Your Early Conlangs?

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Inkcube-Revolver
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Re: Your Early Conlangs?

Post by Inkcube-Revolver »

@alynnidalar, I honestly like the repurposing of goblin the way you had done it, you were definitely more creative with words as an 11-year old than I was at that age. I mostly used ciphers I found online and a few I tried making up, but it wasn't until I found out about LOTR and Zelda that actually got me into conlanging at around 14. I've always made "cipher-bets" for writing stupid puns and messages, but the Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker actually introduced me to the syllabary, for the game used a writing system that's basically Japanese katakana with a woodblock aesthetic and is more rectilinear. Shortly after I found out about Japanese, and wrote EVERYTHING in hiragana and katakana like a feckin' weaboo.

After that I found out about the history of Japanese's writing systems, a little dabbling into Chinese and the cultures and myths of both countries, and while in school, I went digging into Greek mythology which introduced me to Greek itself, then Ancient Greek, Latin, and, eventually, PIE. Pretty much every language I came across at that point I simply borrowed a bunch of words I liked into my nooblang... until it became some sort of Greco-Roman-Japonic monstrosity with a seasoning of Arabic and Spanish and actual conwords rendered into a syllabary. Some traces of the more unique words live on in a proto-language I'm working on that's basically a revamp of my first conlang six years later, but I find it quite amusing when it's not cringey.

The other day, I had reunited with a sketchbook one of my best friends acccidentally kept for five years that has a bunch of text and translations, and since I wasn't able to read much of my language stuff anymore in the syllabary, I actually used it to translate a bunch of shit I wrote back then. Not much of it is really that cool, but the translating and the mystery was kinda fun.
I like my languages how I like my women: grammatically complex with various moods and tenses, a thin line between nouns and verbs, and dozens upon dozens of possible conjugations for every single verb.
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alynnidalar
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Re: Your Early Conlangs?

Post by alynnidalar »

I just found a bunch of old conlang documents!

I'd forgotten this, but apparently not only were the dalar called "west", but humans were called "east". Spelled yst because <y> is cool.

I've also discovered a "conlang" that I have no recollection of. (to the point that I googled it to see if it's something of someone else's that I printed off, and I'm still not convinced it's mine) It's this... thing called Wecen /vikin/ (meaning "Viking"), and it's honestly just a respelling/re-pronunciation of English words to look and sound more "Viking". Here's the whole thing, for your amusement.

I don't even know what this wordlist is. Some sort of game? Actually supposed to be part of a language? I have no context for this, I just found the paper by itself.

I also found an ooooold Tirina lexicon, complete with horrible phonetic transcriptions like "YEER-rahn" and "sahl-AY-deer". What was up with my obsession with using <c> for /k/ back then? No, I know the answer to this one, and it's Tolkien. (although... I could repurpose some of these for Old Tirina to help buff up Modern Tirina's lexicon... no one but me would ever know...)
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qwed117
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Re: Your Early Conlangs?

Post by qwed117 »

My first language was a Spanish-relexinspired conjugation table. Luckily, it has been lost, and probaby now is in some hipster's recycled-paper paper bag. Only thing I remember is one infinitive set being -dere. Thank god. After that I discovered here, (or rather zompist), and made the first copy of Akuriga. Not understanding IPA diphthongs, I used English as a basis for the reduced vowel phonemes, then realized I pronounced them as General Standard Foreign (Foreign being, unsurprisingly, Spanish). So I changed vowels around. And then I got bored and started working on other projects, like Dishashta, and MysteryLang. And thas how you get my 14.5 conla(n)gs: Akuriga, P-Dishashta, Mysterylang, Rushana, Northern Akuriga, Limba, Bislav, Traa, Kurkuru, Mish, Mikur, Neo-Mish, Collabrom, PIE-collab (sorta) and that Romlang in process
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Adarain
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Re: Your Early Conlangs?

Post by Adarain »

My first language was in a lot of flux because as I started reading stuff I kept realizing things were crap. But what I remember of the initial attempts is:

Narulu, a language spoken in a jungle on a smallish island. It had lexical vowel harmony, with front and back vowels denoting opposites. And for verbs I remember that it had a subjunctive, which was denoted by a change of the stressed vowel. In my notes for what the subjunctive does I just wrote "works like a normal subjunctive", the implication being "identical to the Swiss German subjunctive".

Later I changed the language completely to a sort of proto-world. I gave it intentionally bad phonology so that I could play around with diachronics. From that language, I still carry with me two things I keep on putting in my languages: "sevin" as a greeting and the grammatical category of ego-clusivity (whether or not the speaker is a participant).
At kveldi skal dag lęyfa,
Konu es bręnnd es,
Mæki es ręyndr es,
Męy es gefin es,
Ís es yfir kømr,
Ǫl es drukkit es.
Iyionaku
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Re: Your Early Conlangs?

Post by Iyionaku »

I can only hardly remember my very first attempts of conlanging.

I remember trying to make one with 8, the word for "no" was [ˈjɛlɔf], undoubtedly loaned from English "yellow", one of the few (about 10) English words I knew at this time. Joke's on me, the word still lives on in Yélian as ielo [ˈɪ̯ɛlo].

I had a nooblang with 10 or 11, called "Tabalatisch". I remember that it had a few "verb conjugation rows", arguably no diacritics, and a 1PS pronoun that was oy (inspired by Spanish "yo"). That word also found its way into Yélian recently as òi [ɔʊ̯], an obsolete 1PS pronoun.

In puberty, I had a general lack of any interests. I fooled a little around with a conworld with a main character called Iyionaku, actually borrowed (although I am highly ashamed to digest it) by Ex-Duisburg football player Manasseh Ishiaku (sounded cool). I later split it based on the story I wrote into the morphemes iyi (child) o (Genitive) and naku (fire). Those became the first morphemes of Yélian.

In the beginning of 2014 I started to work at Yélian. I remember the first sentence I wrote in a grammar page: Nomen werden ganz normal gebildet. (Nouns are formed totally normal). [:x] [:x] [:x]

I heard most people scrap their nooblangs, but I instead expanded it piece by piece and it feels really natural. However, there are some clearly noobish concepts in it:

1. Genitive o' (clearly from English of)
2. Comparative -a (Germanic)
3. Vowel system /a e i o u a̯iː œ/ (I'm thinking of replacing /œ/ by /ə/)
4. The letter <y> marks /ʃ/ because cool and stuff (might come from Spanish <j>, I had no knowledge about diachronics)
5. <iy> marks /a̯iː/, inspired by Dutch letter /IJ/
Wipe the glass. This is the usual way to start, even in the days, day and night, only a happy one.
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