Language Dungeon Spitballing

I've had an idea floating around in my head for a puzzlebox dungeon (system and setting indeterminate) centered on decipherment of the dungeon-builder’s language, Chants of Sennar or Heaven’s Vault style. Pulled off right, it could be a really fun diegetic challenge for players; pulled off wrong, it’ll be a tedious pain in the ass. This post is me thinking aloud and seeing what sticks.

Need: Complementary Components  

The concept would naturally attract language enthusiasts, but I don’t want to limit the focus so that they’re the only people who would enjoy it - for that, I could just make a wickedly hard decipherment puzzle. Things like pronunciation and spelling would also need taken into account: it’s no fun for anyone if the DM is constantly stumbling over describing the puzzle.

Ideally, the language-puzzle should exist side-by-side with the dungeoncrawl without overwhelming it, serving as another tool players can use to navigate the environment and the hazards therein. 

Need: Onboarding Clues / Trailheads

Throwing players directly into the deep end with no leads would be a bad move if the goal is engagement, but I also don’t want to give them a complete key to the puzzle from the beginning.

 

Trailhead Option: Give players a document written by a known party.

Epitaph did this nicely by giving players the one Roman source mentioning this people has a few root words and the names of two kings, and that worked pretty well for that game. You just need to give the players some context clues so they can identify the dignitary or god or what have you:  if you had a king named “Ran the Tiger” and then there’s a statue of some imperious looking guy with a tiger pelt, you can make some guesses about which words on the inscription are what if you have “here’s how Ran is spelled in the ruin script” or another king nearby to compare inscriptions to (could get titles or numbers from that).

Trailhead Option: The script is still used in the modern day 

This would entail giving the players the key to the known version of the script (or just using the Latin alphabet) as one of the opening clues. Some of the symbols would be used for the same sounds, while others would be repurposed, left out, or used in nonstandard ways.

Trailhead Option: The children’s book

Hand someone a copy of One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish in a language they know nothing about, even if they can’t read the script, and within moments they’ll know five words, where adjectives are placed in relation to their nouns, and maybe even plurals. 

This option requires a bit of finagling for your typical generic vernacular fantasy setting, but it’d work excellently in Mothership or other sci-fi settings; stumbling across the classroom of an abandoned colony would be a treasure-trove in this sort of puzzle-dungeon.

Pulling on that thread a bit…

Trailhead Option: Use players’ existing knowledge as starting point

Making up an original text for the above scenario would be easy enough and a good clue; but you could also hand the players a book titled “Ozad Shungan Hluneitsan” with a little girl, a metal man, a scarecrow, and a lion on the front cover. Players will immediately clock that the words on the cover translate to "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" and that’d be both a good clue and a way to encourage engagement because it’s something players already know.

Question: Script or no?

Script here meaning anything not the Latin alphabet; nearly all games of this sort involve translating glyphs directly into their semantic equivalents in English. This is a method that works (Heaven’s Vault, Chants of Sennar) but it's a method that bypasses phonetics and most grammar: relying on it is going to typically result in a logographic language, and those tend to have enormous glyph lists (hello, hanzi) to make up for the fact that you can't really just spell out a word as it's pronounced. So that's either a very truncated glyph library, or a load of extra work.

Using a different kind of script drastically decreases the number of symbols but introduces the new step of symbols no longer being directly connected to concepts. But that's not as big of an issue as it could be, because even if you don't know how the symbols are pronounced, Pattern-Seeking Brain will still be able to figure out that this string of glyphs means this or that with the right clues

Real-World Example: Koga's Koffing

So back when I was 8 or 9 or so, I was able to pick up that の meant possession in Japanese despite knowing absolutely nothing about the language, because I had some Japanese Pokemon cards (couldn't tell you how i got them) and when you've got cards you know are "Koga's Koffing", "Koga's Weedle", and "Misty's Starmie", you can process-of-elimination your way through it.

• The strings of matching kana on the Koga cards must be his name, so the rest of those names must be Koffing and Weedle, respectively.
• If I port the word order over, Misty and Starmie's names should follow the same pattern.
• の is a shared element on the cards that isn't part of their names, so the only thing remaining is that it marks possession (or, as I understood it at the time, it's the Japanese version of apostrophe + s). 

**

 All right, I think I've got enough to work with here.

• Mothership adventure set in abandoned colony previously inhabited by a group that kept to themselves (for whatever reason); colonists have their own language spoken nowhere else.
• Computer systems are either down (so you can't just google-translate them) or locked behind figuring out passwords, program names, and executable commands.
• If there are any survivors, they need to be encountered after the main language puzzle is solved. 
• There's a classroom for the colony children with books printed on-site. Since this is a treasure trove for solving the puzzle, there needs to be some sort of obstacle between the players and getting in that can't just be forced. The reveal that it's a classroom could be really meaningful if the players don't know what's behind the blockage until they get in.
• Signs, warnings, and maps are easy ways to get some clues and basic words in.
• Assigning sounds to symbols will need some sort of video or audio component. There could be subtitles on a video, or you could cross-reference the A/V clue with another document (a work schedule, an attendance sheet, etc)
• This is going to involve a LOT of handouts: these will need to be formatted for home printing & cutting out sections (numbered index cards?)
• Add a horrible monster and some reason the PCs can't leave until they do something, and you've got a stew going.  

Solid start, I'll keep you posted if it goes anywhere. 

