Positively Unhinged Elden Ring Theoryposting: Part 5

 Previous posts: (Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4). 

Let's get this show back on the road.

Part 9: Last Call Before Nightreign 

Turns out the announcement of Nightreign stopped my positively unhinged theoryposting dead in its tracks. I had been drafting a Big Finale Post where I presented my Grand Unified Headcanon, but there’s not much fun in that knowing that in a short time I’m going to be hit with a series of curveballs from left field that throw everything into total chaos. (The inevitability of FromSoft DLC / sequels)

But with release nearly upon us, I’m going to round up the straggling theories and observations I’ve had that don’t fit into the Big Finale Post, just so I can clean out the draft dog a bit and stop having all these words sitting there menacingly.

**

Observation: The incantation sigils for Messmer & Frenzy look similar

I can’t believe I didn’t catch this until recently. Three pronged fire on both of them, with the Flame of Frenzy predictably looking more ragged and not having a boundary circle. Which would make Messmer’s flame the un-frenzied version of the Frenzied Flame, something chaotic but still controlled. The sigils for Giant and Two Finger incantations are just boundary circles (ie, “things you contain other things in”), with the Giant sigil being more solid (looks like the forge seen from above, as fitting for masters of the flame.) and the Two Fingers being in light-cipher script they use to communicate with humans.

Messmer’s sigil has a thick outside border like the Giants (with less decoration), with a double-helix or braid inside the ring (vs the Tengwar-like scribbles of Finger sigils). This feels like a combination of methods, and it looks like the Celtic knot pattern in the Erdtree sigil.

Of course, you know what also makes a nice circle? Mythologically potent serpents. The serpent that is currently inside Messmer and nibbling on his flame.

It also brings up a question of which came first: is Messmer’s sigil representative of Flame of Frenzy that has been bound, or is the Flame of Frenzy actually a variant of whatever Messmer inherited? Something that’s been supercharged by despair like oxygen fuels an ordinary fire? Is there really just the one Fire that has speciated into multiple forms?

**

Correction: Maybe Not A Brownshirt

In my last post, I did a lot of theorizing based on the idea that Messmer was basically leading his own brownshirt death squads and either threatened or was going to commit a coup. I still like this reading, though Kyana and several other commenters have pointed out that not only is there the line about him leading the crusade “on his mother’s wishes”, but a lot of his voicelines seem almost bored with it all. Like his heart really isn’t in it. He says “Those stripped of the Grace of Gold shall all meet death in Messmer’s Flame” like he’s reading off a script.

Which makes me think that maybe this was a punishment detail for him. He might still have been building his own personal death squads back in Leyndell and / or tried to burn down the Erdtree, but he doesn’t seem to have much in the way of hatred for the people he's fighting.

Which is seemingly countered immediately by the literal walking warcrimes he had as part of his forces and the whole “committing genocide and sticking heads on pikes” thing. So if he wasn’t “yeah let’s go kill hornsent” and was really doing it on Marika’s wishes, the game is drastically understating the extent of how psychologically broken this man is.

That item description indicates that he took the carrot. I think it’s safe to assume that Marika had a stick ready and waiting for her wayward red-headed step-son if he didn’t cooperate.

**

Observation: There’s something missing from the Beast incantation sigil

It’s an empty oval with claw marks, as if something inside was gouged out of it. Which is a bit odd, as it would imply that a beast was responsible for clawing out whatever they had at their spiritual center. The Ring is a likely candidate for what was lost.

That there are three claw marks there is probably nothing important at all and doesn’t mean anything.

**

Theory: The Scadutree is the real Erdtree

• Looks burnt? Check.
• In a location where the ash would fall on Leyndell? Probably check.
• A secret Marika would want hidden? Check.
• Oozing golden sap? Check.
• Sap which may or may not be the blood of the sun? Not checked but I believe it.
• Conveniently near the apparent physical location of the Crucible? Check.

I do not have a meaningful argument beyond vibes and implications but it feels right. Scadutree is real Erdtree, which was planted on top of the Crucible in order to control and regulate it, and it might have also eaten the sun and this probably established the Golden Order.

Because the sun is associated with death. The sun is barely mentioned in the game but nearly every damn time it crops up, it is associated with death.

• The eclipsed sun is described as protector of the “soulless demigods” in the mausoleums, where it (the eclipse) keeps Destined Death at Bay.
• But, importantly, the sun is not currently eclipsed, so the mausoleums are walking around to prevent them from being consumed by deathroot.
• An eclipse was part of Miquella’s plan to resurrect Godwyn so he could die a true death (and potentially return his soul to him?)
• Death becomes unstuck at night (crucified bodies re-animated and start screaming)

I’m going to stick a pin in this: “Sun seems affiliated with Destined Death  (and possibly the Gloam-Eyed Queen) and prevents spirits from being re-embodied (ie,  the dead remain soulless / cannot have spirits put back into them) - these might be one and the same. Does Destined Death destroy the spirit as well as the body? We know the Flame of Frenzy does that…

(Aside, Death Flare skill drops the phrase “lusterless sun”)

As for demihumans going mad at night, despite all their connections with the Carians and all their magic being sorcery… I think this calls for my Sun = Greater Will theory.

Greater Will gave intelligence to the beasts, intelligence that they have been steadily losing over time  with the loss of the sun’s radiance (ie, what was once given out by the sun directly is now Marika’s to pick and choose with) and which they fully lose when the sun is no longer visible. The sun has lost its luster, the beasts have lost their intelligence, it’s like poetry it fucking rhymes.

And if Scadutree = real Erdtree and Erdtree blessings / sap = golden tears / sun-blood…

Oh yeah, it’s all coming together.

**

Observation: Possible timing of the Gloam-Eyed Queen Dustup.

In a moment of brief coherence of the whole GEQ charade (damn you Miyazaki and Martin both), the description for the Mending Rune of the Death-Prince contains the following line:

“The Golden Order was created by confining Destined Death.”

Enya has dialogue that is basically that verbatim. Which on its own is not much, but it gives us a pin on the board:  

Golden Order founding = defeat of Godskins and GEQ by Maliketh.

Which means that the GEQ vs Maliketh fight could not happen any later than Radagon’s return to Leyndell, since you can’t have Golden Order Fundamentalism if there’s no Golden Order.

But if I am onto something with the previous section, there might be an addendum.

Golden Order founding = defeat of Godskins and GEQ by Maliketh as part of a greater plan to steal the Sun/Greater Will’s power via the Erdtree

Tree would likely have already been extant at this point, but I don’t know if it would have happened before, during, or after Marika’s ascension to godhood. We can say with reasonable confidence that she was doling out sap blessings prior to cutting away the Land of Shadow (the big collection bowl being the most direct sign)

**

Observation: Marika’s choice of exile for Maliketh

I don’t think that’s where the GEQ was located when she was defeated. I think his exile was a combination of practicality (“outside of time” is about as sealed away as you can possibly get) with some small measure of kindness. Maybe. As close as Marika at the height of her power would have. As one of the beastmen, Farum Azula would have been Maliketh’s home. Whether or not he took any comfort in being stuck in the perpetually-crumbling ruins of the city that was once his own, I couldn’t tell you.

**

Immediate Retraction: Was Maliketh actually exiled, or was he hiding?

Off the cuff on this one.

• Marika has a big spear of destined death through her body, indicating that she was attacked by either Maliketh or the GEQ
• Malieketh, like Blaidd, was assigned to an Empyrean by the Fingers to ensure compliance.
• Marika going rogue and breaking the Ring would be more than sufficient reason for the Fingers to give Maliketh a kill order. (Note: I think this would also apply to attempting to kill Metyr, or removing the Rune of Death from the Ring. Or attempting to devour the sun.)
• Maliketh was clearly not able to finish the job, since Marika-Radagon is still alive when we find them.

Putting it all together: I think that Maliketh had enough loyalty to Marika to prevent him from killing her. Gearing punishment from the Fingers/Will, he bolted from the scene and hid himself somewhere that his half-mad self still recognized as safe (his old home of Farum Azula)

No, I do not know how the outside of time thing works for this, nor do I have any meaningful insight into the nature of Marika’s betrayal or what Maliketh is referring to when he asks non-present Marika why she “relinquished” something.

**

Theory: Destined Death causes petrification

Building on the above, Marika’s body is basically entirely stonelike when we meet her, and she has a big ol’ red spear sticking out of her. Destined Death deals damage over time, its lesser deathblight form grows long pointy objects out of you, put together I’m feeling more confident in the previous theory. Given the extent of the damage, it’s certainly been a while since it happened, but who knows how long that would be.

Hold on… if this is true and Maliketh is the one who delivered the wound, it would mean that Maliketh had Destined Death already in his possession: the GEQ would already have been defeated and the Golden Order already established. That would cross out “Erdtree eating the sun” as a trigger, leaving us with attempted killing of Metyr or breaking the Ring (unless eating the sun and assassinating Metyr were happening simultaneously, which makes a whole lot of sense. If you’re trying to take out the Boss Man, you have to also take out the second in command before they can organize a counter)

If it was the GEQ who delivered the wound, that would necessitate that she and Marika were different people (at least at this stage), she had the Rune of Death in her possession, and Maliketh was acting to protect Marika. That would align more with Marika betraying him; he saves her life, and then she uses him as a disposable vessel for Destined Death.

Wait, wouldn’t removing the Rune of Death necessitate Marika having godhood (and thus possession of and control over the Ring)?

I’m at an impasse: there are two versions I can reconstruct, both of which seem equally likely but incompatible due to the ramifications.

Right at this moment, I am leaning towards

1. GEQ = Marika prior to removal of the Rune of Death; an Empyrean selected by the Fingers as the next candidate for godhood.
2. GEQ goes off-script and attempts to coup the Fingers by trying to assassinate Metyr and using the Erdtree to eat the sun.
3. Maliketh is activated; he wounds but does not kill GEQ
4. Option A) Maliketh does not have Destined Death at this time
5. Option B) Marika splitting off from the GEQ and removing the Rune of Death happens simultaneously with all of this. Like we’re talking a difference of minutes. Potentially even Maliketh straight up taking it out of her hands in a blind rage and stabbing her with it
• Actually that’s a banger of an image, I’m keeping that.
6. Marika betrays Maliketh’s loyalty / mercy by foisting the newly-separated Rune of Death onto him and exiling him to the ass-end of nowhere.

I do not know where the Gate of Divinity comes into play in this theory. I am presuming it would happen shortly or even immediately before, but there is nothing nada jack shit on the GEQ, godskins, or Maliketh in the DLC so who the fuck knows. I will use explicitly bad archaeological methodology and say that the absence of direct evidence can be filled with whatever I god damn feel like.

**

Headcanon: Godfrey’s Caelid campaign

I like the idea of Caelid being a patchwork of minor states that was never conquered by a single party. A new castle and a new warlord on every new hill. Technically they were loyal to Leyndell but Godfrey was probably running cleanup operations against rebellious lords for years afterwards. Definitely feels like a place where empires go to bleed out and die. A reading not really supported in the text, but it feels appropriate.

