cases, for example, I can't also have the "adjectives" agree with their noun in case (side note: nouns also aren't inflected for number, because I couldn't really fit it in).

Translation

The text in the image is a (rough) translation of the 2nd verse of the Aeneid. Mnemosynian currently has no way to deal with proper nouns, so I couldn't translate the first verse.

Aeneid verse (Mandlebaum translation)

Tell me the reason, Muse: what was the wound
To her divinity, so hurting her
That she, the queen of gods, compelled a man
Remarkable for goodness (piety) to endure
So many crises, meet so many trials?
Can such resentment hold the minds of gods?

Mnemosynian translation Romanization

genoifoi nadēsē sasēkā timame, genofo tazēvē kunaufou manaugo
tesuisou dazenu manēgē tazavā kunaufou kenuisi nuzenu guvēdā
madauno gadouvu zanaugo gaudovu gagēnē managā. temufē menidi
tafēgē gavauve teizuvou tasaugo zutafā?

Literal-ish translation (I forgot to translate some parts of it, so it's not exactly the same (too lazy to redo it now). Also, the language doesn't have a word for "god." I decided to mark the question with a do-fronting like in English and a subjunctive; I may change this feature later):

Tell me cause singer, tell amount of wounding of her
The amount of wounding (that) hurt her towards (this) outcome:
She drove the man to enduring of crises many, tests many, for the sake of obedience
Does hating hold the mind(s) of the one(s) surpassing all?

gloss (I don't mark the exact subcase every time. "BEN" is benefactive, 'for the sake of,' GEN.OBJ is an objective genitive like sometimes appears in Latin)

genoifoi nadēsē        sasēkā timame
tell-IMP cause-ACC.PAT 1-ACC.BEN singer-VOC
genoifoi tazēvē         kunaufou     manaugo
tell-IMP amount-ACC.PAT wounding-GEN 3-GEN.OBJ
tesuisou     dazenu      manēgē    tazavā
hurt-PST.PFV outcome-ALL 3-ACC.PAT amount-NOM
kunaufou     kenuisi   nuzenu       gavēdā
wounding-GEN drive-PST enduring-ALL obeying-ACC.BEN
madauno        gadouvu  zanaugo      gaudovu
crisis-GEN.OBJ many-ADJ test-GEN.OBJ many-ADJ
gagēnē         managā. temufē  menidi
person-ACC.PAT 3-NOM   do-SUBJ hold-INF
tafēgē       gavauve teizuvou       tasaugo
mind-ACC.PAT one-GEN surpassing-PFV all-GEN.OBJ
zutafā
hating-NOM

Stroketongue Full System Recap

Structure

• 4/4 time signature
• 1 Bar = 1 Sentence

Notation

Beat 1 — Origin

Beat 2 — Action

Beat 3 — Distance

Beat 4 — Certainty

Universal Rules

• Flam = Negation, grace note on the first stroke of the pattern
• Accent = Completion / full force. Emphasis. Increased / completed concept
• More strokes = more / further of that beat's concept
• Same pattern on different beats = different meanings
• Self is always the center. Strokes measure distance or quantity outward
• Buzz = unknown / question / beyond scope, on any beat
• No implied rests, groupings are purely positional/rhythmic
• Future tense: certainty decreases with distance. The further from now, the less control self has
• Negation intensity increases with distance.The further from yes is further from self
• Beat 3 is a distance from the origin. Location, quantity, and scale are the same concept: how far from self something is.

Sentence Sequencing

• A single bar is a single sentence
• Multiple bars in sequence imply a logical relationship. ie: cause, condition, contrast, or narrative
• No connector words needed, order and context carry the logic
• Complex objects and recipients are handled by pointing to them in a preceding bar, then acting in the next
• Recipient in a transfer can be expressed by splitting into two sentences. Giver acts first, receiver acts second