Romanizing Cthulhu 3: Breakthrough

• Part 1
• Part 2 

Back on this again, but now with something to actually show for it. Dump the previous two posts out the window, I've cooked up an actual, functional, etymology for the ol’ squid head. This is extremely silly on paper, but brings with it some potentially interesting lore threads or complications if you want to shake up the Mythos in your own games or stories. 

This will ignore everything in the HPL letter cited in Part 1: he wasn't concerned with this shit and so there's an inescapable disconnect between the intended pronunciation, intended narrative role, and actual execution that would undermine the entire exercise (see: the last two posts)

Core Assumption A: The similarities between “Cthulhu” and “chthonic” are etymological, rather than coincidental. “Cthonic” is a viable alternate spelling of the latter, which gives us our <cth>.

Core Assumption B: The Necronomicon’s chain of translation is as described in History of the Necronomicon: Arabic > Greek > Latin > English

Divergence 1: While John Dee still never completed his Latin > English translation of the Necronomicon in my version of events, he incorporated some elements of it (such as the name Cthulhu) in his other occult writings and from there those elements dispersed into modern esotericism.

Now to get rolling, chthonic is the adjectival version of Greek khthṓn (χθών), which generally means earth, soil, ground, country, world, etc. This comes from Proto-Hellenic *kʰtʰṓn, which in turn comes from the very well-attested Proto-Indo-European *dʰéǵʰōm, which is generally considered to be the unattested / undefined-but-probably-just-means-earth root *dʰéǵʰ- plus a neuter noun ending *-om

There’s step one: *dʰéǵʰ- "earth, soil, ground"

But, in order to get that onset cluster we need to shift this to 0-grade instead of e-grade (don’t ask what this means, think of it as linguistics THAC0). There are a couple ways to do this, but I’m going to use the less common option of compounding two roots together to make a new root. The second root is going to need an *ow as its nucleus so we can get -ou- in Greek and -u- in Latin, and it can’t end in *-l because PIE roots can’t end in two resonants (m, n, l, r, y, w) in a row. Since it doesn’t have a leading consonant, that means it’ll start with a laryngeal, so our only actual options are *h₁ew-, *h₂ew-, *h₃ew-, and *Hew-. We’ve got a *h₁ewH-, meaning “to help; to protect”, which is fine, but *h₂ew- gets us the one-two punch of “to enjoy; to consume” (it’s the ultimate origin of “avarice”, and a good deal of other words involving desire, greed, or hunger).

Well if that ain’t a bit of spooky synchronicity.

Combining the two we end up with a new root of *dʰǵʰh₂ew-, which if we’re going by its literal components is “to earth-eat”; I’ll pencil it in as “to cause widespread destruction / catastrophe; to perform act-of-the-gods levels of ‘fuck this place in particular’.”

To this we’re going to add a root extension of *-l.  Root extensions are consonants that got glommed onto the ending of roots at some point but elicited no apparent change in meaning. This is technically not cheating, in the way that the rules technically do not ban dogs from playing basketball.

Final root form: *dʰǵʰh₂éwl- 

Last thing we need is an ending, which is going to be a two-step.

First step, we’ll add the ending *-os. This is not very unusual, as it seems that approximately 310% of PIE words end in *-os, in the same way as how about a gorillion words are related to either shining or swelling. But we’re specifically using the thematic o-grade *-os, which turns a verb into a noun meaning “the action or result of doing that verb”. 

PIE penultimate form: *dʰǵʰh₂ówlos - "the action of earth-eating"

Step two is shifting the accent to the final syllable, which will form an agentive meaning by way of a genitive construction: “of earth-eating” => “earth-eater”.

PIE full form: *Dʰǵʰh₂owlós - “earth-eater”

Then we run it through the sound changes and transcription

• Proto-Hellenic A: *Tʰkʰoulós
• Proto-Hellenic B: *Kʰtʰoulós
• Ancient Greek: (As above) 
• Latin: Chthūlus
• English A: Chthulu
• English B: Cthulhu

Wham bam thank you ma'am. 

Three more things before I finish up, all of which can lead into surprisingly deep wells of inspiration.

First off; this PIE form means that you can convert *Dʰǵʰh₂owlós into any Indo-European language you want with a bit of elbow grease - I shouldn’t have to tell you how extremely useful that is if you want to establish global scope. And if you deal in loanwords, it could spread to different language families!

Secondly, you might have noticed by now that there’s a conspicuous gap in the chain of transmission: If Cthulhu can be traced all the way back to PIE through Greek, that skips Arabic entirely. Did al-Hazra use a Greek name to begin with (and if he did, why?) Did the Byzantine translators scrub the original names out of the text and replace them with their own? Did al-Hazra even mention Cthulhu at all, or was he a later addition to the text? 

And perhaps most concerning of all: if you use this etymology, it would mean that a bunch of nomadic horse-warriors  (most-accepted hypothesis of now is that the Yamnaya culture were the core speakers of PIE) on the Pontic Caspian Steppe knew about Cthulhu. 

(Oh, would you look at that, a couple of hyperlinks to The Chronicle of the Daevas and The True Empire just fell off the back of a truck right in the middle of this post. I’m certain they contain absolutely no relevant inspirational material whatsoever.)

Bonus fourth fun fact; the Yamnaya culture co-existed with (and also potentially had a hand in destroying) the neighboring Cucuteni–Trypillia culture, who are part of the burned house horizon. Every 70-80 years the Cucuteni-Trypillia would not just burn their settlements to the ground and relocate, they’d burn them with such intensity that the wattle-and-daub would vitrify like clay in a kiln. They burnt their houses so completely that archaeologists are still not entirely sure how they did it.

Food for thought. 

