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.