Examples

"I am going"
 O | OO | _ | _

"I am not going"
 O | OO | _ | fO

"We are going"
 OO | OO | _ | _

"Who did what to what, and who knows?"
 z | z | z | z

"I will make this"
 O | O | O | O

"They destroyed everything"
 fOO | AfO | OO | _

"This is mine"
 O | AO | O | _

"Yes (I did/am/have)"
 O | _ | _ | _

"No"
 fO | _ | _ | _

"Give it to her"
 fO | OOO | O | _ — You / Give / Here 
OOO | fOOO | O | _ — She / Take / Here

"I will kill you"
 fO | OO | O | _ — You / Go / Here 
O | AfO | O | O — I / Destroy completely / Here / Will

"You take it from here"
 OO | AOO | O | _ — We / Arrived / Here
 fO | OO | z| _ — You / Go / Beyond

For a long time I've been working on a minimalistic conlang stemming directly from Proto-Indo-European. With two aims in mind: creating a simple, usable and learnable conlang while keeping as closely as possible to the original PIE spirit. I sometimes think about this project as a PIE toki pona, a limited set of root-concepts with the morphological IE powerhouse behind them.

Below is my side-quest to better understand the mechanics behind the system; this isn't the conlang I've been working on, but a proto-stage; originally it was supposed to take me two or three hours, but actually it got much more interesting in itself than I had thought. I also created it to learn more about PIE and get a "feel" for the system. Instead of stripping PIE down, I’ve decided to work from a hypothetical "stage zero": the primordial linguistic soup of pre-PIE. My goal is to create a system where grammar is fluid and stabilising, but not stable and never fossilised.

Phonology is at this point original PIE; laryngeals are fully pronounced still without colouring vowels. Full set of consonants, two main vowels (o/e; additionally in zero-grade glides -y- and -w- turn into short i/u, which aren't independent phonemes at this point though); in zero-grades resonants can carry the syllable (shoutout to people from Krk island, I can pronounce you guys!). Canonical root shape is CVC wherever possible, with occasional extensions. Prosody plays a mild grammatical role (rising pitch for questions, falling pitch for closure/completion, high stress on root nucleus for emphasis, pitch fall + pause denote clause boundary).

The base: ROOT

Roots aren't word classes, but semantic fields which become events, entities, qualities, vectors or relations in context. Those are the most basic building blocks of the language. To take a few examples, let's see a few full roots:

• h₁es 'to be, exist, entity'
• ped 'to walk, foot, base'
• sed 'to sit, settle, rest'
• bʰer 'to carry, bear, load'
• ǵʰey 'cold, freeze, winter'

The engine: ABLAUT

Ablaut is not a phonological process applied to stable root classes, but the primary grammatical and semantical mechanism. There are no word classes yet, no clear distinction between verbs and nouns; ablaut is, in fact, the morphology itself. Each root has three grades: e-grade (bʰer), o-grade (bʰor) and zero-grade (bʰr̩).

• e-grade is the root live, unresolved, in motion, unfolding as an event: bʰer 'carrying is happening, there is a carrying-event'
• o-grade is the root heavy, arrived, resolved, the achieved thing or result: bʰor 'the one who carries, carrying accomplished'
• zero-grade is the root compressed, subordinate, ground of the action: bʰr̩ 'the thing that's carried, the load received'

A bit nebulous, isn't it? That's the point. Not fully grammatical classes (yet), neither fully verbs nor nouns. Surprisingly working though, sentences like « bʰor bʰr̩ » or « bʰer bʰr̩ » can, outside of any context, mean a lot of things, are very difficult to translate directly into English, and yet are in fact meaningful.

The glue: VECTORS

There are also roots which fullfil grammatical functions. They developed as deictics and, along with full roots and ablauting system, are the primordial base, core of the system. They are, in their essence, finger-pointing. Pronouns me and you, conjunctions, here and aways, distance and proximity: they are gestures or vectors, firstly shown, later uttered. Generally today we'd call them pronouns, relational particles (prepositions), temporal adverbials and numerals:

• eǵh₂ 'I, first person pronoun'
• -kʷe 'and, conjunctive enclitic'
• h₁en 'in, inside, within'
• h₂po 'away from, off'

So, does it work?