E: u/YuunofYork brought up some significant critiques when I posted this on reddit, which I've linked to here.

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.

Romanizing Cthulhu, Part 2

Part 1

In a surprising development that no one could have possibly predicted, the inspirational well (and the fun) for this idle thought experiment ran dry very quickly. The truth can’t really be avoided; in their attempts to make “alien names”, Mythos authors mostly just replicated the sounds and forms of English words. Even those ludicrous consonant clusters just get broken up with epenthetic schwas if you try saying them out loud.

Ah well. I went into this knowing it was unlikely to amount to much.

Anyway, this post will contain all the meaningful thoughts I wrote prior to giving up.  With that done I can free up the mental hard drive space for the next fixation.

**

Now, before we start, I have a couple significant observations that could use expounding on.

Yi romanization isn’t viable on the whole 

As much as I would like to include it for novelty’s sake, I must concede that we’re using English orthography for the stop consonants. Saner that way.

The rarity of <e>
Outside of <ee> digraphs, the only places I have found it in the core HPL namelist are Gnopkeh, Y’ha-nthlei, R’lyeh, Yhe, Yeb, Nyarlathotep, Rhan-Tegoth, the nonce word “l’geb” from an incantation in Charles Dexter Ward, and a few locations in the Dreamlands.

Going by our earlier guidelines and dropping Nyarly, that gives us three /ɛ/, two /e/, and one /ɛj/

(R’lyeh is called “Relex” in The Mound, but I don’t have anything useful to pull from that at the moment)

That is an exceptionally small selection considering how many nonsense names we are dealing with, to the point where I am reasonably convinced that the mid front vowels don’t exist at all. I haven’t found evidence of a minimal pair yet to make the call.

(A minimal pair is when you have two phonemes in the same environment that, when swapped, would change the meaning of a word. A simple example would be pen vs pan (/pɛn/ vs /pæn/), which has the minimal pair of ɛ and æ.

I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled on this one, to see what I can cook up.

BACK TO THE LAB AGAIN

Picking up where we last left off, I’m going to focus on names that give us new rules or interesting new phonemes; the majority of Lovecraft’s names are actually quite tame and they don’t really have anything interesting to analyze

#3: Gyaa-yothn

A minor monster from The Mound, a story that will have outsize representation in this series (ed: It did not) for its higher-than-average percentage of weird names. This one can give us a couple of extra rules that are blessedly self-evident:

• HPL 7:  <aa> => /a:/
• Giving us a nice balanced triangle of long vowels.
• HPL 8:  CyV indicates that the preceding consonant is palatalized
• In this case, this is a straightforward  /ɟ/
• HPL 9: Syllabic consonants can serve as syllable nuclei
• This is going to be a huge help later on with those really absurd clusters. While we only have /n̩/ for now, /l̩/, /r̩/, and /m̩/ are likely.
• /-n̩/ is explicitly a pluralization affix in the story (no sign if it has any other function), and Yoth is the name of a place, so we have a surprising amount of grammar to potentially work with.
• Specifically, compound constructs seem to be built as [root]--[modifier] + [ending]; “gyaa-yoth” in the singular is something like “a gyaa, from Yoth” or “a Yothic gyaa”

#4: Yhe and Y’ha-nthlei

We get a double minimal pair here (at least according to our common sense rule of “if it’s spelled differently, it’s pronounced differently”): <y’h> and <yh> are not the same, and <e> and <a> are not the same.

<yh> is going to be a fricative due to HPL 6, and since the consonant component is the palatal approximate /j/ that’ll leave us with the voiced palatal fricative /ʝ/. Nice and easy. <y’h> can wait until we try to tackle apostrophes.

<ei> and <e> are going to be a pain in the ass, because in English these are treated as the same thing: we stick a /j/ glide after /e/ because English doesn’t like vowels sitting next to each other, but we stick that glide in even when there isn’t a vowel after it. But if we are going by what we’ve been given, /ɛ/ /e/ and /ɛj/ probably form a minimal trio in Aklo because they all show up in word-final position.

We’ll set that one aside for now. However the vowel is pronounced, <nthl> is a pretty obvious /n̩.θl/

#5 The god-damn apostrophes

Ah, the apostrophe. The bane of spec-fic since time immemorial, yet somehow they endure to the present day (See: local space-fascist frog-person Lē Zel from some video game)

In real languages, apostrophes can be used for:

• A glottal stop (ex. Hawai’i)
• A sign that letters or sounds have been elided (ex. cannot => can’t)
• An unwritten schwa (this is how the SFF apostrophe is typically pronounced)
• An ejective stop (this is how ejectives are written in IPA)
• An aspirated stop (as in Wade-Giles romanization of Mandarin)
• A marker to clarify if two sounds do or don’t form a cluster
• A marker to differentiate between phonemes that would otherwise use the same letters (ex. Breton uses <ch> for /tʃ/, and <c’h> for /x/ and /ɣ/
• A glottalized consonant

Since none of these authors gave a shit about any of this and just threw them into their alien names willy-nilly,  I’ll be using a similarly eclectic approach and give the apostrophe different realizations depending on its environment. Let’s look at our proper noun list and see what patterns we can find (limiting the survey to HPL alone for now).

• Y’ha-nthlei
• K’n-yan
• Thuum’ha
• T’la-yub
• Y’m-bhi
• L’thaa
• N’Kai
• K’thun
• S’ngac
• R’lyeh

Nearly all of these are word-initial C’C clusters preceding a vowel. There’s more variety in the strings of speech we get in The Call of Cthulhu  and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward

• Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn
• Y'ai 'ng'ngah, Yog-Sothoth h'ee - l'geb f'ai throdog
• Ogthrod ai'f geb'l-ee'h Yog-Sothoth 'ngah'ng ai'y zhro

The CDW lines have more to them, stick a pin in that for now.

