Daniel M. Bensen
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Work and Play

​The  Adrrixan Language

3/15/2023

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Picture

(from my Patreon)

I'm working on the language of a big expansionist empire for an epic fantasy story. It's supposed to be light and fun (sigh). The conceit of the worldbuilding is that ghosts exist. The conceit of the storytelling is that not only is the language of the main character translated into English, but the other related languages are "translated" into conlangs that are more or less different from English (weee!)

So: Adrrixan is an Indo-European language about as closely related to English as Persian or Russian. It was rather conservative until about five hundred years ago, when its speakers got fed up with the ghosts of their ancestors interfering in their lives and created a cant to fool them. The rule of the cant is: for any word C1V1C2V1, make it V1C2C1V2. If you have an odd number of syllables, extend the final syllable with -ha, -wo, or -yi, depending on the preceding vowel. For  example the pre-Adrrixan *drama (soil) became amdra (<dr> is a single consonant /d͡ʑ~ʑ/). A lexicon developed: adrrásma ("earthworms" contracted from adra-awra-asma < *rada +*waramasa) andi ("they eat" contracted from anda-iyti) anámdri ("soil-acc" contracted from ana-amdra-iyi, from "in"+"soil-dat"). So far so good, but those <a> letters are actually schwas, and are easily elided. The sentence "earthworms eat soil" becomes Adrrásm'andi'námdri (I say it aʑrás.mandi.námdri).

With free word order, you can have:
Adrrásma'námdri'ndi (earthworms soil eat)
Anámdri'drrásm'andi (soil earthworms eat)
Anámdri'ndi'drrásma (soil eat earthworms)
Andi'námdridrrásma (eat soil earthworms)
Andi'drrásma'námdri (eat earthworms soil)

Thus, I have achieved the aesthetic dream of fantasy conglangs: apostraphes, acute accents, and unreasonably long strings of letters. My only problem is when I go back to English. The citation forms are all sort of same-y looking ("The city of Adrrixa lies between the Fields of Atrrába and the Apquasa Mountains"). I keep feeling the temptation to slice off the first to letters ("The city of Rixa lies between the Fields of Rába and the Apqus Mountains") but that is that arbitrary? Boring? What do you think?

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Even Worse Spelling

9/2/2022

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Just a silly little idea. If English's non-phonetic spelling is due to (mostly) not keeping up with sound changes in the past 600 years, what would happen if we pushed its origins back further? What if an Ulfilas-like missionary wrote a Bible in his dialect of Proto-West-Germanic in the fourth century and his work *really* caught on? To the point where modern Germanic languages are still written using his Latin spellings?

Aside from that, the history of this world parallels ours. Here is English as we speak it, but not as we write it.
Unsar Fader, hwarh irht in hebune,
hailagodaz biwje thin namo
Thin kuningadom kweme
Thin willjan biwje dan
An erthu alls' hit ist in hebune.
Imagine school children having to learn that a <b> between vowels is pronounced as /v/, and all the fiddly non-pronounced word endings. Then, they'll have to remember that in "hailagodaz," the i, middle a, g, and ending -az are all silent! Why is /art/ spelled with an <i> and a <rh>? You just have to memorize it.
​
Then of course some good-hearted person will suggest a spelling reform. What if we at least omitted all the silent letters?
U'r Fader, hwa' irht in hebun'
Hail'od' bi' thi' nam'
Thi' ku'ng'dom kwem'
Thi' will' bi' dan
An erth' a's' 'it is' in hebun'
Much better.
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