**

Observation: The Flame Gradient

I have once again only recently observed something potentially significant: The different kinds of fire have colors that can be arranged on a gradient, which I have listed here as primary-secondary color.

• Frenzied Flame - Bright yellow-orange
• Giant’s Flame - Bright red-orange
• Black Flame - Bright black-white
• Messmer’s Flame - Deep red-crimson
• Ghostflame - Washed-out light-dark
  

The outlier is St. Trina’s flame, which is a pale purple; off the top of the dome I think it’s Ghostflame that’s been imbued with Trina’s toxin / nectar, I don't know how it counts here.

 

The question now becomes "what order do these go in, and what does that say about the relationship?"

 

Frenzied Flame is the most destructive, Ghostflame the least. All of them sans maybe Ghostflame are treated as an existential risk by the Order. Black Flame might be a combination of Giant's Flame or Ghost Flame with Destined Death. Ghostflame is cold, and is said to burn death. Messmer's sigil looks like the Flame of Frenzy contained by the methods of the Giants. Let's not forget Magma, Bloodflame, or Thorn sorceries (the first looks closer to Giant's flame, the latter to Messmer's.

 

If we're going alchemically, the ordering of the magnum opus is black > white > gold > red.

 

Will muse on this further.

 

**

 

Theory: The GEQ had her Grace rescinded

It’s all in the name, isn’t it? she’s the Gloam-Eyed Queen, not the Night-Eyed Queen. Gloam is twilight, when there’s no direct sunlight but it’s not fully dark yet. That sounds like an appropriate epithet for someone who had the Grace of the Greater Will taken away from them - the light is gone from her eyes, but not fully.

It’s unclear how much control the Fingers / Will have on who gets or loses grace. It’s always “Grace of Gold” or “grace of the Erdtree”, digging through the text doc I have reveals nothing as direct as “given Grace by the Two Fingers”. We know that they’re able to call the Tarnished back to the Lands, but that could just be re-activating or taking advantage of something that was once there: like having Grace and then losing it still leaves a backdoor. The GW abandons the demigods, but it doesn’t seem to strip them of Grace when it does so. On the other hand, Marika is wheeling and dealing Grace like a professional grifter, so it’s a safe bet to say that it’s something the bearer of the Elden Ring can just do.

Which would indicate that GEQ is a separate person and aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagh.

All right. Let’s reverse course and say that she was a separate person, and that she had Grace stripped from her by Marika. This would mean that:

1. She wasn’t originally called the Gloam-Eyed Queen (backed up, perhaps, by 1.00 calling her the Queen in Black.)
2.  Marika didn’t kill her when she presumably had the chance.

**

Observation: Marika & Radagon are blind

Considering that the shamans all seem to be blindfolded (and the Nox, for that matter), and their likely inspiration in an order of all-female blind mediums (check Zayf's video for details), I see no reason to believe that either of them could actually see.

 

You know who else was blind (at least in 1.00)? And who got their eyes removed (in both)? Shabriri.

 

Hyetta's blind, but she can see glimpses of the Flame of Frenzy all the same, just like like Shabriri.

 

Considering what I've said already about the sun, I think the Frenzied Flame and Greater Will might be less different than anyone might be letting on. Indeed, they might be the same thing. The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma (a gigantic nuclear furnace), but it is also the prime mover of all the interconnected systems of life on earth. Chaos and order.

 

Also worth nothing that the Briar Witches supposedly see the Blood Star in their blindness. Another facet from Frenzy, perhaps.

 

**

Theory: The Beast Eye = GEQ's eye (and probably Marika's)

It’s a stone eye with a purple aura, and the color alone would be enough for GEQ affiliation - the fact that Maliketh gives it to you it's described as “claw-marked” are a bonus. If Destined Death = petrification that’s yet another point in favor.

 

When we finally meet Marika, she's missing an eye and a large chunk of her head. And petrified. Almost as if someone violently gouged out her eye and attacked her with a weapon that can petrify people.

 

A problem emerges if we consider the scar- and sore-seal, though not an insurmountable one. Common belief is that these are Radagon / Marika's eyes, which were placed on their eyes by the Fingers / Greater will and removed for reasons. I don't know how much I believe that, no matter how appealing the core idea is, because why would the Fingers / Will use Marika / Radagon's runes? Not to mention that Messmer's sealed eye is clearly Marika's Rune, right there.

 

So with our two lonely lines of lore for the four items.

 

Scarseal: These seals represent the lifelong duty of those chosen by the gods.

 

Soreseal: Solemn duty weighs upon the one beholden; not unlike a gnawing curse from which there is no deliverance.

The vaguely defined gods in this place are probably Marika / Radagon, and the recipients of these seals are...probably not important. Randos who have been spared immediate execution and given a duty to fulfill. More useful is just the establishment that this is a thing Marika does regularly.

That the soreseals are yellow and oozing and only slightly less decayed than a Shabriri Grape is worth noting.

 

**

 

Theory: Serpent as agent of Law of Regression

Rykard / the Serpent are all about joining together into a singular whole – this is pinging strong on the Law of Regression sensor. Myth of the Serpent as world-devourer would indicate a cosmological role along the same lines, or at least a belief in said role. Perhaps something of a one-snake cosmic clean-up crew. The interacting systems of the world have become too unwieldy, they’ve fossilized, they’ve started breaking down: here comes the serpent to clean house and restart the process.

Specifically, though, what if its function is to roll in, kill the gods who have overstayed their welcome, and then prime the stage for a new cycle? It’s in line with Rykard’s devour the gods (togethaaaaaaaaah) thing. Rykard’s the one speaking, but the words might very well be the Serpent’s.

 

What if it offered the same deal to Marika? Join with me and we can devour the gods together and take their power. We’ve got a tree, we’ve got a Serpent, we’ve got offerings of divinity: that’s Eden, baby.

 Rykard feeds self to snake to facilitate devouring of the gods and starting a new lineage (since we know that the Serpent permits for a form of reproduction outside Erdtree rebirth (Or outside of what came before Erdtree rebirth, since we know that hasn't been around forever). And if Marika = GEQ, that's where we get the godskin nobles assimilating "inhuman physiology, not unlike the Crucible".

Nobles have a snake tail crucible-aspect, Apostles are stretchy longbois, it's like poetry it rhymes etc.
 

Also: Serpent shows up as part of the decoration Giants’ Forge and lives in a volcano. Both of these are places where things are known to (s)melt together into cohesive uniform masses.

**

Observation: A very important piece of cut dialog for Kale

[800054000] Ah, you, is it...
[800054010] Did you see? What they did to my ancestors?
[800054020] The whole clan, buried alive. Sick. Maddened. Husks of themselves.
[800054030] Have you heard their moans? They're hardly human anymore.
[800054040] They think we worship the Three Fingers? That we called the maddening sickness down upon them?
[800054050] Well. If that's what they expect from us, then that's what they shall get from us!
[800054060] The world of grace and its people should have been content to see us sink between the cracks.

Grain of salt for cut content, but this pretty firmly indicates:

• A) The Nomads did not worship the 3 Fingers 
• B) The Order believed the Nomads were responsible for the 3 Fingers’ subversion by Frenzy 
• C) That the Order believed it was worship of the 3 Fingers that brought the Frenzy (?????)

A & B are more support for my old theory back in Post 1 that that at some point the Three Fingers weren’t associated with the Flame of Frenzy at all. C is wholly speculative and is based entirely on syntax of cut dialogue.

 

This leads me to a secondary, and potentially larger point.

 

**

Theory: Shabriri's greatest crime isn't what we think

While lots of people claim that the genocide of the Nomads was brought around by Shabriri’s slander of them, I honestly don’t know if that would actually qualify him for the position of “most reviled man in all history” (per Howl of Shabriri); he’s repellent to us the audience because we have a better view of the big picture - we know that the Nomads were innocent - but the rest of Kale’s dialogue indicates that the Nomads were already held in generally low regard by the Golden Order. If the the Nomads were toting around a divergent set of Fingers and taking their messages directly (rather than relying on the Order-approved Finger-Readers for interpretation), it probably didn’t take much convincing for the Order to get behind a pogrom; even if Shabriri is the one responsible for starting the killing, the Golden Order would probably consider him a hero who uncovered a dangerous heresy in the nick of time.

A religious minority is accused of practicing heretical rites that pose both a material and spiritual threat to the established religious / political status quo; this should be extremely fucking familiar, because it’s the god-damn Satanic Panic. Pick an out-group, make an accusation, destroy people’s lives and suffer no consequences even when the accusation is proven to be false.

Remember, the Golden Order is an authoritarian theocracy: using spurious accusations to justify atrocities against religious and cultural minorities is practically the national sport.

And, importantly, Shabriri gets us a double (technically triple) instance of the “it is said” weasel-words:

Shabriri’s Woe: "It is said that the man, named Shabriri, had his eyes gouged out as punishment for the crime of slander, and, with time, the blight of the flame of frenzy came to dwell in the empty sockets."

Howl of Shabriri: "It is said that the sickness of the flame of frenzy began with Shabriri, the most reviled man in all history."

Shabriri’s Woe 1.00: “The man, named Shabriri, was born without pupils. Known to be a great lover of the grape, a sickness in the form of a red colored chaos was said to have come to dwell beneath his eyes. Eventually, his pupil-less eyeballs were crushed by other men, and he was driven to the gloomy southern peninsula.”

The only actual contradiction here is timing. In 1.00 he made contact with the Flame of Frenzy before having his eyes removed, and in main game he made contact afterwards.

So then: who was he slandering, to justify the removal of his eyes and hounding him to the dismal fringe of the empire? Was it even actually slander? Did frenzy-sickness actually begin with him, or is it merely a folk belief since Midra was written out of reality? And what did he do to make him the "most reviled man in all history?

 

Slander against a mistrusted religious minority wouldn't even qualify as slander, so I can only presume that he had slandered Marika / the Erdtree, the Golden Order. And, since those three interconnected things are the axis mundi of a brutally violent authoritarian theocracy run by a living god with a skin so thin she would rather rewrite reality than look even slightly not in total control of everything at all times, I'm going to make the bold claim that Shabriri was spitting straight facts.

 

Accusing your critics of slander is right there in the petty tyrant DARVO manual, after all. 

My thinking is that Shabriri was able to see the truth. Maybe it was because he was blind - we do love a blind prophet. He was able to see through the sham. I couldn't tell you what exactly he saw, (though it might be the same thing that Gideon saw), but I presume it had to do with Marika's dirty laundry and how the system is entirely broken and rotten to the core. That part's a work in progress.

 

But a bit of quote-unquote slander isn't enough to become "the most reviled man in all history." Not even Marika is that sensitive to criticism. But I think I know what would qualify - considering, of course, that history is written by the Golden Order.

 

Burning the Erdtree.

 

Because what's the one sane man to do? What's the one man who realizes that the ordering of the world is irrevocably broken? That the Erdtree ate the sun? That the balancing force of Destined Death was removed from reality? If there was anyone else, maybe they could have joined forces. Maybe there could have been a resistance. Marika's martial prowess is not as great as she lets on, a significant enough revolt might actually work.