Our simplest apostrophe is found in “Thuum’ha”, where it’s conveniently placed between two consonants at an apparent syllable boundary. That’s a pretty clear indicator that it is meant to designate that the syllables are split <thuum> and <ha>, rather than <thuu> and <mha>. It’d be helpful if we can find an <mh> cluster to compare it against, but even if we can’t I feel this is an easy one to pencil in under rule HPL 5.

Type 0 Apostrophe: used to denote either a glottal stop (when between two vowels) or a short pause (when between two syllables at a syllable boundary.

We haven’t seen the intervocalic version yet, but it’s such a common usage of apostrophes that I feel confident in including it.

Next up, we have our most common apostrophe usage, a word-initial C’C cluster. This is a really uncommon cluster in real-world languages (which is probably why it is so common in sci-fi), and our only real clue is that <y’h> and <yh> are differentiated.

Seeing no better option, I pencilled these in as click consonants, for the following reasons:

• Weirdo racists like those employed at Miskatonic would definitely consider clicks to be unknowable and alien, despite the fact that human toddlers can make them perfectly fine when raised in a language that has them.
• Weirdo racists like those employed at Miskatonic would probably brew up some bonkers ways of representing them.
• Most of these consonant-apostrophe-consonant clusters are word initial, and real-life click languages nearly always limit clicks to initial positions (usually the word or root, sometimes the syllable)

I have in my notes a sketch of how to determine what cluster equals what click, but like I said up top, the well is dry and there ain’t much to go on.

Type 1 Apostrophe: Word-initial consonant-apostrophe-consonant clusters are trigraphs representing click consonants.

Now, the bit for CDW that I stuck a pin in has one thing that could be interesting - the incantation is described as being “syllabically reversed” in its second half. That is, the syllables, not the individual sounds, are placed in reversed order. We end up with a pair of 'ng'ngah and  'ngah'ng; splitting that up we end up with ‘ng and ‘ngah - normally this would be a sure-fire sign of something like preglottalization, but I am proven a fool immediately by the next-door pair of y'ai and ai’y, where the apostrophe is clearly not tied to the syllable itself.

It was at this point that I got bored admitted defeat.

SO WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED

1. Sometimes I have stupid ideas that I shouldn’t entertain, but end up putting too much thought into anyway.
2. Science-fiction authors should have their apostrophe keys removed until they can prove they can use them responsibly.
3. Reality will always be stranger than fiction in ways that most authors will never be able to match, especially with language: Nuxalk contains many, many words that have no vowels at all, the textbook example being the grammatically correct but unlikely to be regularly used clhp’xwlhtlhplhhskwts’ (IPA: xɬpʼχʷɬtʰɬpʰɬːskʷʰt͡sʼ), which translates to "he had had (in his possession) a bunchberry plant".

HPL would probably spontaneously combust (in a highly ironic fashion) if he ever heard any of the Caucasian languages (that is, languages from the Caucuses). Dude had a mental breakdown over the existence of the Welsh; Ubykh has (well, had. Last speaker died in 1992) 84 consonants and two vowels.

Cthulhu ain't shit, phonologically speaking.
 

Romanizing Cthulhu

Torpishev

In order to get back into the groove and get more blogging done, I want to do more posts that don’t have a plan or an end goal. Just an “oh that’s neat” and boom, a post be happening.

This is not, unfortunately, a scenario of late-republic era Rome dealing with gribbly space monsters. It is also not a Old God dating sim: It’s me getting into the weeds about linguistics. Namely, the linguistics of the names of alien gods written by a weird old racist and a bunch of pastiche-writing hacks: I am going to, against all logic and reason, attempt to reverse-engineer the pronunciation of the Great Old Ones by way of how their names are written.

Gods help me.

I’m going to be operating under some core assumptions:

1. All of the names we see as readers are Latin-script romanizations of the prehistoric liturgical language Aklo.
2. All the phonemes of Aklo are pronounceable by human beings.
3. Later scholars and occultists just did an extremely shitty romanization job.
4. The romanized names we see are the work of Miskatonic University scholars working with Aklo texts. They are American, working from around 1840-1940, and have some very strange ideas about what classifies as good orthography. They will be influenced by Greek / Latin / English phonotactics and orthography.
   
5. I am flagrantly disregarding what HPL said about the words being crude approximations of unpronounceable alien names, because if the names were actually unpronounceable and alien no one would be able to identify that they were names or even words to begin with: you’d basically just end up with random onomatopoeia of bodily noises. Which is a great twist thematically - imagine having ants call you an approximation of the sound of your knees cracking. But that would undermine the entire exercise by declaring all of it wholly meaningless, and that’s boring.  Also the undercurrent of “these (not-white) cultists can only bastardize a language they cannot comprehend, what do you mean they have their own language and their own names for things” is best left avoided.
6. Cases where the same letter or cluster can have different realizations will be predictable according to the environment.
   
7. In cases of ambiguity, I will default to whatever I think is the most interesting.
8. Each real-world mythos author is treated as a separate in-universe translator, and they will all have their own personal orthographies: sometimes the same sound will be transcribed two different ways.
9. In cases where I have to decide if a string of letters means X or Y, I will go with the “more canon” option, using the schema found here: HPL -> Weird Tales contemporaries -> Derleth & later writers -> Chaosium
10. Rules and pronunciations can and will be revised and refined as we go along.
11. I will fill out gaps in consonant series as I see fit.
    
