Last week I talked about PCSK (Proto-City-State Kallerian) and some of the design elements I used when creating the language. The purpose of PCSK was to create a basic foundation for other languages to branch off from—but I still wanted to use it in the novel.
Enter Oracular Kallerian.
Read MorePCSK is the trunk of the family tree: it was spoken long ago, in prehistoric times, before war settled on Kalleria and the Kallerian culture splintered. Grammatically it’s nothing special: English-like with a few twists and declined nouns. It was designed to be adapted: when the project is done it’ll have five children languages, all with their own grammars and quirks.
Read MoreI’ve run into a weird problem with my dissertation.
The novella of my dissertation is set in Classical Athens, just after the end of the Peloponnesian War. It’s alt-history with a number of steampunk elements, which means it’s got enough speculative elements that I can gloss over a few historical inaccuracies. I’d just rather not, if I can help it.
Read MoreEveryone likes PIE.
I am, of course, talking about Proto-Indo-European, the grandfather of the largest family of languages in the world. PIE transformed into European, Slavic, Celtic, Anatolian, and Hellenic language families—essentially, it populated what we know as the European continent and leached into Asia around the edges. If you’re reading this, you’re familiar with its reach.
Last week I talked about constructing a minlang—a small language, in this case based on a concept—so this week I wanted to talk about the exact opposite. One of my biggest projects to date involves creating a root language.
There’s a joke in here somewhere about it being a recipe for PIE, but I’m not going to go there.
Read MoreI’ll come clean. One of the main reasons I’m restarting this blog is to take advantage of a captive audience and talk about conlanging—the art of constructing languages.
It’s probably my dorkiest passion, and I literally crochet my own sweatervests, so that’s an extremely high bar.
Codon is a language I came up with back in 2014. It’s complete, usable, and utterly impractical—it only has a vocabulary of 64 words. You’d never find something like it in the real world.
Except you totally would, because it’s based off the structure of RNA.
Read More