 

But Shabriri is alone. They took his eyes, and yet he's the only one who can see; they call him a madman and a drunkard for it, but they say it because they're all blind.

 

Except Melina. Perhaps. A fragment of Marika split off so the god-empress could sequester a part of herself far away, where it could no longer trouble and humiliate her. A contingency plan in her plotting to free herself from the influence of the Fingers. The vessel of what she used to be: the Gloam-Eyed Queen in Black, godslayer. The hatchet-man who comes around when the powers-that-be have overstayed their welcome.

(Yes, I admit that this theory touches on "Marika was in on the plan all along!" , which I generally don't like. Needs more workshopping.)

So there's a conspiracy to burn the Tree, to set things right. They succeed at the burning but not the repairing. Maybe fixing things was never on the table. Souls games have never been ones where the restorationist fantasy wins the day.

The Tree is burned, but remains intact. Melina is dead in body. Perhaps Messmer was a player here as well, and this was the straw that sent him on the Crusade.

 

Wouldn't that just be perfect justification? Blame the burning on a mad prophet and hornsent saboteurs. Make a show of the traitorous son, too brow-beaten to protest his innocence. Make a show of magnanimity by letting him lead the crusade as penance. Send him off with legions of prisoners, highwaymen, brigands and raiders. Shower them with Grace so they might destroy those wretched hornsent who burned the Erdtree.

 

And then close the door to the Shadow Lands behind him, wipe it all from reality, and rewrite history. Now there is only this perfect, eternal, golden tree growing out of an old stump, and there always has been.

 

Conlang Scratchpad Spectacular

Since I have finally managed to get a couple posts out on my PIE conlang, I figured I might as well do a roundup of all the other ideas swirling around in my head. Some of these are decently sketched out, some are just idle musings that will never see the light of day, some are somewhere in the middle.

I suppose this qualifies as a slush post, so here are all the other slush piles:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 8.5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

1. Early Indo-European (“Onion Bubsian”)

I’ve already posted about this one here and here.

Progress: Still chipping away. I have the phonology where I want it to be, but figuring out the steps to get from Point A to Point B is still a bit of a slog at this point. Thankfully I found a Crank Credit™ worthy shortcut that gives me a whole lot of leeway. More on that in the next dev post.

2. Cut-Up Collage Lang

A language where every component is taken whole-cloth from a different conlang and it’s all stitched together in a grand exercise in baroque maximalism. Might have a final step where I run it through sound changes and dramatically pull away the curtain to show that I’ve somehow managed to turn it into a cohesive whole. To make it a challenge and to force myself to widen my inspiration, I’ve limited myself to one feature from each conlang and no more than two conlangs per creator.

Progress: I have a decent number of components locked in and a general idea of what I want the end product to look like, I just need the Muse to get on the same page as me so I can actually sit down and bang out a proper outline.

3. Generic Vernacular Fantasy Common

A conlang for generic fantasy dungeon-delving (an idea which I briefly dabbled with before but abandoned). The base lexicon would be derived from Proto-Celtic and Common Brittonic (the latter probably being the closest thing to GVF Common), with additions from existing conlangs / D&Disms to represent loanwords from assorted generic vernacular fantasy cultures and peoples (ex. Klingon words would be used to represent orcish loans).

With the implicit setting right there in the background, the cultural worldbuilding is going to be a bigger focus than the complexities of phonology or grammar. Right now the main idea is that the speakers live on the fringes of a collapsed / collapsing empire (British Isles after Roman withdrawal, pre Saxon invasion is my main comparison point) and they commonly find themselves employed as monster hunters, mercenaries, and delvers.

Hopefully the end result  will be engaging  enough for other folks to use (even if they just want “what’s the name of that town” or “I want to call goblins something different”.)

Progress: I’m still hammering out the sound changes to get it from P-Celtic to where I want it to be, but since P-Cletic is extremely close to Latin it is much, much easier than the never-ending headache of PIE proper. The spreadsheet is starting to get unruly, though. Thankfully, since I am starting from existing reconstructions, I have a wordlist to start with.

4. Huttese-but-good

When the languages of Star Wars come up, there’s a claim that OT audio producer Ben Burtt based the alien speech on real-world languages like Quechua, Tibetan, and Haya (an obscure-to-us Bantu language) - this might even be true, but it dodges the larger issue that the usage of alien languages in Star Wars is real fuckin’ racist. All the aliens speak gibberish and broken English (Huttese is straight-up just an English pidgin, yikes) and are trapped in a state of perpetual [Alien chattering]; our human cast, secure in their full cultural supremacy, never has to sully themselves with learning or speaking the local language.

Anyway this lang is “what if those core components were used for good”, because I think the underlying concepts are strong.

• Sticking with the initial premise, this will be drawing phonology and grammar from Quechua, Tibetan, and Bantu languages (documentation on Haya specifically is hard to come by, at least when I checked.)
• Background setting / in-universe positioning will be the lingua franca of the impoverished Rim worlds that are currently being encroached upon by the last gasps of an imperialist liberal democracy backsliding into fascism. There may or may not also be a decaying alien empire as well.

Mothership crossover is obviously an option I will try to take.

Progress: Phonology & phonotactics taken care of, plus a bullet list of the main grammatical features I want to include. Need to start generating words and translating things.

5. Georgian + Navajo

Starting with the consonant inventory of Georgian  and adding to it the vowel inventory of Navajo, I then make an about face and give it a strict CV syllable structure and a dead simple analytic grammar. No world or setting for this one, at least not to begin with. More just a “let’s see where we end up” type of deal.

Progress: I’ve got the generator presets taken care of, haven’t actually started any meanings to the words yet.

6. “Altaic”

So the Altaic macrofamily is a pareidolic phantom; a small but dedicated number of historical linguists have spent a whole lot of time and words reconstructing a competitor to PIE that they can lump half of Asia into, despite the fact that the language families they have lumped together aren’t actually related and only appear to be linked because of widespread sharing. The idea (hardly original, I know other people have done it before) is to take the reconstruction and use it as a springboard to make a conlang.

Progress: Some loose sketches of potential sound changes, nothing beyond that. Main issue here is that, predictably, the reconstruction chasing phantoms with bad methodology isn’t a very good reconstruction (and that’s by the standards of reconstructions, which aren’t very great to begin with). There’s a nice big wordlist, sure, but anything beyond tends to be pretty vague and unhelpful. This one is not likely to go anywhere.

7. Jp + Lt + Gr

A very simple conlang where I just mash up words I like from Latin, Greek, and Japanese, because the trajectory of my formative years was Dinosaur Kid > Weeb (I made a Yu-gi-oh expansion set based on The Future is Wild when I was 10 or 11). This premise crops up often just in how I normally write fantasy, MSF and otherwise (ex: calling the Gods of Man the anthropogami, giving Hecate the title daipetastos.) because the components are familiar enough for people to suss out what they mean and the novelty is in the combination.

Progress: I haven’t worked on this one in a long while, but I do have a couple pages of words selected and had started laying out the grammar basics.

8. Evolved English

An inevitability in this hobby: at some point, you’re going to try evolving your native language. For my take I want to start off with my own local dialect (Western PA English), add some traits from neighboring dialects (Midland, Appalachian, Southern, AAVE), apply a vaguely defined apocalyptic event (After the End rules apply here; I’m sure everything is fine) to get it isolated from other dialects, and then just see what wild places I can take it.

Progress: Got most of the early sound changes figured out; the biggest roadblock atm is getting test sentences prepped so I can actually apply them. Since English is a fucking nightmare pronunciation-wise, the default “General American” IPA is an accent that doesn’t actually exist that you then have to apply dialectical changes to. This wouldn’t normally be an issue, were it not for the fact that I have yet to find a version of the Harvard Sentences (or any other test sentences for that matter) that is already in IPA, so I have to go through and copy paste WORD BY WORD from the million-plus entry IPA dictionary spreadsheet I’m using. Tedious as fuck.

Also, and this is an optional thing, I got it in my head to do a phonetic analysis of my own voice. PRAAT is free, after all, and that’s field standard. Even if it’s not much use for the project (or even if it doesn’t get off the ground), I think it’d be fun.

9. Alchemy Lang

A spin on one of those Enlightenment-era taxonomic languages (such as the philosophical language of John Wilkins, later edited by George Edmonds), this time for occultism purposes. I have basically nothing but the concept for this one, other than a bullet list of “okay so there are three primes, four elements, seven planets / metals, 12 steps in the magnum opus split into 4 stages, 72 demons in the Ars Goetia…”

Just copying and modifying Wilkins / Edmonds work would save a lot of effort, but digitizations of both are lacking.

10. Language of the 5 Peoples

An extremely overdue and wholly invalid entry to the r/conlangs 19th Speedlang challenge. The premise for that one was to select a clade of organisms, choose a handful of locations where those organisms are found, and then choosing languages from those regions as the basis for a conlang.

While I only have a brief outline, my choice of clade was “thinking beings” (as in MSF) and ended up with the following selection:

• Human (????)
• Elephant (Swahili, Maasai, or Marathi)
• Orca (Haida)
• Corvid (Icelandic)
• Octopus (Hawaiian)

Never really decided what I wanted to do with the representative human language. Options I've considered include

• Basque (Pro: Non PIE isolate, lots of Neanderthal sites in northeastern France; Con: Quack linguists get really weird about Basque and I'm certain someone out there has actually theorized that it is a descendant of Neanderthal language and even brushing up against that sits poorly with me.)
• Sumerian (Pro: Earliest written language, also an isolate and long-dead; Con: Too associated with empire for the vibes I want to pursue with this one.)
• Afar (Pro: Primary language of the region where Lucy's skeleton was found; Con: Documentation less easy to come by compared to Amharic)
• Proto-Dené-Yeneseian (Pro: Reconstructed language hypothesized to have descendants on both sides of the Bering Straight (extremely thematically appropriate), is one of the least whackadoodle macrofamily proposals; Con: Being both the least whackadoodle macrofamily proposal means that there's less just making shit up and thus barely any material to use, not to mention that lack of usable material leaves it in a permanent state of extremely speculative. Also the entire subject is extremely depressing considering that there is exactly one surviving Yeneseian language (Ket) and it has less than 60 speakers (and the rest of the Siberian languages aren't faring much better. I think Chukchi is doing the best out of the lot of them, and it has maybe 8.5K speakers.)

The others I picked primarily for mythic association (sans Swahili, which is there mostly for geographic proximity / I Just Think it's Neat reasons), but that logic really doesn't work out well when one tries to apply it to humans as a whole. So I either need a bolt from the blue, a change in my approach, or just shelve the idea.

11. Character Sheet Conlang

This is actually a means of generating a conlang by translating the stats and options of an rpg character sheet into the phonology and grammatical features of a language. I picked 5e due to both ubiquity/familiarity and the number of moving parts (and sometimes it’s nice to show that the game still has some use since Wizards has catastrophically dropped the bag.)