12. I am taking this way more seriously than any of these guys did, and can and will ignore any of the preceding rules as I feel like it.
    

I will be using some weird transcription symbols, don’t worry about them.

• <angle brackets> are orthography - the letters used, not the sounds: <pool>
• [square brackets]  are narrow transcription: exactly what sounds are being made: [pʰu:l]
• /slashes/ are broad transcription, which focuses on the most relevant features of the sounds and allows for a certain amount of variability: /pu:l/

And now that I have bored you all senseless with minutiae, let’s get cracking with the big lad himself.

#1: Cthulhu

First not just because he’s the poster boy, but because we actually do get a pronunciation from HPL in a 1934 letter to Duane Rimel.

“The actual sound—as nearly as human organs could imitate it or human letters record it—may be taken as something like Khlûl'-hloo, with the first syllable pronounced gutturally and very thickly. The u is about like that in full; and the first syllable is not unlike klul in sound, since the h represents the guttural thickness. The second syllable is not very well rendered—the l sound being unrepresented.”

And we are off to the races with a bad start because “guttural” does not have a meaningful definition in phonetics. It’s used variously to describe velar, uvular, pharyngeal, and glottal consonants, with a high score on weird racism what with how the velar stops /k/ and /g/ and the glottal fricative /h/ aren’t gutteral, but velar fricatives /x/, /ɣ/, and voiced glottal fricative /ɦ/ are (because they aren’t in English but are featured in languages that Anglophones have commonly been at war with).

The consonant cluster we get is <CTH>, which is clearly meant to ape the Greek “chthonic”. That was pronounced with a /kʰtʰ/ in the Classical period and then shifted to /xθ/ by the time of Byzantium. Neither of those has an l in it anywhere, and his “h represents guttural thickness” isn’t helpful either: it could be /x/, since <KH> is often used for it in Greek-origin words, but he uses <CTH> instead of <KH> in the story. It could be /χ/, and someone on Wikipedia (citing no one but themselves) claims it’s the classic Klingon /q͡χ/. Since we don’t really have any better options at the moment, let’s pivot to the vowels.

The vowels actually give us something to work with. Double-checking my regional phonology, it looks for the time being that Rhode Island Eastern New England English still uses /ʊ/ for “full”. Using <oo> for /u:/ is a time-honored tradition for authors who want to sound like Victorian gentleman writing derogatory things about India, which certainly fits ol’ HPL to a T. That’s an easy rule to establish.

HPL 1: <oo> and <ee> represent /u:/ and /i:/

The second rule we can establish here is even more important: /u/ and /ʊ/ form a tense-lax pair, and in Cthulhu /  Khlûl'-hloo we get /u/ in an open syllable and /ʊ/ in a closed one. This is a handy tool that will help us later.

[Aside: /ʊ/ is a weird phoneme in English; in most environments it unrounded and became /ʌ/ or /ə/ (Thank you FOOT-STRUT split, ya bastard). He did say "about like that in full", which I am more than willing to use as my get out of ʊ free card.]

HPL 2: Tense vowels become lax in closed syllables {a, e, i, o, u} => {æ, ɛ, ɪ, ɔ, ʊ} / _ C {C, #}

Back to consonants: “thickly” of course means jack all: <lh> is typically used to stand in for /ʎ/ or /ɬ/, <hl> is often used for /ɬ/ as well, but the way HPL writes the name in the letter indicates it’s meant as two separate phonemes on a syllable division, so that’s a no go. He says that he left out the prevocalic <l> from “hloo”, which he also left out from <Khlûl>. And then there’s that apostrophe stuck in there - if he was actually writing this in IPA,  that would mark primary stress on <hloo>, but he’s dividing the syllables up with a dash and the apostrophe is attached to the end of  <Khlûl> so I am going to say it’s a glottal stop between syllables.

A dead end, perhaps? If he’s just going to leave out sounds, who is to say how any of this is said? Is this all a doomed enterprise?

Not if we use PATTERN RECOGNITION.

Both of those invisible <l> are stuck between a consonant and a back vowel, which would indicate that the presence of a back vowel regularly changes the sound of the consonant before it. HPL just uses <l> and says it’s “thick”, but I actually lied a bit before:  “Thick” does help us here. It confirms that the <l> is not /[l], but it could be [ɫ] or [ɬ]. The first of those just so happens to be called the “dark L” (it’s the L in “pool” in English) and possesses the feature [velarized]. And there is a language where consonants get velarized before back vowels, spoken by people HPL would have had near the top of his list of scary foreigners worshiping dark gods out in the hills

Irish.

HPL 3: Consonants gain the secondary articulation [velarized] when preceding a back vowel.

(Irish does it for /a/, /o/ and /u/, I am playing conservatively here and going with just the back vowels for now)

The <hloo> would be /hˠu:/ under this schema, but I like a good /ɬ/; /ɬˠ/ is a phoneme so rare the only evidence I can find of it is in reconstructions of Proto-Semitic and possibly Moksha (Wikipedia doesn’t include it, PHOIBLE cites one Russian-language paper from 1993).

Executive Decision 1: <h> = /ɬ/, unless part of a consonant cluster representing another phoneme; /h/ is not part of Aklo's phonology.

HPL 4: <l> is /ɫ/ when following a back vowel.

HPL 5: A glottal stop may be added to break up same-place/similar-manner clusters to differentiate syllables and prevent assimilation.

