The Conlang Blog: Kallerian Family Tree

all posts about the Kallerian Language Family can be found here.

Everyone 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.

As with most of my longer projects, this one’s attached to a novel. I wrote the first draft of this book when I was about twelve years old—it started out as an exercise writing description in the fifteen minutes of free time we had in the computer lab at the end of the day in middle school, and ended up a 200k portal fantasy that I finished before high school. And it was surprisingly not too bad. I brushed off the idea last year and it’s turning into an actual novel. (There’s a lesson here: kids, don’t throw things away when you grow up and get frustrated with your learning curve!)

The setting is a planet called Kalleria. The plot isn’t terribly relevant to this blog post, but the essential history is that a wandering group of tribes which shared a language settled down, immediately went to war, and closed off from each other. (Side note: this language is probably closer to Proto-Hellenic than PIE, but I can’t make bakery jokes about Proto-Hellenic.)

Weird stuff happens to languages over time. Languages in isolation change at the whims of their speakers; languages with sudden influences will change so rapidly that grandchildren find themselves unable to understand their grandparents—or a language will die in the process. In the case of Kallerian, linguistic isolation led to the creation of four distinct cousins and a common, simplified version that’s rarely spoken.

For the past couple of months, I’ve been building Proto City-State Kallerian (PCSK), which originally wasn’t going to make it into the book at all (it’s now used in Oracular Kallerian, which is a whole other ball game). When I got to the part of the book where the characters finally reach Kalleria, I started adapting PCSK into Nation of Sky Kallerian, the first of the modern languages.

(I sometimes feel like this sounds more impressive than it is. The actual construction of the languages are fairly uninventive, with vocabulary coming from PIE roots and a pretty standard word order. I’ve told people this, and they usually hit me with something. This is your daily reminder that perspective is an important part of recognizing your own accomplishments.)

I’ve officially got three of the six (?) languages in actual working order, to the point where I managed to translate a bit of English-language poetry into PCSK complete with meter and rhyme intact! (Can you tell I’m proud?) Which means I’m at the fun part—writing bilingual scenes, complete with technically-not-swearing and sentences in straight-up Kalinglish, meandering from Kallerian to English and back again, while the main character who doesn’t speak a lick of it sits with the readers and wonders what the heck is going on.

Tolkien’s often said to have wished he could write his book in Elvish, but no one else spoke it. I feel that. Maybe one day I’ll get massively famous and could release a translation—or at least translate all the scenes where non-English speakers are speaking among themselves.

But alas, today is not that day. I’ll bore you with the details of PCSK later.