So for example, your people and class will give you your starting phonology and the cultural context of the language, character alignment is now morphosyntactic alignment, stat bonuses and skill proficiencies will add new features and components, so on and so forth.

Progress: I was stumped on this one for a while, but recently have been able to work my way through the roadblock. Could whip up a proof of concept version in relatively little time.

12. Heraldry-based neography

Using heraldry as a writing system, where each shield is a syllable or full word. Could be its own conlang, could be the simple version of just a way to write existing languages (Latin would be the natural choice). Either way, a fun semi-shitpost idea.

13. Deriving words from Star Wars

Different idea: take the names of planets and aliens and characters in Star Wars and use them as the root words for a conlang ex. “Hoth” would be the root for “snow”, “Tatooine” becomes “ta + tuwin” / “sand + country”, etc. Everything would be shifted and mangled and transformed, of course. Since planets and aliens in Star Wars are just one thing with little nuance or variation, it's a good source for simple concepts.

Scope creep filled up the spreadsheet with loads of other names and words from other space opera franchises, and then things that weren’t space opera, and I wasn’t really doing anything meaningful or transformative with the pieces beyond accumulating more of them so this one is kinda dead in the water. Which is a shame, because I really liked a few of the parts (such as "Obi-wan" becoming the word for grandfather, odiwa.)

If I wanted to go back and make this useful, I think I would have to cut back on the scope (ie, cut out everything that's not Star Wars, and maybe even cut out a lot of the expanded universe) and focus more on building upon the root words / reverse-engineering grammar (ex. Mustafar became "mus + tafar" / "among flame", but I didn't do much of this to my own detriment.)

I might scavenge this for Idea 3, if I am not able / wanting to make it become it's own thing.

(Aside: Getting rid of my copy of The Essential Atlas haunts me to this day. It's easily one of the best pieces of "let's try and make Star Wars make any sense at all" exegesis out there, not to mention I am a notorious space map enjoyer. Extremely poor judgement on my part.)

(Aside x2: There is a dream in my brain of translating the Star Wars galaxy map into a single fantasy world map. Not the entire fucking thing, of course, but something that takes advantage of the shared vernacular shorthand of Star Wars for fantasy purposes. This is for another time.)

14. 3-Letter Acronym Lang

Via Bad Conlanging Ideas;

#461 Make a triconsonantal root-based language, where the roots are taken from Internet slang or other common abbreviations: b-r-b “to return”, w-t-f “to be surprised”, s-f-w “to be appropriate for children”, t-b-h “to speak frankly”, etc. 

Haven't done anything with this at all, but it's a fun gag and there's certainly no shortage of TLAs out there to use. Certainly a lot easier than doing a naturalistic triconsonantal root system.

 **

And there you have it; not even the full list, as there were several more that I know for certain just aren't going to go anywhere at all. Languages 1, 2, 3, & 11 have the best chance of seeing the light of day, 4, 5 7, 8, 13 and maybe 14 are decent enough odds, 6, 9, 10 and 12 are lowest chance of ever seeing fruition. That be how the crumble cookies, sometimes.

A Quest for Leslie Stone

A couple nights ago, as the Youtube algorithm flailed desperately in an attempt to parse my viewing history into something advertisers can understand, I was recommended a video with maybe 200 views about a pulp science fiction author named Leslie F. Stone. I'd never heard of her before, but "sci-fi author I have never heard of" + "public domain" is a guaranteed way to get my attention. So I brought up her Wikipedia page and started digging.

Leslie wrote from 1929 - 1940, all of them short stories published across the pulp magazine ecosystem (sans a compilation book published in 1967 and a short autobiographical essay in 1974). Quite a few of these stories are definitely public domain, and the rest are cozy in that grey area of "did it get renewed or not?"

But when I checked Gutenberg, she only had one story to her name - 1929's When the Sun Went Out.

There's a quote (that I can't remember the source of off the top of my head) that's something like this: the  history of women (or queer people, or people of color) in genre fiction has to constantly start over from 0, because they are consistently left out, forgotten, overwritten, sidelined, and ignored by the historical narrative. The same sort of narrative that leads to thinkpieces in whatever thinkpiece magazine du jour is announcing with self-satisfied triumph that science fiction is written by women, now - as if they hadn't been writing it from the beginning.

And once that got in my head, the next thought was "if not now, when?"

I haven't felt this fired up (positive) about something for a long, long while. Let's see if I can sustain it.

Here's Stone's bibliography, sorted according the year and copyright status. Would not have been able to do this without an extremely helpful Kirkus Reviews article which provided the magazine and month for each of her stories (which are left out of her Wikipedia page)

Already on Project Gutenberg

• When the Sun Went Out (1929)

Very Definitely in the Public Domain

• Out of the Void (Amazing Stories, Aug-Sep 1929)
• Men With Wings (Air Wonder Stories, Jul 1929)
• Women with Wings (Air Wonder Stories, May 1930)
• Through the Veil (Amazing Stories, May 1930)
  
• Letter of the 24th Century (Amazing Stories, Dec 1930)
  

Very Definitely Not in the Public Domain

• Out of the Void (1967 novel version)
• Day of the Pulps (1974) 

Possibly in the Public Domain

• Across the Void (Amazing Stories Apr-May-Jun 1931)
• The Conquest of Gola (Wonder Stories, Apr 1931)
• The Hell Planet (Wonder Stories, Jun 1932)
• The Man Who Fought a Fly (Amazing Stories, Oct 1932)
• Gulliver, 3000 A.D. Wonder Stories, May 1933)
• The Rape of the Solar System (Amazing Stories, Dec 1934)
• Cosmic Joke (Wonder Stories, Jan 1935)
• The Man With the Four-Dimensional Eyes (Wonder Stories, Aug 1935)
• When the Flame-Flowers Blossomed (Weird Tales, Nov 1935)
• The Fall of Mercury (Amazing Stories, Dec 1935)
• The Human Pets of Mars (Amazing Stories, Oct 1936)
• The Great Ones (Astounding Stories, Jul 1937)
• Death Dallies Awhile (Weird Tales, Jun 1938)
• The Space Terror (Wikipedia says 1939, Kirkus Reviews doesn't provide a magazine, but searching the name got me a zine called Spaceways, where it appears in Issue #7.)
• Gravity Off! (Future Fiction, Jul 1940)
  

A cursory search through the UPenn periodical copyright renewals database doesn't ping for any renewals of the stories, but since we're trying to prove a negative here I'm going to double-check with New York Public Library's renewals database.

Then once I have a list and find all the scans, I guess all that's left is to start transcribing. Somehow, after over 30 years on this planet, I only learned earlier today about Distributed Proofreaders. 

Who knows how it will go, but let's see where it ends up.

 

 

Sidrak the Sage Asks Some Questions

The blame for this can fall squarely on the Maniculum for introducing me to Sidrak and Bokkus, a medieval text wherein a Babylonian king named Bokkus (or Boctus, or Boccus…) asks several hundred questions to the philosopher Sidrak (or Sidrach, or Sydrac…) who provides some absolutely bonkers medieval-logic answers.

Unfortunately, the Middle English translation doesn’t seem to be easily available online, there is no modern English translation, and the dual-manuscript scholarly edition doesn’t have an ebook or the decency to release after creative commons was invented (This is my box of “translations of ancient and medieval texts should be released under creative commons so that people can freely read and share them” brand soap), and I am too impatient for interlibrary loan. It is on Internet Archive, but you have to have an account and check it out. (As of writing, the volume with the index of questions is checked out by someone else: damn you artificial digital scarcity!)

Anyway: since the master list of goofy medieval worldbuilding questions is out of my reach, I will content myself for now by using the ones that the Maniculum has used for its April Fool’s Day game show episodes.

Some of these questions are very clearly written by a Frenchman in the high middle ages, and are thus exemplars of being weird and uncomfortable.

IMPORTANT EDIT: Skerples has, in an act of sudden heroism, compiled the entire index. The questions are now available.

***

Brother Sidrak has spent the greater part of thirty years compiling a comprehensive survey of the Known World’s knowledge. From east to west and north to south he has wandered along the trade roads and pilgrimage paths with his Book of Questions, seeking volunteers for his great scholastic project. Anyone even modestly cooperative (and in many cases, not cooperative at all) will be peppered with selections from his list of 400-odd queries; whatever answers they give will be dutifully recorded and indexed for later tallying as he calculates which nations and peoples are more or less misguided and in need of salvation (He’s not doing this whole thing to find any answers - he’s certain that he already has them - only to see what other people’s answers are.)

• Appearance: Wrinkled, sun-darkened skin. Habit patched so many times that it now makes for surprisingly good desert camouflage. Thick grey hair and beard turned off-brown from accumulated dust and grime.
• Manner: Inquisitive, hyperfocused, performatively pious. Enjoys facts and lore, cares little for context or nuance. Does not consider differing worldviews worth arguing with or understanding, only recording.
• Wants: To compile all the Known World’s knowledge in a single work (with his name on it, of course); to prove that his sect (and by extension himself) has all the answers.
• Secret: Has a bastard son out there who has come into some notoriety on his own.

The following answers and their attendant questions were selected at random from volume twelve of the fifth book, The Vulgar, Also Called Cutters, Delvers, Vagrants, Hobos, and Gentlemen of the Road.

***

1. How are birds held aloft in the air?

• “All birds are avatars of the Simiurgh, who alone possesses the power of flight.”

• “Their bones are hollow and very light, and their wings push against the air like our feet push against the earth.”

• “As offspring of the dragon and the phoenix, birds are aligned with both fire and air, and thus naturally live above the earth and sea”

• “It’s punishment for their rebellion against the giants in the age before the sun.”

• “They are puppetted around on strings by Atlakhnakha for her amusement and our ruin.”

• “What the fuck is a bird?”

2. What becomes of falling stars after they fall?

• “Ever seen a fresh angel corpse? Wildest shit. They’ve got white meat, gold blood, feathers like a peacock show, and they don't rot. There’s one out past Jangar, fell a couple decades ago. Splattered itself across half the township when it hit. Might still be some bones left.”

• “The smith-priests of Kogan-Usan forge their metallic cores into the weapons of kings. Three are known to us, four are missing, an eighth is suspected and a ninth is pure supposition.”

• “They hatch into a dragon.”

• “They disgorge a legion of evil spirits and vile phantasms, after which they suck the vril from the land and poison all plants and animals that live there. They do this to restore their inner fires before returning to the heavens.”

3. Why is the Moon cold and the Sun hot?

• “The moon used to be hot, but it died and cooled off. That was before the demons took it over from the Moon King.”

• “If you look closely, you can see the sigil of the Frost Witch inscribed on the cislunar surface.”

• “Well one of them’s on fucking fire, ain’t it?”

• “It’s only temporary; the seasons of the heavenly bodies are extremely long, and they run opposite each other. The sun will enter autumn soon, and the moon will warm in its spring.”

• “The sun was made of Ghanjuk’s golden heart, the moon from his blinded left eye.”

• “You’ve got it backwards; heat and cold are extensions of Sunness and Moonness.”