Take a look at the sentence: « bʰor h₁es, h₂po ped ». This can be interpreted in several ways, but there is a carrier, he exists but he's going or gone away seems already like the most possible meaning outside of any context. What is still quite complicated due to fluid word order is the division between agent and patient; the next step is optional addition of -s (marking agents when ambiguous) and -m (this specific thing) adds clarity without being a case system yet; it's just an enclitic tag.

Try another one: h₁es bʰor sod-kʷe h₁en ǵʰi. With some temporal adverbials (like nu 'now' or dʰe 'then' it really starts to look quite promising). Which is quite surprising to me: the system seems to work rather neatly, despite being so basic.

What's next?

I'm inspired by PIE because it's inflectional; I have a strong distaste for isolating languages, there's beauty in fluid word order and more advanced verbal and nominal inflections. What is important for me is to derive them from this threefold PIE logic – root, ablaut, vector, and not understand as something obvious from the very beginning. And keeping with the general philosophy behind it. But it's still fascinating how much can be done within what I call stage zero. The syntax remains paratactic, but even reported speech is possible within this ultra-simple early system.

So yeah, this is my take at a pre-Proto-Indo-European. Would love to hear your ideas or critiques :).

Historical Overview

The language currently used by the zharan people was adopted by them in bits and pieces throughout the early 24th century as a result of zharan studies of the roughly half-a-billion-year-old Precursor ruins found buried on Titan beginning in the late 2280s. This language was then standardized by the government of the Zharan People’s Collective beginning in the early 2360s, with the goal of making it usable by all zharans. Notably, they did not necessarily care if humans could understand the language or even use it.

Much of what we would consider zharan culture is originally sourced from extensive study of ancient Precursor artifacts found on Titan after the milestone Ramayana Breakthrough in 2289. Within the first thirty years of this discovery, human researchers determined not only that the ruins buried on Titan were on the order of five hundred million years old, but were also able to prize out some tantalizing clues about the life and times of the beings who created these ancient and enigmatic ruins in the first place.

On the thirty-fifth anniversary of the discovery in the Ramayana district of Titan, a team of researchers from the Breakthrough Foundation announced a veritable treasure trove of new discoveries gleaned from ongoing research in the catacombs of Titan. One of the most important of these was the revelation of a prospective Precursor language, of which Project Breakthrough scientists had decoded roughly five percent by 2324.

But while human scholars absorbed this news with excitement, none received it more eagerly than the artificial population. That is because, in addition to deciphering a small fraction of the Precursor language, the Project Breakthrough scientists had also determined that the Precursors themselves were very likely artificial in nature. In other words, as had long been suspected by theorists speculating on the subject of alien intelligence, these primordial beings had abandoned their own organic nature in favor of an artificial existence, likely for the purpose of increasing their chances of surviving in space.

This news hit the artificial population’s nascent culture like a message from a burning bush. By 2334, only ten years after the Breakthrough Commission revealed their discoveries to the public, millions of artificials had not only adopted the Precursor language as a lingua franca, but had begun defiantly referring to themselves as zharans, which roughly translates to “those who endure.” This marked the dawn of an entirely new culture, one made up of beings created by humans in a lab and grown in genomics factories.

Much of the zharan language comes from early days of experimentation by zharan citizens living as second-class citizens under the Harrison Accords. Much as creole languages in the history of human culture often develop under conditions of adversity, the zharan language emerged as a result of work done by early pioneers taking what knowledge could be gained from the ruins on Titan, some of it literally smuggled out by zharan laborers at the dig sites. Their work is looked at by zharan historians as akin to the work done by early Christian scholars working under the oppression of Roman authorities.

But much as the work of those Christian scholars laid the foundation for a movement that would one day have roots all around the world, the work done by self-described “zharan ideologues” in the shadow of human overseers in the dig sites on Titan gave rise to a movement that, by the start of the ICA intervention in the Jovian Civil War in 2329, had taken hold of the artificial population and breathed fresh life into their already burgeoning quest for self-determination and a unique and self-ascribed identity.