Which means that, for the time being and pending future revisions, <-ULHU> is the romanization of  /- -ˠʊɫʔ.ɬˠu:/.

I swear this will get interesting eventually. And faster!

#2: Yog-Sothoth

We take a wild 180 from obtuse to relatively easy. The syllables go closed-open-closed and there’s nothing weird about the <y> or the <s>. The  <th> could be either /θ/ or /tʰ/ (since the latter often turned into the former), and we don’t really have any justification for /tʰ/ that outweighs “English writer, he’s using /θ/”.

That is going to be the basis of an extremely convenient rule going forward, but it’s a bit too plain for me. So I’m going to cheat a little and do something weird with the stops.

Many languages around the world distinguish their stops not by voicing (vocal cord vibration) but by aspiration (little puff of hair when you say it). English doesn’t, which is why we say that <p> makes the same sound in “pen” and “spin” (first is aspirated, second isn’t). Mandarin Chinese does, but instead of adding h everywhere (like the Romans did when transcribing Greek) or throwing in apostrophes (curse you Wade-Giles!), Pinyin romanization uses <p> for /pʰ/ and <b> for <p>.

The Nuosu (Northern Yi) language (also in China) (which has a rad script) features a 3-way split between aspirated, plain, and voiced stops, which goes like this: <p, b, bb> => /pʰ, p, b/, and wouldn’t you know it, these mythos names have all three of those inputs. Rounding out the selection I am pencilling in that <pp> or a similar pair follows the old Haida orthography of being an ejective. This is in total violation of the premise that Miskatonic scholars invented this romanization, and I don’t care, that was a flimsy premise anyway.

HPL 6: [consonant] + h = [fricative]; <ph, th, sh, zh, kh, gh> => /f, θ, ʃ, ʒ, x, ɣ/

Executive Decision 2: <p, ph, pp, b, bh, bb> => /pʰ, f, p’, p, v, b/

Which all gives us the final result of /jɔk sˠo.θˠɔθ/

(There's no velarization on /j/ because I cannot find a single example in PHOIBLE)

Executive Descision 3: Only labial and dorsal consonants get velarized by HPL 3

(Friendly reminder that “Thoth” in Greek is spelled Θώθ)

And with one and a half in the can, our current HPL phonology looks like:

Consonants: k, θ, s, ɫ, ɬ, j
Vowels: ɔ, o, ʊ, u, u:

Not much to start with, but we’ll be getting a lot more soon enough.

Something to Consider for Later

Looking through the names specific to HPL, I have noticed a very odd, but potentially very helpful pattern: <e> is almost entirely non-existent outside of Dreamlands locations. So far, I've found it only in the words R'lyeh, Yeb, Yhe, Y'ha-nthlei, Dhole, Nyarlathotep, and Gnoph-keh. Four of those look to be a /ɛ/, one is silent, one as /e/, and  the <ei> could be realized as /e:/, but having only one instance of the latter two at all makes me think that we have a gap in the vowel system. <e> might be a leftover, it might represent something else, or it might just be an extremely marginal phoneme. Something to play around with later.

Bonus Round: Nyarlathotep

This is the exception I mentioned earlier; that -hotep marks this as a clearly Egyptian name, or at least HPL’s poor approximation of one. Well, an hour or so on Wiktionary allowed me to kludge together the following:

• n(j) - negation prefix
• j’rr - (of eyes) to become weak, dimmed, or cloudy
• ‘t - a specific moment or span of time
• ḥtp - to be satisfied or content

Which gives us <nj-j’rr-’t-ḥtp> and a modern Egyptological pronunciation of /ni.ɑ.rɛr.ɑt.ho.tɛp/ (the actual Egyptian would have been radically different, but so long as we don’t call pharaoh's scribes to check the grammar I think we can get away with it.)

 “The moment of undimmed eyes is satisfied.”

Yeah, that checks out.

Some Thoughts About Language in RPGs

In my conlang dabbling, I have thought to myself "self, what about just a very simple naming language for use in RPGs for a bit of inspiration and flavor?"

Well, that project hasn't gotten off the ground and is also for a very niche audience (this is my niche, it was made for me!). But I remain on the linguistics kick and have been thinking of more practical ways of using it in games. This post will entail two of them. Several other people have written about this subject already (including me), and I assure you I will write about it again.
 

Scripts and Ciphers

The principle is simple: you use a non-Latin script as a cipher for English. The cipher represents an in-game language unknown to the characters, and a players learning to decode the script is representative of their character learning the language.

You can make up your own if you so feel like it, but there are also plenty of scripts out there to choose from, both actual and artistic. Omniglot is your friend here, especially the pages for alternate methods of writing English and scripts for conlangs. Quality varies significantly, but there is sufficient quantity to make that a non-issue. Top posts on r/neography will likely do good for you as well.

In practice, I would recommend mixing up the presentation if you are using multiple languages. Cipher other languages that would be relatively easy for players to decipher (Latin would be the obvious choice, but depending on your players this can get a lot more complex). Cut up or recombine words. Spell things phonetically, or use different romanization (ex: x for sh, j for y). Use single letters to represent entire consonant clusters or dipthongs. Use a script with phonemes that don't match up exactly with those of English and get creative. Remove vowels. Remove spaces. Apply a ROT13 or other cipher to the original text before changing the script. Or just limit yourself to one script - it worked for Tunic.

Or just ignore all that and use them purely for handout flavor. Playing a dwarf? Your character sheet has X script on it. This is probably the easiest method.

Some favorites of mine, in no particular order, chosen mostly according to raw aesthetic appeal.