4. Of which are there more, grains of earth or drops of water?

• “Trick question; their natural state is a singular whole, as evidenced by the tendency of both substances to coalesce. In this way every grain of earth and every drop of water is merely a temporary and circumstantial separation.”

• “They are two elements in a single substance, just in different concentrations along a dirt-water gradient.”

• “This line of inquiry was judged to be of sufficient stupidity to revoke the favor of Heaven and  banned at the Council of Hanharrat, as was the counting of angels found on pinheads; you are committing heresy by entertaining it.”

5. How many stars are in the sky?

• “Doesn’t matter, you only need to care about the seven that hate you.”

• “Twenty-one myriads of myriads, exactly. Minus one for the Betrayer.”

• “Only one star exists, and it is the Sun; the things called stars are enormous luminescent creatures similar to a great fish or a whale that drift through the aether and feed on moonlight.”

 

6. Why are some people tall and some short?

• “God saw fit to put the manhood of my enemies at the level of my fists.”

• “Trends of height come from residual influence of the giants. Most likely, the very tall were born in a land above one of the more intact corpses.”

• “The gods play dice with each soul, and this determines the qualities of the body they inhabit.”

7. What kind of apple did Adam eat?

• “It wasn’t the apple that was the issue, it was the cider. Drunkenness is the root of all evils.”

• “It was the golden fruit of the Hesperides, stolen by Eris and tossed casually into the garden as Adam was naming the zoa and valar. Adam, of course, escalated matters when his answer to the question of who was most beautiful was to ask to sleep with all three of the Tridevae. Simultaneously. He was ambitious, if nothing else.”

• “Common misconception, there are no apples in the land of Uz: it was a fig. A nasty, rotten fig filled with the larvae of wasps, for good and evil is terrible knowledge to have.”

• “Eve’s.” [Sidrak notes here that he does not know why the woman waggled her tongue.]

• “As best as modern scholarship can determine, it was the fruiting body of a shoggoth that had entered its sessile semi-vegetative life stage. This triggered a dramatic increase in neuron density.”

• “A stolen one. The angels had entrusted Lilith with care of the Tree; Adam wished to be like God but would not stand for having to share it with anyone else.”

8. Why do people sneeze?

• “Dust? Pollen? I don’t know what you want from me, man, my nose gets tickled and I sneeze.”

• “Some people say it is caused by invisible sickness spirits: modern natural science has taught us that it is in fact caused by extremely small sickness spirits!”

• “Your ancestors are fucking in the underworld.”

• “It’s the signal of a failed der0 transmission from the Air Loom.”

• “Your astral self has detected the presence of a nearby ghost.”

• “The air at the bottom of  your lungs is old and needs replaced."

9. What is the greenest thing in the world?

• “Couldn’t tell you, I’m colorblind.”

• “The gossamer robes of the Emerald Emperor, lord of all elves.”

• “There is no green more beautiful than the countenance of Yha’galuush, orc god(dess) of love and sex. To see a single glimpse of them is to see the greatest treasure on the earth.”

• “A tree in early summer, about midmorning or so, when the sun is warm and the sky is clear, and a faint breeze rustles the leaves above your head.”

• “Saw this one malachite idol once. Someone in one of the other cutter camps had dragged it out of the Tomb of the Serpent Kings and was showing it off. Got his ass cursed for it. Anyway, it was really green.”

10. What is the best animal?

• “Dogs is gods, y’know.”

• “The elephant; they are both the wisest and most moral of all creatures, far beyond mankind in both capacities.”

• “There’s this kind of slug down below - very brightly colored, glows in the dark - that feeds on blood. Its ooze foams up and gets gummy when it hits air, and it cleans inflection from a wound. See this scar on my neck? Woulda died without one of those things. Don’t eat em, though, poisonous as hell; numbs you for a while, then excruciating pain.”

• “The Questing Beast is of symbolic primacy, for it is the human condition; chasing that which we can’t ever catch.”

• “Dragons. Because if they can die, so can kings.”

• “Is not man merely an ape who has stolen fire from the gods?”

11. Why is seawater salty?

• “They are made of the Moon’s tears, after she was rebuked by the archons for changing her face.”

• “Lot’s wife was a giant, one of the Nephilim.”

• “It was struck by the star of Wormwood at the birth of the gods.”

• “It used to be blood!”

• “It is a vast dilute ooze, slowly dissolving the stone of the world.”

• “Fish piss.”

 

12. When dogs fuck, why are they more tightly joined than other animals?

• [Much of the page is taken up by a bloodstain and a note explaining that the interviewee, a cynocephalon from the kingdom of Prester John, had punched Brother Sidrak very hard in the nose when asked this question.]

13. Why did God make the Earth round like a ball?

• “It is the ideal shape for pondering.”

• “Easier for the elephants to keep balanced on their backs when the turtle moves, discs are usually too unstable for life to develop.”

• If you look at this diagram you will see that it is in fact a concave depression surrounded by vast walls of ice that then forms a dodecahedron…”

14. Is magic real?

• “Earlier today I lit a man on fire by snapping my fingers and then sold his possessions to a talking plant who walks the dying neurons of Yog-Sothoth. What do you fucking think?”

• “As everything that exists exists within nature, the supernatural cannot exist. Magic exists, therefore it is natural, and therefore it is not magic.”

15. Where in the body does the soul live?

• “In the lungs, with the breath.”

• “In the heart, with the blood.”

• “In the stomach, with the heat.”

• “In the testicles, with the seed.”

• “In the eyes, the brain, and the hands, where ideas turn to actions.”

• “In the womb, where two are made one.”

16. Why are some people white, some black, and some brown?

• “Presumably because they are not blue, red, or purple as they are in my homeland.”

• “You see only three colors in mankind? Such dullness”

• “I can only speak to the first; an albinic is a test from the gods, to see if men lose their wits and their morals when confronted with one who is different.”

• “Because humans, sadly, have lost their beautiful fur.”

• “God ran out of colored ink after painting all the birds and fish.”

17. If someone is deaf, blind, and mute, in what language do they think?

• “The feral howling that undergirds all of reality.”

• “Standardized Mi-Go Interface Language, if their ancestry can be traced back to Atlantis; otherwise they will think in either Ural-Altaic, Dravido-Koreanic, or Dene-Caucasian depending on which son of Noah their people descend from.”

• “None at all; they will think in pure thought, as the gods do. This is why they are so powerful in the magical arts.”

18. How should one remove a bone or thorn stuck in the throat?

• “Don’t eat things with thorns? Or at least pluck them out first, Jesus.”

• “The Von Heimlich Maneuver.”

• “I keep forgetting humans can’t just eat bones.”

19. Should the rich be judged in the same way as the poor?

• “Gods, I wish.”

• “No, because at least that way they’re honest about fucking us over.”

• “Of course not! Do you understand how long it took to quarantine all the rich men of the world on the Golden Isle? Bringing them to court for any of their heinous crimes against God, nature, and their fellow man would remind them that the rest of us exist! May God bless and keep those bastards as far away from us as possible.”

• “I do not know. We do not have poor men in my country, though  I suspect it is because we have yet to invent rich men.”

20. Why does shit stink?

• “It’s filled with the angry but extremely weak ghosts of everything you ate.”

• “You’d smell like shit too if you were chewed up and dunked in stomach bile.”

• “All the good qualities of the food have been taken into the body, leaving behind only the bad parts, and this produces the miasmatic effect.”

21. What animal lives the longest?

• “It’s a sliding scale of turtles. Small turtles, medium turtles, big turtles, zaratans, world-turtles, turtles all the way up and down.”

• “Not animals, but trees: Mighty Pando was old long before mankind was shaped from the clay.”

• “I was nineteen, and had just signed up with a mercenary company heading eastward. We went all the way to World’s End Lake before turning round, but when we were there - I don’t even recall what we were doing there anymore - we saw the Dragon. Not a dragon, the Dragon. She that watched the iron star fall from the sky and destroy the world of the Feathered Men. Was nearly eighty years ago now that I saw her, and those years are nothing. She has lived them a thousand thousand times over.”

22. What are the best colors of clothing to wear?

• “Context-dependent on what monster is trying to eat you - some manner of dappled green, brown, or grey is good for general purpose, but you’ll want to be careful about the saturation and contrast depending on what colors it can see. Not knowing a monster’s visible spectrum is a sure way for a greenhorn to get killed. Oh, and scrambler patterns are good to throw off enemy wizards, they have a real difficult time targeting you if they can’t make out your face.”

• “Blue. Dunno why, I just like it.”

• “A black tunic with a white sash, for that is what Emar wore when he assassinated the Five-and-One Emperors.”

23. What is the worthiest day of the year?

• “The vernal equinox, when we renew our vows with the spirits of the world.”

• “May the 25th, in honor of the One-Night Republic and the start of the Revolution.”

• “Calendrical division of time is arbitrary and false; all days are sacred.”

• “Every alternating Friday, ‘cause that’s when the paycheck clears.”

• “The vigil night of Inti, our lost Bringer of Day.”

24. What happens to fire after it goes out?

• “It reverts to its invisible aerial state as phlogiston.”

• “It is gone forever, and the cosmos is diminished.”

• “It returns to the smaller sun. Mankind has yet to steal fire from the greater sun.”

• “It is dead, having reached the end of its lifespan. Such elementals are brief things, compared with those of water and earth, yet not so brief as those of the air.”

25. How may a child come out of its mother’s womb?

• “Bloody, naked, and screaming battle-cries against this cruel world and its demiurge.”

• “Sometimes by surgery, sometimes by miracle, usually with great difficulty.”

• “What is a ‘womb’? Is that a variety of forge? Do you not carve new descendants out of the living stone?”

• “I’ve had three of the little bastards, and let me tell you, we made a mistake when we gave up laying eggs.”

• “You…use their true name to summon them out of the mother without pain or struggle? Like a reasonable person?”

26. How many children may a woman carry in her womb at one time?

• “One to three, barring any mythical importance. Then it can go up to seven, though I only know of one case in written memory. Which means we have two or possibly just one left before the end of the world, to satisfy the Law of Threes.”

27. What causes animals to go mad?

• “The Hell Star, obviously.”

• “Cannibalism of their own kind. Prion disease is scary shit.”

• “Long-term isolation within a zoological garden.”

• “Pain, stress, and loneliness, otherwise diseases of the mind or the influence of dread powers. Same as with man.”

28. Which women give the most benefit & delight to men?

• “I do, it’s me, it was me all along. My hips don’t lie and my thighs save lives. You’re welcome, men.”

• “Call me when you find a man who provides any benefit or delight to a woman and I might have an answer for you.”

• “Making some bold assumptions today, are we?”

• “A succubus woven from the hot black flame, bound by mask and name to fit the sorcerer’s specific desires. She will, inevitably and justly, stick a knife in his neck and string his corpse from the tower balcony as a warning.”

• “I do not consent to adventure in your magical realm. Away wi’ ye, foul wizard!”

29. What is the best and worst body part of man?

• “Oh fuck you, man. This is such an obvious setup to get me to say ‘his cock’, and then you’ll launch into a sermon about the importance of semen retention or some shit.”

