Conlangery Short 36: Another Personal Project Update

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George gives a little info about his current conlanging project, a set of naming languages for a story.

Original Script (below the fold)

Welcome to Conlangery, the podcast about constructed languages and the people who create them. I’m George Corley.

I thought it was time for another personal conlanging update. I’ve been doing something interesting regarding historical development that I thought I might share with y’all.

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.

Some listeners may be aware that I have been writing a story recently and wanted to create a diverse set of names for the characters in it. This story takes place in a fairly diverse academic environment. Because of that, I’m aiming not just to generate names of characters from a variety of languages, but I also want to generate names that people will cite in the story. To do that, I want to have a number of different languages with enough history to reach back in time a bit and cite some really old texts as well.

Although I only need naming languages at this stage, I wanted to keep things open to expand these languages in the future. I also really want to establish language families that I can branch off of when I need to. This is really some of the underwater part of the iceberg here, as I’m doing a whole lot of work just to make these names, but I’m hoping that the relationships will be apparent in the story, and I’ll have my framework for future work laid out.

I’ve talked about the family that I provisionally called “Ankong” before. Ankong has ended up with two closely related sister languages that are developed to where I can make words and names. I used it for my Lexember language, which for some reason I did entirely on TikTok. I probably will decide on actual names for the languages and the family sometime soon. 

Now, I am working on a second family, which is under the working name “Ingar”. Ingar so far has had more branching, with a fork in the tree right at the start, and a later fork down one branch as I’ve developed it out. This language family was sort of aimed at producing the language for the more “European-esque” or “Anglo-like” culture, but it turned out very not that in phonology. I have done one vowel chain shift similar to the Great Vowel Shift, and I might actually do another one after I’ve worked out what to do with the monstrous diphthong inventory in that branch.

Here is the way that I’m handling these families so far. Each language is developed in five stages, with each stage representing five hundred to a thousand years worth of historical change. This should get me language families with three to five thousand years of time depth, which is quite a lot, but I’d rather have a framework going back further than I need, than to go expanding families down the line and find out I need to reconstruct backwards. I used to wonder how many sound changes I should give for a particular period of time, but frankly, I’ve found the best answer is just whatever I feel like. Languages don’t change at a regular rate, and there are tons of factors that could affect the speed of change, and it’s not like sound changes are actually that easy to count, especially if you end up having to break some changes up into stages because of the limits of a sound change applier.

Each stage is represented as a Phonix file. I discussed Phonix back in short number twenty six, so you can go there for details, but suffice it to say that it’s my preferred sound change applier because it can handle arbitrary features, syllable structure, and stress, though stress assignment I had to build some stuff to do. At the root of each language is a phonology I generated from gleb, which I build a contrastive hierarchy for, similar to the ones that Joey Windsor presented at two LCCs, just to set up the features. From that, I generate three thousand roots in Lexifer, William Annis’s word generator, then I start working on sound changes.

When I work on the sound changes, I have some ideas about where I want to end up, but not anything super firm. I wanted the Ankong languages I was working on to be analytic and tonal, and I wanted some Ingar languages to have some sort of European-ish features. Beyond that, I go with what the features and the sounds suggest. As I go, things get restructured, phonemes come and go. Features come and go. When I feel that I have enough sound changes for one stage, or when I identify a place where I might want to make a fork in the tree, I run Phonix to apply changes in a new text file, then move on to the next stage.

I haven’t bothered to figure out exactly when and where these stages happened, or precisely where each language is spoken. If and when I decide to do loanwords, I’ll have to figure out some sort of timeline. People might recall that I had started a map for my world, but I haven’t really been able to continue that work for a while. I honestly feel a little bit lost trying to figure out the geography, and I might instead just abstract it out to some kind of diagram to get my head around it. I have no idea if I’m going to use that map anymore.

One thing that has occured to me is that once I do have the roots for the “Ingar” languages, there’s more work to be done there. For a full language, there’s always more to do, and I don’t think I could easily say one kind of language is easier or harder to create. For a naming language, though, I think that typology really affects how hard the job is.

The two Ankong sisters I have are analytic, so once I have basic roots, there’s cultural work on naming conventions and maybe some basic assumptions about syntax, but otherwise, I don’t feel I need much. I’ve figured out how compounding works. Maybe I will do some reduplication and a couple affixes and that’s really it.

But for this “Ingar” family, I want to have some synthetic and fusional morphology. That means that, even with just a naming language, I need to think more. I need to do more thinking about derivational strategies. I need to decide if nouns will have cases, and if so, what is the citation form. I probably need to do more grammaticalization work and general morphological changes. It just seems to be a whole other series of decisions I’ll need to make just to be able to have names.

In any case, I think that I’m very close to finalizing the sound changes I need for the languages that main characters’ names will come from. After that, I will probably throw up a few more languages — offshoots of these families or one-off isolates — in order to fill things out and get everything in order. I’m shooting for two or three families and a handful of isolates for variety. Then I need to actually have a timeline and some history, some kind of work on the actual geography. Oh, and I need to make all the names!

I’m going to see how this grows from here. At some point I need to sit down and start writing again.