• Mkhedruli - It's like Tengwar but real. 10/10, no notes.
• Glagolitic - The Witcher uses this script, and for good reason - another one with primo aesthetics
• Deseret - This alphabet is actually terrible, but that does work in its benefit as a cipher - it's got loads of similar-looking letters and false friends with Latin characters, which can make for a good puzzle.
• Shavian - I can't figure out if this is ugly and unreadable or tightly designed and slick. Whatever. It's an option, and it's here.
• Ditema-tsa-dinoko - The languages this script was designed for don't have a particularly large phonetic overlap with English, so if you use it you'll either need to add characters, or change a lot of consonants. But as is a recurring theme here, it looks fantastic, especially if used in the combined / colorful forms.
• Canadian Aboriginal Syballics - Another script that doesn't have a lot of English overlap (though Omniglot does feature a variant someone made to that end). Also, I think they are extremely cool and more people should know about them in general.
• Sitelen Sitelen - The fancy version of writing Toki Pona. Logographic, so you will be stuck using Toki Pona's minimalist wordlist and lack of grammar unless you decide to mix it in with other scripts (it would make for a very good cartouche system, honestly, especially with this handy vector renderer)
• Zbaeleroma - Originally designed for Lojban. Decent aesthetics, won't be too complicated to crack (especially if players know voiced / unvoiced consonant pairs)
• Ithkuil 4 - Now, using the full version would be highly impractical, but there's a simplified version down at the bottom of the page that's a normal abugida. I think this is a really good option, honestly: the phonology has significant overlap with English, and it's obscure enough wrt how vowels and consonant clusters are written that it should prove a not-too-difficult challenge.
• Tunic runes - If your players haven't played Tunic, there's no reason not to use it. It works!
• Heaven's Vault script - Like Sitelen Sitelen above, this one will require a bit of additional effort, as its connected to an oligosynthetic language and you'll have to bolt together conceptual characters into words of any sort of complexity. But it is beautiful, and there is a considerable pre-existing corpus of those complex words, thanks to the game being all about translation.
• Warframe scripts - The game's got five of them (Orokin, Grineer, Corpus, Solaris, and Ostron) in varying levels of complexity and readability, all with different vibes. Personally I like Ostron and Corpus best.
  
• Hallownest Script - It's Just Really Neat.
  
• Aurebesh variants - While the baseline script is a simple 1:1 English cipher and I don't think it looks all that good, with a little creative orthography and one of these variant fonts you can get something pretty cool out of it.
• Hylian Scripts - Pretty recognizable, but decent options to keep in the back pocket.
• Blissom's English Syllabary - For when you want to look like katakana. I like this one quite a lot.

Bonus: Rapid-Fire Omniglot Selections
Curvetic; Heptal; Reality; Tennent; Westonian; Oxidilogi, 

 

The Languages of Generic Vernacular Fantasyland

This is not particularly practical, but it is at least a bit of additional flavor that can be used for your Generic Vernacular Fantasy Land.

Commonplace Languages

Being those that a human being can speak without magical means.

Elvish - An incredibly difficult language to learn - in great part for an inventory heavy in sounds considered rare in human languages, but even more so because the written language fossilized millennia ago, sound change has been moving along ever since, and the overall conservative current in elvish society has sunk every proposed attempt at spelling reform.

• Features: Triconsonantal roots; tones; uvular series; retroflex series; click consonants; whistle components; pure abjad.

Dwarfish - Central to the dwarvish languages (and adopted by many languages of neighboring humans) is a logographic script carefully regulated by the centralized stonecarver councils of the Mountainhomes. As the meanings of characters remain the same (this is easier to accomplish with a dwarven mindset, less so with humans) they allow for easy transfer of information between unrelated and incompatible languages, and thus have become the adopted standard in nearly all dwarven civilizations.

• Features: Analytic; isolating; tap-code register (domesticated knockers are used to send long-distance; high speed messages down in the caves); numerical forms used for high-density communication

Halfling - A limited phonology and restrictive syllable structure mean homophones are common, puns are rampant, and transcription into other writing systems is extremely difficult. 

• Features: Extensive noun-class system, unique script, plain/aspirated/ejective distinction, ergative-absolutive alignment. Highly adaptable derivation of obscene terms. Let's hear it for tɬ!

Martian - There are technically three Martian language families - the most widely known off of Mars (and to non-Martians) is that of the now-liberated Red Martian underclass.

• Features: Prenasalized stops; broad/slender (velarized/palatized) consonant distinction; sandhi; ye gods those are some large consonant clusters; phonemic vowel length; perfect direction; beautiful calligraphic script.

Orc - An experiment by sorcerers to enforce hard Sapir-Worf Hypothesis on their soldier-slave legions. Thankfully, hard Sapir-Worf is bullshit, and so in the wake of the overthrow of the Dark Lords, orcs have taken on some very creative strategies to overcome the artificial limitations of their original language. While loan words are often adapted from neighboring languages, more popular by far is making creative compounds out of the existing orcish lexicon.

• Features: Internally-developed abugida recently adopted; artificially regular grammar and limited vocabulary; measure words; robust neologism formation; frequent loanword adoption; complex system of formal address dismantled and repurposed.

Common - There are four different languages called "the common tongue".

• Imperial A - The language of the previous empire to rule the region; serves as a shared second language among both those once ruled by Empire A and those on the outside who wished to interact with it. Mildly synthetic, polypersonal agreement, grammatical gender, robust derivation system allows for easy formation of new words. Dialectic diversity will eventually lead to formation of separate languages.