• “His cock, obviously.”

30. Why did Noah take evil animals, such as scorpions, adders, and snakes, onto the ark?

• “He owed the Serpent a favor.”

• “I question why snakes are here twice while wasps are not mentioned at all. Scorpions only sting you if you fuck around with them and then you deserve it.”

• “One; because God said every animal. Two; no animal but man has knowledge of good and evil and thus all harmful animals are innocent by way of ignorance.”

• “Ah, it’s metaphorical, you see. Representative of a mass extinction event some thirty thousand years before Christ that saw a resurgence of the flying polyps.”

31. Which gives greater cunning, hot food or cold food?

• “Well, it’s not whatever I’m eating now. What the fuck is with you people and food temperature?”

• “If I eat a frozen chili pepper, is it cold or hot?”

• “Do I look like someone who cooks their food? I’m a fucking ghoul.”

• “Hot, naturally; you try thinking straight with a brain freeze.”

• “Cold, obviously; hot foods overheat and may potentially melt the brain. Your thoughts become sluggish, in any case.”

• “You must be one of those ‘salt has too much flavor’ types, eh?”

32. Sort from most to least numerous: animals, humans, fish, birds

• “Trick question; all of these are fish.”

• “What the fuck is a bird?”

33. Should people greet each other whenever they meet?

• “Hardly! Repeated headbutting, even for an orc, is bound to leave lasting damage.”

34. Which is worthier, maidenhood or virginity?

• “I have dealt with a lot of men who can’t get any and I used to be a preteen girl: both groups possess an immeasurable capacity for evil.”

• “Best of all is to be a kind and considerate lover.”

• “Never ask this question again.”

• “Motherfuckers like you who think virginity is magical are why I was sold into slavery in a unicorn slaughterhouse when I was eight. Crawl up your own ass and drown in shit.”

35. How are worms bred in the body and how do they feed?

• “Oh, do you not know? Congratulations! Today you get to learn about endoparasitic wasps!”

36. On what day and at what time will the Final Judgement occur?

• “Whatever the day, thanks to time zones it will take place at all hours at once.”

• “The final judgement will never occur, as the increased population of Earth has clearly overloaded the celestial bureaucracy and made it unable to render preliminary judgement - that’s why no one gets smote anymore.”

• “No one knows the day or the hour, dipshit.”

Lets Build a PIE Conlang 2: Water and Fire

Part 1: Introduction and *h₁n̥gʷnís

Let’s get right into it.

1. *wódr̥

This is the most common recon!PIE word for water, surprising absolutely no one. It's not the only word, but it is the generic one vs the more active "body of water" found in *h2ep. I’m actually going to do this one backwards.

1.1 -r̥

*wódr̥ is a fun one, because it’s what’s called a heteroclitic stem: In the “strong” cases (nominative, vocative, and accusitive) it ends in *-r̥, but in the “weak” cases (everything else, but genitive is the standard example), we find an *-n̥ where we’d expect to find an *-r̥ (ie *wódr̥ / *wédn̥s).

This is one of the clearest traces we have of PIE’s internal history: r/n stems are pretty rare outside of the Anatolian languages, indicating that they’re the leftovers of an older system (just what I am looking for), and the trace of an old sound change is obvious. They’re all also neuter nouns, so another point for animacy distinction.

Since it ends in a syllabic consonant, I can slot in an **ə in front of *-r̥, being a reduced / unstressed **a.  Then I just wind back *r < **n  and we have **-an and a new step to our sound-change list

Final N > R Shift: **n > *r when word final, following an unstressed **a / **ə

(This is going to need more specificity in the future, because we’ve got those pesky *-mn̥ stems to deal with.)

Word progress: -an

1.2 d

Plain voiced stop, no special circumstances, this is going to be **t’ (or, since the stress is on the first syllable, **’t.)

Word progress: -’tan

1.3 ó

No avoiding it now; it’s time to rip off the bandage and talk about vowels.

Traditional recon!PIE operates on the assumption that every syllable has a vowel slot, which can potentially hold *e, *o, the long versions of those vowels, or nothing at all. These are called “grades”, and are used to describe ablaut patterns: a slot is in such-and-such a grade in these cases, then shifts to another slot in other cases, it’s such-and-such grade when stressed, and this-or-that grade when unstressed. It’s all terribly complicated.

*a doesn’t fit into the ablaut patterns at all, so a lot of reconstructioneers will say “oh it’s an allophone of *e when adjacent to *h2” because that does fit ablaut patterns, and every other case will be written off as a marginal phoneme inherited from nursery talk or loanwords.

This runs into two problems: Problem 1 is that the traditional ablaut patterns might not be true in the first place. Paul Kiparsky (2010) suggests an alternative that he calls the Compositional Model, where stress placement previously treated as arbitrary ablaut patterns are the result of a process of several underlying rules applied in a specific order. This theory has not caught on with PIE studies at large (likely because it throws out like 50% of the entire field), but I find it a lot more appealing, understandable, and reasonable than the patterns and paradigms.

Problem 2 is that there are languages with only two vowels out there - conveniently located right next door in the Caucasuses - but those vowels are never /e/ and /o/. All the languages that have only two or three vowels will distinguish them by height, not by backness.

• Abkhaz has either /ɨ/ and /a/ or /ə/ and /a/, depending on who you ask.
• Kabardian and Adyghe have /ə/, /a~ɐ/, and /ā/.
• Ubykh and Arente have /ə/ and /a/

(Note: these languages tend to have a lot of allophonic variation, where the underlying vowel is pronounced differently according to its surroundings - similar to what is reconstructed for PIE. So you can get an [ə] that sounds like /i/ or /u/.)

You will notice that all of these languages have /a/. In fact, the only languages I know of that don’t have /a/ are Arapaho and its closest relatives, and even then they have /i/ and /u/ to pick up the slack and it’s clear by comparison to the rest of the family that they had /a/ at some point and later lost it.

So either real!PIE had a vowel system that has never before been documented in a human language, or recon!PIE is using misleading symbols out of tradition.

(You can guess which side I come down on)

Kümmel (2012) posits that at least in early PIE, *e was **æ  ~ **a and *o was **ɑ, which was itself descended from ***ā. This is, ultimately, the base I will be using because it requires the least amount of jumping through hoops (I will still be jumping through hoops, and I don't have all the edge cases hammered out yet, so for now all we need to care about is that *ó is **â (I’m using circumflexes for when it is both long and stressed)

Word progress: -â’tan

1.4 w

I have two options available

• Option 1: *w in this environment is **w, final word is **wâ’tan
• Option 2: Long high vowels (**ī, **ū) split into (**ya, **wa) > (*yo, *wo) when word-initial. Final word is **ʔû’tan.

Erring on the side of aesthetics, I gotta go with Option 2. That’s a goodass word right there, we’re cooking with ‘ank’ʷani now!

2. *péh₂wr̥

This is the other recon!PIE word for fire, which was much more common than *h₁n̥gʷnís and represented fire as a substance (-r̥ on the end is a sure sign of a neuter noun)

2.1 p

*p is **p, no issues here.

Word Progress: p-

2.2 éh₂

At last, my nemesis reveals itself.

*h₂ is the reconstructioneer’s magic bullet. You can drop it in anywhere to explain anything: it can turn *e into *a, it can turn short vowels long, it can aspirate voiceless stops, it explains ablaut paradigms; it can be a consonant, it can be a vowel, it can be a consonant that acts like a vowel or a vowel that acts like a consonant. Depending on who you ask it, it can be reconstructed as *q, *qq, *x,  *χ, *ħ, *ɦ, *h, *ʕ or *a. I am certain there’s a paper out there claiming with utmost sincerity that it can turn lead into gold and resurrect the dead.

Kümmel (2022) once again saves the day with what I think is the most convincing argument. Short version:

• The *h₂ &  *h₃ laryngeals inherited into the Anatolian languages were a fortis-lenis pair (likely voiced/unvoiced) of uvular consonants - probably fricatives, but stops is possible in the extremely early stages.
• This applies only to Anatolian languages and Homsar Hol, since it’s clear that they work differently in Strongmadian and Strongsadian PIE.

This all aligns with [A PAPER THAT I LOST THE LINK TO GOD DAMN IT], who comes to a similar conclusion by analyzing Anatolian terms that were loaned into neighboring languages that had more robust scripts (Anatolian languages were mostly written with inherited cuneiform, which wasn’t designed whatsoever for them). All fine and good, but I am still not satisfied. Time for some major creative license and a new list of principles:

• I am operating under the assumption that the *H series changed so radically between Homsar Hol and later Strongmadian and Strongsadian PIE that they were essentially independent sound systems.
• If there’s attestation in an Anatolian language (ie, if ḫ shows up), there’s definitely a laryngeal there (either *h₂ or *h₃, they used the same symbol for both)
• If an Anatolian cognate shows no sign of *h₂ but it’s reconstructed with one anyway, the reconstruction is incorrect and there was just normal **a.
• If there’s no Anatolian cognate at all, we go by secondary evidence and vibes.
• Voiceless aspirates in Indic languages are decent evidence of a laryngeal being there, though I am less certain on what kind.
• Long vowels on their own are not sufficient evidence, since there are other ways for long vowels to form than just through laryngeal deletion + compensatory lengthening.
• Example: *muHs (“mouse”) is typically reconstructed with an unknown laryngeal to explain why the descendants have a long /u/ - I am going to apply  Szemerényi's law and Occam’s Razor and say that either A) the original form was *mus-s and Sze’s law kicked in as normal or B) it was originally *mu-s and Sandall & Byrd (2014) are correct.
• Greek Triple Reflex is insufficient justification on its own - if there’s no other evidence, I’m saying it was probably just a regular-degular vowel. Maybe if the vibes are good I’ll pick and choose.
• If the only justification for there being a laryngeal present is vowel coloration, it’s suspect.
• *h₃ had a backing effect, not a rounding effect; if it turned *e into *o because of labialization, then the *Kʷ series would have done it as well.
• If all other options are exhausted and there is no way to rule out a laryngeal or identify it, the dice decide. 1-2 are *h₁, 3-4 are *h₂ , 5-6 are *h₃.

Finally getting back to the word at had, this one comes with easy Anatolian attestation via Hittite paḫḫur and Luwian pāḫur. That double form is unique to  *h₂, so I’m going to add a bog-standard unvoiced uvular fricative **χ. *e is **a, naturally.

(I could have *h₂ = **q, but I am saving **q for the time being.)

Word Progress: paχ-

2.3 wr̥

Here we get another heteroclitic stem; the *r̥ is **n, but we do have another variable with the vowel. This ending is attested in Hittite as -war, so I'm going to make things easy for myself and go with **-wan; since it's an unstressed vowel we get a nice clean shift of **-wan > **-war > *-wr, with Anatolian languages either inheriting **-war whole cloth, or just adding an /a/ back in.

 
Final Word: paχwan

3. Dictionary entries

• ʔû’tan (IN): Water as a general substance, regardless of size, state, drinkability, or other factors. Generic, non-branded water.

