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I'm in the process of writing a story. If you've had the pleasure of meeting me for at least 5 seconds before, then you know that this story will involve conlangs (constructed languages). Plural.

Sharing creative work is really difficult for me due to some unfun events of my past. That said, I've been pushing myself to heal since then. I have a public art twitter, and by public, I mean it's unlocked but good luck finding it. I've shared some writing that will never see the light of day with my partner. And this story I'm writing is really important to me. So it's time to make the jump.

Briefly

I'll start with a little about what I know of my story—at least what's relevant to the conlang aspect.

The story takes place partially on our same Earth, but another reality of it, and probably more in the future. Sentient life has been discovered on an exoplanet. One of the main characters is kidnapped and exiled on the planet. Learning and speaking the languages on the planet is an admittedly small part of the story, but still an important part.

So far (that phrase scares me), I have three languages on the planet. There are probably close to 100 in my mind that theoretically would exist? But I'm only going to develop those that will be relevant to the story. I'll comment on each of the three, in order of most developed to least developed.

The Conlangs............

Huammei

I really love this one, I made a lot of the details in a conlangin' fervor. It started as an off-brand Cantonese, but its current iteration looks nothing like. Now, I'd say it's Mandarin that sounds like Estonian. The group who speaks it lives near the ocean, so water has distinct cultural imporance. This is reflected in the language's idioms. ...Or will be, when I make them up.

The simplest irreducible concepts come in monosyllabic units. Ge means water. Hem means tree. Pn means heart (syllabic consonants, babey!). These units will eventually, theoretically, coalesce into larger concepts in the future, like waterfall or deciduous tree.

The grammar is intentionally hellish. There are 8 different noun classes, which are formed synthetically (modifying a noun's ending). They all indicate a noun's role in a sentence, which in turn allows for a mass of complex and nuanced meanings. I made a little chart to... summarize... how to form each noun class.

There are 6 verb tenses: present, future, far future, immediate past, near past, and far past. This also gives way to a lot of nuanced meaning! Altogether, Huammei is shaping up to be extremely expressive and fairly complex. Unfortunately, while it's my most developed conlang for the story so far, my writing has led me to diminish its presence in the story. Instead, it takes a backseat to...

Mayi

I'm happiest with this one's aesthetic so far. It's distantly related to Huammei, so a lot of root words and concepts are similar, but the two diverged maybe 500 years ago and have developed into their own distinct languages. Mayi has a softer sound to it, with a lot more fricative sounds, fewer obstruant sounds (p t k), and vowel harmony to boot.

This one isn't very developed at the time of writing. I only have enough info to serve the lore. One big change I've decided on is the loss of all noun classes; no need for colour-coded charts. I might reverse this and just bring back the nominative/accusative distinction, but I'm not sure yet. Knowing what move to make next is hard. I've tried to simplify how I view the conlanging process over time, but every component really does work together. One change to the way nouns work means considering all the implications to verbs, how the language developed to that point, what that means for Huammei, etc.

(Not named yet)

I don't name my conlangs, they name themselves. The Huai are a fictional ethnic group. Mei means tongue. Huammei, Huai tongue. Mayi just means language in Mayi, and is related to Huammei's mei. This language's title might come from another fictional ethnic group, the word for tongue or language, the word for speaking, or something else that's culturally important to the people who speak it.

The work is just beginning on this one, and I only started it because the arc of my story demanded it. I want it to carry some of the aesthetic of indigenous languages found in the PNW, but without so many stops (again, p t k). The result is basically just Arabic's phonemic inventory condensed, which I'm down with.

I want to dig deeper with the grammar. I tend to stick with things I'm more familiar and practiced with, but I'd like this one to be grammatically distinct from Huammei and Mayi. It's native to a village far away from where the other two languages are spoken, so it's not related, and should sound quite "foreign" to a native Mayi speaker; not only in terms of phonoaesthetic, but also in terms of grammatical concepts.

Learning Finnish has been eye-opening. I haven't gone too far, but I'm interested in how you can imply verb aspect through the noun, whether in the partitive or genitive case. Being an agglutinative language also makes for a challenge to the native English speaker, as a lot of bigger concepts are derived from stacking suffixes on simpler nouns (I know, kinda already doing this for Huammei). I want to look into how languages like Nuxalk or Lushootseed do agglutination and work from there.

So yeah it's like kinda hard lol

I'm slow to work on these. My most important takeaway from last year working on Huammei was that I shouldn't be afraid to make big changes, and I shouldn't worry about the cascade effect of new additions on the rest of the language. I'm not here to make something perfect. When this story is out in the world, the reader's experience of any of these languages will be a quick glance at most. I'm just here to entertain myself. Why should my standards be so high?

This blog isn't the place for updates about my conlangs I think, since conlanging is EXTREMELY boring to most people. Thoughts about the story and about writing though? Maybe. If my spaghetti brain allows it, it would be nice. Til next time.