• Imperial B - The language of the current empire. The standard for politics, magecraft, military matters and sanctioned religions. Not commonly used by the underclasses (save in rebellious territories, where standard practice is total replacement of indigenous languages through imperial schooling). Highly agglutinative, irregular verb morphology, vowel harmony system, a couple leftover laryngeals in the phonology.

• Free Peoples - A trade language of peoples bordering the empire. Simple phonology with (mostly) strict CV syllable structure, nasal vowel series, and I sure hope you like verbs because we've got some beautiful polysynthesis going on here. Extensive tense-aspect-mood morphology.

• Friend-Sign - The most widespread and useful of common languages, as it is signable by any being with at least two arms and four fingers (regardless of their mouth and throat structure). A written version later emerged, representing the positions and movements of the most common elements of the signed form, and has since become equally widespread and useful.

Uncommon Languages

Being those that require some manner of magical assistance to speak or comprehend.

Ghoul - Vocal components often described as consisting of "gibbering", "yipping", "howling", "meeping", "keening" and "snuffling". Heavily dependent on scent to carry additional information; humans both lack the ability to detect the meaning-shades imparted by these scent-markers, and are repulsed by the use of rotting flesh, skin oils, urine, and fecal matter as components of grammar. Ghouls' vocal mimicry permits them to speak human languages, but makes communication no less unpleasant to those human participants.

Deep One - The extreme physiological variety between icthropai lineages means that their languages trend towards mutual unintelligibility. Despite this, there are some common elements shared (often in conjunction with each other) among them: ultrasonic whistles and clicks, carapace / mandible / claw scraping, pressure bubbles, modulated electric currents, and color change. Communication between lineages and with humans will need either specially-engineered translator hybrids or direct use of magic.  

Giant - The languages of the giants are heard by humans only as a deep, distant rumbling, as if a train is passing by. Their immense size (and thus, the immense size of their vocal cords) render their speech so deep that most of it exists in the infrasonic, well outside of the human hearing range. Their unique chambered respiratory systems (a necessity in getting sufficient oxygen) permit them to inhale and exhale simultaneously and without ceasing, as if playing the bagpipes.

Dragon - Imagine being able to remember that you once knew the song of the sun, but not able to remember the notes. That is what it is like to be a dragon - to be aware that you are becoming more and more like an animal with each passing season and, unable to stop it, losing that awareness until there is nothing left.

Aboleth (Benthic) - The ordovician masters communicate mind-to-mind, through direct transferal of their trench-deep thought. If an aboleth ever needs to speak to a non-aboleth, it will simply tear the language-knowledge out of the victim's mind, re-assemble it in the necessary order, and play it back in the victim's own voice.

Goblin - Gobbledegoblin is the linguistic form of Calvinball - perpetually in flux and hewing to no rules longer than what's considered entertaining. It's a funhouse mirror of the listener's native language, mocking prescriptivism and propriety with purposefully "incorrect" usage and absurd traits (noun classes based on species of freshwater fish, armpit-fart tone systems, common words get their meanings radically changed, so on and so forth). It is more of a language game than a language itself, which is fitting for goblins.

Lithic - Delicate organs of vibrating crystal; clusters of silicate chimes; wind howling through funnels of sculpted stone. A few of the lithic ambassadors can use these features to imitate human languages; a skilled occultist will be required as an intermediary otherwise. There are theories that these features are either mostly ornamental or engineered specifically for human benefit, and that lithics an home in the upper mantle instead communicate through controlled release of radioactive material.

Imperial Elder - The pentatone musical language used by the Elder Empire is an echo of the flautists of the azothic court of MANA-YOOD-SUSHAI and the drumming of great Skarl. Whether it was purposeful imitation, coincidence, or the result of some sensitivity to the Dreamer and its attendants is unknown, and perhaps never known to begin with. The written form (recovered in a vast corpus from the Antarctic capital city) is a direct graphical depiction of Elder mouthparts and the appropriate tones for each note-concept - while incredibly complex to learn and impossible to speak without aid, machine translation has made impressive advances towards translation.  

Imperial Shoggoth Interface Language - A code of chemical signals and truncated musical tones, used to give commands to the amorphous beings. While the hated enslavers are long dead, hard-coded recognition of the Interface Language remains in the mainline descendant clades. The Polyps and Dark Young carved this knowledge out of themselvesmillions of years ago.

Yuggothic - A combination of bioluminescence, mycelium-ferried electro-chemical signals, chitin-clicks, and hyperspatial ripples. Undeciphered; even those who are host to symbiotic strains of the yuggothic mega-organisms are incapable of describing how any of the components correlate to discrete information.

Mi-Go Machine Interface Language - Undeciphered coding language used in the brain-interfaces of human-compatible Mi-Go hard-tech.

Yithian - We only have knowledge of the scribal shorthand script through the tablets recovered from the Pnakotic ruins, but this has proven enough to serve as a (slow, incomplete) means of deciphering other texts found within the library.

Carcosan - [THRONE DECREE 6511-45 - ANY PERSONS FOUND TO SPEAK THE LANGUAGE REFERRED TO BY SAFEGUARD EUPHEMISM 'SAFFRON' WILL BE SENTENCED TO DEATH ALONGSIDE ALL KIN WITHIN FIVE DEGREES OF RELATION]

Last are the languages that I didn't get around to writing meaningful blurbs for but wanted to mention for completion's sake: Kobold, Cynocephalic, Akeloi, Drow, Derro, Cetacean, Octopode, Corvid, Ape Sign, Elephantine, Alignment Languages, Class Languages