• páχwan (IN): Fire; typically a controlled fire (campfire, cooking fire, fire for illumination, etc)

Since I started with words that were all a root + a suffix, I can add some derivational suffixes as well.

1. ʔank’ʷaní = ʔank’ʷa + (a)n + í
2. ʔû’tan = ʔû’t + an
3. páχwan = páχ + u/w + an

Which, after tweaking the existing definitions, end up as

• -(a)n (SUF) - Generic inanimate / passive nominalizer; turns root verbs into nouns
• -i (SUF) - Forms nouns of animacy / activity
• -ani (SUF) - Forms animate / active (but not agent) nouns from verb roots
• -u/w (SUF) - Forms action nouns from verb roots
• -wan (SUF)  - Forms object nouns from verb roots

Or to break it down:

• páχ- = "to warm"
• páχ-w-  = "(the action of) warming"
• páχ-w-an = "warming thing"

 

4. Corrections and Revisions 

Despite liking Glen Gordon's "labiovelars come from reduction of an older /u/" theory, it doesn't really jive with how I'm going to be handling vowels anymore: that step has been axed. Since only one word was effected, that barely means anything.

 

5. Conclusion

Well, I'm having fun. Don't know about all y'all, but I'm having fun. So much idle musing and scribbling on sticky notes is finally starting to become something coherent - honestly, I think it's the format that does it. Much easier to get my thoughts in order when I force myself to describe it to an audience step-by-step.

 

It's honestly a really cool feeling seeing things start to snowball - with the right groundwork and basic rules laid down, the rest just kinda flows naturally.

 

I think I have one more of these in the tank for the time being, then doubtlessly more stuff later on down the line. Don't want to overdo it and scare everyone away.

 

 

Let's Build a PIE Conlang 1: Intro + First Word

TLN sent me this ages ago

I have been deep-diving on Proto-Indo-European linguistics for the last year for Conlang Reasons, which has filled me with useless knowledge that makes me very fun at parties. Now, after many false starts and nigh-constantly running up against one wall or another, I have returned from the depths with treasures. And / or eyes on the inside.

0. Prelude to the Introduction

The first thing to get out of the way is this: PIE studies are bullshit (slightly affectionate) for reasons you will hear a lot about; the second thing is that this rabbit hole is so deep I am bumping elbows with Tsathoggua, which makes for blogposts bogged down in tedious explanations of each and every weird thing in a desperate attempt to make any of this chicanery make any sense at all.

So as to avoid dumping everything on y’all all at once, for this post I’m only going to do an introduction with my goals & design principles, and then go through an example word sound-by-sound to show how I got from the abstracted reconstructed version to the conlang proper.

Third and potentially most important thing to get out of the way first: there is no “true” PIE; there was a dialect continuum spoken by some Eurasian steppe nomads, and that dialect continuum drifted and fragmented over thousands of years as its speakers spread out across west-central Asia, India, and Europe. Reconstructions of PIE are an abstraction used to describe a language we have no attestation for; they’re closer to algebraic formulas than an actual language, and they are algebraic formulas composed with limited data, bias, best guesses, academic dogmatism, outright crankery, occasional bits of insight, and every other skew you can possibly think of. Ceci n'est pas une *h₁éḱwos.

This is made infinitely more frustrating by PIE reconstructioneers (this is the official technical term) and lay linguists alike using “Proto-Indo-European” to describe the reconstructed language-abstraction and the real historical language(s) interchangeably, despite the former being a work of artifice set in amber outside of time and the latter being three goblins and a horse in a trenchcoat. I myself will be guilty of this, but I will try not to be by saying "when I say how something works in PIE, I am talking about how linguists think real!PIE worked according to how they have built reconstructed!PIE like some sort of word-demiurge, not how it actually worked in reality". 

 

General time periods will be named according to a schema of my own devising.

• Homsar Hol - Prior to the divergence of my as-yet unnamed language family; “Pre-Indo-European” or “Pre-Indo-Anatolian”
• Strongbadian PIE - Prior to the divergence of the Anatolian languages from the core continuity; “Proto-Indo-Anatolian”, “Proto-Indo-Hittite”, or “Early PIE”.
• Strongmadian PIE - An era of significant differentiation between core and fringe speakers; “Middle PIE”
• Strongsadian PIE - Total dissolution of the core speaking community, dialectal continuity completely lost by this stage; “Late PIE”.

Branches and their lower-order reconstructions aren’t really going to show up here, so I will just use their normal names.

Now with all that out of the way, let’s get inside baseball.

1. Introduction

Emboldened by the flame of ambition, this project began with two must-haves:

1. It was going to belong to its own branch of the greater Indo-European family (and likely become very weird because of it)
2. I wanted to retain the infamous mystery-consonant laryngeals in some form.

Point 2 immediately gave me no shortage of issues, because outside of a few edge cases in Iranian and Armenian the only descendants to retain laryngeals are the Anatolian languages; Anatolian languages are so divergent from all the others that you need to consider pre- and post- Anatolian split as wholly different stages of the PIE continuum deserving of wholly different reconstructions (Strongbadian vs Strongmadian PIE), which the mainstream reconstruction doesn’t bother to do. So I ended up having to trudge through material that is bogged down in features that didn’t exist at the time I wanted to split my language off from the whole.

(Granted, good data for this sort of thing is even harder to come by than the usual, and historical linguistics is an extremely slow-to-adapt field).

It does not help, and this one is entirely on me, that I was using Wikipedia for most of my research: Wikipedia’s PIE pages are abyssmal. Outdated, contradictory, poorly-written and inadequately explained, they will teach you the wrong things and then you will have to waste a considerable amount of time unlearning all the horseshit. Don’t do what I did.

1.2 Brief List of Sources

I’ll have a longer writeup later on down the line: the bulk of my inspiration thus part has come from the work of Martin Kümmel, Andrew Byrd (he made Wenja for Far Cry Primal), Paul Kiparsky (primarily for his Compositional Theory), the blogs Paleoglot (Glen Gordon), PhDniX’s Blog (PhoeniX), and protouralic.wordpress (J Pystynen), some random bullshit I found on reddit, and The Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European and the Proto-Indo-European World by Mallory & Adams. I'll try and update this as I continue.

1.3 Core Premise & Design Principles

I am for the time being painting the speakers in broad strokes, and will have to be content with worldbuilding as I go.  

• The speakers diverged from the main language continuity extremely early, leading to a language that doesn’t include many of the features later PIE stages are known for, and retains several major parts that were lost.
• The point of divergence was sometime between █████ and ████ BC.
• The speakers’ culture runs orthogonal to the patriarchal horse-based murder that characterized much of the later PIE culture group(s), and they may or may not have even remained in this world.
• I am not going to worry overmuch about where the vocabulary comes from, at least not at the moment; while I will try to stick to words with more solid / widespread attestation, some might time travel to before their invention.
• The rules are made up and the points don’t matter.

The early point of divergence gives me some guidelines to follow with the actual content of the grammar: it’s going to retain features that were lost entirely in other branches (or only survived as scattered and unproductive archaisms), and it’s going to sidestep the development of some signature features of later stages of the family. As of right now, that’s going to include:

• The laryngeal consonants (which are not actually laryngeals) are retained.
• Active-stative alignment rather than nominative-accusative alignment
• No grammatical gender; animate / inanimate distinction is only semantic at this point, not morphological.
• No thematic endings (or at least not in the way they are typically reconstructed.)
• Pre-syncope - This language is set before the stress-based syncope obliterated most of the vowels in the Great Dying / Vowel Mass Extinction / Schwapocalypse / the Fuckening.
• No ablaut - or at the very least, I’m going with Paul Kiparsky’s Compositional Theory if I need to, because I can grok it much easier.
• No vowels in hiatus - This is pretty well established in PIE, vowels that are next to each other either merge into a long vowel, have a glide inserted between them, or turn into a glide.
• No geminate consonants - Also well established in PIE.
• Everything's got to start with a consonant, but that includes the glottal stop so it's basically cheating - this is in line with modern ideas of root constraints, though for my purposes roots don't also have to end with a consonant.
  

Don’t worry if you don’t have a fucking clue what I am talking about here, we’ll get to it eventually.

Principle 0: Art over accuracy
As I said in part 0, accuracy is a mug’s game in historical linguistics. I’ve aimed for the sweet spot of “coherent enough to make sense” and “I personally like it”, with the latter taking priority in cases where I need to decide. This is an art project based on half-baked amateur linguistics and the power of Pattern Recognition, nothing more. (To be honest, I had to enforce this principle on myself just to stop the what-if rabbit-holing and decision paralysis.)

Principle 1: The Two-Step Plan
I want to do two distinct stages of this language: the one I’m going to be describing here is the older of the two, which is intended to be pretty close to the core Strongbadian PIE dialect. The later one is where we go off the rails.

Principle 2: Areal features yes, macrofamilies no
There was absolutely cultural and linguistic exchange going on between the peoples of east Europe / west Asia: that does not mean that their languages are connected via descent from a shared origin. I will pillage loan words and grammatical features from Proto-Kartvelian, Proto-Caucasian, Proto-Uralic, and Proto-Semitic if I think there’s something neat, but I’m not designing this conlang to align with the Indo-Uralic, Pontic, or Nostratic theories (note: these are all varying levels of fringe, and I only recommend looting them for creative purposes.)

Principle 3: Crank Credits
Sometimes the cranks have a good idea or two; these will be called out with the cashing in of a Crank Credit™. I don’t expect many of them, because the reasonable ideas are few and far between and the entertainingly bonkers ones are somehow even rarer. (I did find one guy I found who somehow managed to turn recon!PIE into Earthsea magic, though it is not as cool or useful as you would hope.)

(Fun fact: there is absolutely no requirement whatsoever for anything uploaded to Academia.edu to have any connection to an institution of higher learning or a peer-reviewed publication.)
 

Principle 4: Moderation in laryngeals
I am going into this project with the presumption that zealous reconstructioneers overuse laryngeals as an inconsistency-solving tool. *h₂ cannot possibly be that common and be a single phoneme, that’d make what is probably a uvular fricative the second or third most common consonant in the language and that is bonkers.

Principle 5: *a definitely existed
We’ll get to this one. 

Principle 6: Symbol Usage
I will be marking normal reconstructions with the usual asterisk like *so, and I will mark my own bespoke Pre-PIE reconstructions with two **asterisks. This will be strictly in reference to explaining how things from my version of recon!PIE changed to get to traditional recon!PIE.

 X < Y means “X derived from Y”; X  > Y means “X turns into Y”

I promise this is the end of the set up.

2. *h₁n̥gʷnís

First and most important thing (I'm really saying that a lot, aren't I): this isn’t actually one of the PIE words for fire; This is a formula representing one of the PIE words for fire. Think of every letter here as an algebraic variable that, if you apply the right sequence of functions to it, will become words like Sanskrit agni and Latin ignis. If you had a time machine, popped into a settlement of Eurasian steppe nomads, pointed at the campfire and said “*h₁n̥gʷnís!” you’d get some very strange looks but if the reconstruction is solid the confused steppe nomads would probably figure out that you meant “fire” and correct your gods-awful pronunciation.