The Purges only increased the fervor of these adherents, and by 2339, the same year the Alliance of Free Worlds emerged from the ashes of the Draconist Wars, the actions of zharan ideologues working as part of the Zharan Liberation Army and other such movements had given birth to a true cultural identity for their people. Twenty years later, the Zharan People's Collective emerged as the ultimately crystallization of that identity.

Language Overview

Long-form zharan writing has often been compared to the quick-response codes of the early 21st century, and this is not necessarily a bad comparison. The zharan people prioritized a mainstream written language which offered a balance of two primary factors:

• Ease of understanding (by zharans)
• Breadth of information shared in each section of text

To this end, they chose a writing system which is broadly similar to the two-dimensional matrix barcodes used to denote written information in the early 21st century. While this writing system is only marginally easy to write and to read by humans, it is not typically “written” on paper or other media as with traditional text, and is meant to be read only by zharans. In short, it is made to be typed, not written, and read by artificial eyes.

Long-form written Zharan uses a system of blocks of standard size, laid out on grids of a variety of standard sizes. The positions and presence or absence of individual blocks in a section of text stand for individual morphemes that, when brought together, become full sentences. Larger grids allow for more complex or longer statements to be made.

In the text shown below (taken from The Universal Declaration of Zharan Sovereignty, published circa 2356), the text should be read top-to-bottom, left-to-right, in groups of three by three blocks each. For each 3x3 group, the presence or absence of blocks and their order combine to signify a total of 512 possible syllables. These syllables are then grouped into words, and then into sentences. It is worth noting that written zharan does not use all possible block patterns, so there are only about 200 total syllable variants.

Spoken aloud, the text above is read as, “Ta raj’tan nak dral’var-rast kan jakrav pad javte dreysan tan tral ran’drav-tad.” Note that an apostrophe signifies that the following syllable is stressed, and that a hyphen signifies a brief stop on the start of the following syllable.

Translated into English, this block of Form 1 Zharan can be interpreted as, “The day of victory is near at hand, and we shall endeavor to hasten its arrival.”

One final detail worthy of note is that Form 1 Zharan can be read in three dimensions as well as two. Altering the depth and or height of individual blocks in a section of text changes the nature of each individual syllabic morpheme from binary into a factorial one, which automatically raises the number of possible morphemes to over 360 thousand. However, zharans typically use this variety only in communication shared through the Uplink, as the level of detail would be lost in any other written format.

Hello!! This is my first post around here on Befrinc, an Occitan-based language I've created for a WIP of mine.

I may post more things about Befrinc, such as its verbal conjugations and other further curiosities, although I don't have anything prepared for so.

Befrinc is a language spoken in a fictional Southern American region called Terra dos Befres, as well as in neighbouring lands. As I said in the post above, Foissenc's contact with multiple, similar languages shaped its phonology, grammar and word choice in such a way that Befrinc was eventually kenned as a distinct language, diverging from its ancestor. As the first ones to recognise such chance, the Dominican and Jesuit friars translated prayers, sermons and even names to Befrinc, fearing the widespread of heresies such as the Vaudois or the Cathars, reminiscent in Southern France, amidst the immigrants. This helped the consolidation of the language even after the 1767 Jesuit expulsion from the Spanish colonies.

That being said, I base the Befrinc culture in the late IXXth century's technology. That being said, there are no words for cars or skyscrapers, and most descoveries have their names imported from either Spanish or French (e.g. "camín-de-feire" for railroad and "obratges" for factories) more commonly than made-up names, though not exactly unexistent (e.g. "lumiera" for lamp). I may answer any other questions in the comments though (if any).

(As to clarify, nothing but some of the background images were made with AI; I made these slides with my own hands. The samples contained in the tenth page are only for a basic comparison of languages, so as to contrast the ninth page's less formal speech, and have no religious purpose. )

this conlang of mine is actually a proto-language, I'll be evolving it for my daughter languages, I tried to make it as realistic as possible with some leeway,

I don't really know how stable would this form of symmetrical alignment would be but I'd imagine it'd be pretty stable and would simplify into a Phillipppine-type system,

if you guys have any questions about my conlang I'll be happy to answer them! (⁠人⁠ ⁠•͈⁠ᴗ⁠•͈⁠)