(Granted, that’s dependent on them being from one of the dialects that used *h₁n̥gʷnís in the first place: it’s the less common of the two.)

2.1.1: Basic Structure

*h₁n̥gʷnís can be broken down into component parts:

• h₁engʷ- ; a root with a general meaning of “to burn” or “fire”.
•  -n- ; An extension added to the root of entirely unknown function: it’s here in *h₁n̥gʷnís, but missing from the related *h₁óngʷl̥ (“charcoal” or “embers”). It might be part of the suffix?
• -i- ; A suffix that makes animate nouns out of verbs or adjectives.
• -s ; The nominative singular case ending

2.1.2: h₁

Starting off strong we get one of the mystery laryngeal consonants; these are sounds (that are not actually laryngeals) that were lost in all IE languages (save the Anatolian languages, a few edge cases in Iranian and Albanian, and this weird thing called the Triple Reflex in Greek) but we know that they were there because they influenced nearby vowels (and sometimes consonants). There are normally three laryngeals reconstructed, sometimes four, but some people have gone as low as 1 (highly unlikely) and as high as 10 or 12 (also unlikely, but less unlikely when framed as h₁, h₂, and h₃  encompassing multiple sounds each)

h₁ is the easy one, because it doesn’t have much going for it: it lengthened vowels, it didn’t have any coloring effect on *e (the others did, more on that eventually), it sometimes turned into e in Greek, and it vanished in all descendents (including Anatolian). Nearly all reconstructioneers plug it in as either *h or *ʔ, since those sounds fit all the criteria: I’m going to be going with the glottal stop ʔ (for the time being, stick a pin in that).

Word Progress: ʔ-

2.1.3: n̥

That little dot means that this is a syllabic resonant - a consonant that can serve as the nucleus of a syllable in place of a vowel. English has them all over the place (It’s why “little” is two syllables) and they’re not particularly difficult to wrangle. Syllabic consonants are almost always the result of a nearby vowel being reduced and / or deleted, and we can clearly see that the root h₁engʷ- has a vowel in it: this is an example of ablaut, which is when vowels change and carry different meanings when they do (English sing-sang-sung is an example of ablaut).

In this case, since the stress is on the *í, the *e got reduced/deleted because there was a resonant to pick up the slack. But since my language doesn’t have stress-based deletion as part of ablaut, it’s going to stay as **en.

Vowels in PIE reconstructions are a 50 gallon drum of worms that I am going to save for another time: for now, I am going to say that *e isn’t actually /e/ most of the time, and was probably closer to the ɛ, ə, ɐ, or æ - something weakly pronounced and a bit forward in the mouth. I’ll just be representing it with <a> for now because I’ll need a separate schwa in the next step and haven't fully decided on how the low vowels will pan out.

Word progress: ʔan-

2.1.4: gʷ

This one is going to be a tricky one, despite looking relatively normal. It’s got two prominent distinctive features, but they’re a lot more questionable than what’s come before. As reconstructed, *gʷ is:

• Voiced, contrasting with unvoiced *kʷ and breathy voiced *gʷʰ
• Labialized velar (pronounced with rounded lips), contrasting with plain *g and palatovelar *ǵ.

The problem is that both the plain voiced (*D Series) and the velar (*Ḱ *K and *Kʷ series) categories are suspect, and we get into the quote unquote fun of historical linguistics - the variables used in the reconstruction are only ever best guesses, sometimes new data makes old best guesses less best, and it takes an extremely and unfortunately long time for the traditional way of writing and talking about things to change to reflect that new data.

To whit: The three-way voiceless-voiced-breathy voiced (*T, *D, *Dʰ series) distinction in the stop consonants is so rare in the modern day that the number of comparable languages is in single-digits. This has led some reconstructioneers to theorize that the *D series was something else entirely, usually some kind of glottalized voiceless consonant (this is called Glottalic Theory), to account for why they are so infrequent in the corpus, why they never appear twice in the same root when *DʰeDʰ is extremely common, and why there is basically no *b at all except weird edge cases that might be errors or loanwords.

I’m going to cash in one of my Crank Credits™ and go with Allan Bomhard’s version of Glottalic Theory: the traditional *D series behaved similarly to glottalic consonants in Coast Tsimshian / Sm'algya̱x. Glottalization occurs on whatever side the vowel is on (leaning towards stressed vowel if between two), and is unreleased word-finally.

(Bomhard, as a rule, is not a reliable source: his whole deal is trying to reconstruct a protolanguage macrofamily ("Nostratic") that encompasses basically every language in Eurasia, and you can probably see the issue with making a reconstruction based on other reconstructions and claiming that it’s reflective of reality. His work is impressively thorough, methodologically whack, and would be better served if it was an elaborate art project. That said, in his efforts to make a Grand Unified Theory he cites basically everything anyone has ever written about the subject and entertains basically any idea that could even tangentially fit.)

So instead of *gʷ, I’m going with **k’ʷ, but this leads us to a second problem: it’s pretty weird for a labialized ejective to be stuck between two other consonants. (*-n̥-, since it acts like a vowel, is less weird in this regard, but since I’m working with a stage that doesn’t have *-n̥-, that’s not an option.)

Here’s where saying “fuck it, we ball” is very handy. Labialized consonants are pronounced with lip-rounding, and they are typically formed when a rounded vowel like /o/ or /u/ carries over to the preceding consonant. This is the extremely common process of assimilation which boils down to “brain makes one sound closer to a nearby sound to make it easier to say.”

Tugging on that thread (we are outside of normal reconstruction and fully into the art project weeds now), I’m going to stick a schwa in there, representing an unstressed **u that got reduced during the Vowel Mass Extinction and then obliterated in the Schwapocalypse (also called syncope) but left behind its roundedness on the **k’.

(This theory I am pulling primarily from the long-abandoned Paleoglot blog by Glen Gordon and his “Diachrony of Pre-PIE” document which was saved from oblivion by an automated Scribd web trawler. It has some significant issues that I have already run into trying to prep the next post, so I’m including it here because I like it and I can make it work for the time being - we’ll see how it turns out in the future.)

Now we are fully into the weeds and have three different versions of the word: pre- Extinction (reduction of unstressed high vowels to schwa), and then pre- and post- apocalyptic (deletion of schwa)

Word progress (Pre-Extinction): ʔank’u-
Word progress (Pre-Schwapocalpyse): ʔank’ʷə-
Word progress (Post-Schwapocalypse): ʔank’ʷ-

2.1.5: n

After all that mess, *n is just **n. Nasal consonants are anomalously well-behaved in reconstructed!PIE. There’s no indication of what this might have meant, if it meant anything at all, though there are other instances of *n getting slapped onto the end of words so maybe later we’ll see something that can give us a clue.

Word progress (Pre-Extinction): ʔank’un-
Word progress (Pre-Schwapocalpyse): ʔank’ʷən-
Word progress (Post-Schwapocalypse): ʔank’ʷn-

2.1.6: í

*i and *u are weird, because reconstructioners treat them as syllabic versions of *y and *w, working the same way as *-n̥- did above. They normally get written as *ey and *ew when stressed, *i and *u / *y and *w when unstressed, but as you’ve probably noticed by now, this here is a stressed *i. Exceptions to rules are everywhere, especially in old words, but that actually works in our favor.

While the “*i is just syllabic *y and the unstressed form of *ey” works for the background formula level of PIE chicanery, for my purposes there is a much simpler function I want to use: that at some point in the history of PIE, stressed high vowels (**i and **u) broke into the diphthongs **ay and **aw (or **əy and **əw - I’ll figure that out when we get there), and then when ablaut stress changes were applied we ended up with the syllabic *y and *w.

This is way too many words to say “*i is just **i for the purposes of this conlang”.

Word progress (Pre-Extinction): ʔank’uni-
Word progress (Pre-Schwapocalpyse): ʔank’ʷəni-
Word progress (Post-Schwapocalypse): ʔank’ʷni-

2.1.7: s

This was probably pronounced closer to /z/, since /s/ commonly voices after stressed vowels or voiced consonants (again, super common in English), but there didn’t seem to be a meaningful distinction between the two in recon!PIE: it’s just *s, nothing weird there.

Except there is something weird, it’s just grammatical instead of phonological - *s appears all over noun endings in PIE, to the point of being weird, but this post has gone on long enough without me going into a digression about why I think this happened just right now. To bullet-points it:

• It’s typologically unusual for nominative-accusative languages to explicitly mark the subject of a sentence, but you do find this sort of thing in languages that make a distinction between the subject of an intransitive verb and the agent of a transitive verb.
• PIE neuter nouns use the accusative case ending (*-m) for the nominative, which is another indication that we’re dealing with something that descended from an older system that cared about agency / animacy: since a rock isn’t animate it would never be the agent, and thus it would always use the ending for the patient of a verb, and this carried over through the switch to NOM-ACC.
• The singular nominative demonstrative pronoun, *so, (“this, that”) is weirdly out of place - every other form in its declension table (all the non-NOM cases and every single plural form) begins with *t, not *s.

All put together we get a theory (that I did not make up myself) that the NOM.sing ending *-s is the leftovers of **sə, which is the reduced form of *so (which for vowel reasons I will write as **sɑ for now and explain later), which was originally **tɑ.

Now, to get all that working properly I have to add several more steps to our sequence and rename the ones we have. Here I’m going to shift over into directly describing

• Starting Point: ʔank’uni tɑ
• High Vowel Collapse + Labialization: ʔank’ʷəni tɑ
• Agglutination Dance: ʔank’ʷənitɑ
• Final vowel reduction: ʔank’ʷənítə
• Schwapocalpyse: ʔank’ʷnit
• Spirantization of final *t: ʔank’ʷnis
• a > e shift: ʔenk’ʷnis
• Ablaut Deletions: ʔn̥k’ʷnís
• Glottalized > creaky voice:ʔn̥g̰ʷnís
• Creaky voice to plain voiced: ʔn̥gʷnís
• Laryngeal Loss: n̥gʷnís

And bing-bang boom we have a timeline of (hypothetical) changes from Early PIE to Late PIE that I can add to and adjust as I need to later on. I had to run my functions backwards in time, which is a bit awkward, but now I can just pick a stage and say “here’s where my language broke off”. Then I can just apply all those steps in reverse to any reconstructed word and add more granularity and more steps as needed.

Going forward, I think I am going to split off shortly after the Great Vowel Collapse, to get all those fun labialized consonants. More on that later.

3. Dictionary Entry

• ʔan.k’u.ní (AN): wildfire; uncontrolled blaze; a fire that is particularly intense, destructive, uncontrollable, or fast-spreading.

4. Conclusion

For those of you who I haven’t chased off yet with all this nonsense, let me know if you’d like to see more. The density will trail off after I get more of my personal reconstruction established, but for the next few follow up words there’s still a good chunk of material to cover; I haven’t even gotten to rant about *h₂ yet.