Andreas's Conlanging Pages

I made conlangs.
People told me to do a web presentation of them.
The one thing led to the other, and this page appeared.

If you're reading this, I strongly suspect that you know what a conlang is. I'm going to explain it anyway; it's an abbreviation for "constructed language", that is, a language that has been deliberately constructed by one or more individuals rather than has developed naturally. I belong to the subset of conlangers (=people who create conlangs, or people who conlang) who do it as hobby, rather than, for instance, try to create a so-called international auxiliary language, like Esperanto. It may seem to be a weird hobby, but then there are people who like soccer. The only detrimental effects of the hobby reported are hugely increased knowledge of linguistics and a tendency to mumble in languages that nobody else understands. Oh, and people may think that you're a nerd, too. But that goes for practically any intellectual hobby.

Myself, I'm a physics/engineering student in Linköping, Sweden. I started conlanging in the mid-90s, inspired mainly by Tolkien. Some years later I, thanks to Daniel Andreasson, came into contact with the CONLANG mailing list, which has been a huge boost to my conlanging efforts and to my linguistics knowledge. I'd like to take the opportunity to thank the members of the CONLANG list for being the slightly obsessed bunch they are. And a special thanks to Christophe Grandsire for helping me getting this webspace.

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Much longer than conlanging, I've been creating imaginary worlds, or "coniverses" as I like to call them. Conlanging for me began as an aspect of world-building, and largely still is, altho' it has become a very important one. So, I'll sort my conlangs after what coniverse they belong to. Unfortunately, the inhabitants of my coniverses are about as bad as we at giving exciting names to their universes, so I shall have to refer to them with boringly descriptive primarily-world labels.

The SF Coniverse
The "present" of this coniverse is sometime around the year 25,000 AD. I've spent untold hours developing its history, politics, culture etc, and only succeeding in charting small bits of it's spatial extent and historical depth. That's what happens when you megalomanically creates a hopelessly huge coniverse. Linguistically, the chief attration is perhaps Tairezazh, the language of a interstellar empire centred on Earth, which of all my conlangs is the one I've worked the most on. The Tairezazh Grammar below is available in two versions, one with the "official" romanized orthography that I'm using in my own notes, which uses some signs that may not show up correctly on all systems, the second in a "safe" orthography that I think shall work on any browser. Pick your choice:

- Tairezazh Grammar (fancy orthography)
- Tairezazh Grammar (safe orthography)

Another conlang localized in this coniverse is Steienzh, a sister language of Tairezazh (in which it is called Steianzh), which is grammatically quite close to Tairezazh, but due to divergent sound-changes has a somewhat different sound. It contains alot more schwas to begin with, and is less prone to lengthy consonant clusters. Its grammar can be studied in the article below, which unfortunately isn't quite finished yet. It's, for now at least, only available in "fancy" orthography.

- Steienzh Grammar (fancy orthography)

Belonging to the same family are Telendlest and Searixina, also known under their Tairezan names Telenzh and Tsárizh, which are, this far, much less well developed than Tairezazh or Steienzh, but also rather similar in structure, although they only sport two and three cases, respectively, compared to Tairezazh's four and Steienzh's five. These four languages form the Klaishic language family.

The region of the galaxy where the Klaishic languages are spoken is known as Tshána. The other important language family of Tshána is the Vaikic, which includes Zenevin and Ethínin, as well as Altaii, the basics of which can be gleaned from this introduction:

- Introduction to Altaii (fancy orthography)

Zenevin and Ethínin are as yet mere sketches. The same is true of Kesheáras and Siréazh, which are also spoken in Tshána. Somewhat more fleshed out is Tersnuvu, which is spoken in a distant corner of the galaxy. It is a fusional language featuring umlaut plurals, of which I really should be writing something some day. Some work has also been done on the proto-languages Classical Klaish and Classical Vaikin, the immediate ancestors of the aforementioned families.

All of the above-mentioned languages, except Tersnuvu, are/were written in a script known in Tairezazh as the Maidzhen Klaish, a featural alphabetical script intended to be able to handle widely different languages. The presentation below is, for the time being, only available in the "fancy" orthography.

- The Maidzhen Klaish (fancy orthography)

The Magical Coniverse
This might somewhat unsympathetically be described as a standard Fantasy world. At any rate, it includes humans, elves, orcs, wizardry, etc. This far I've worked on two conlangs set in this coniverse; Yargish and Meghean.

Yargish, or, to use its own, slightly un-wieldly, term, U-Rakh U-Nayargiz-ung, is the ergative language of a group of Orc clans. I'm planning to write something more readable and comprehensive, but until then the interested may take a look at the 'Introduction' below, which is essentially a slightly enlarged and reworked version of a post to the CONLANG list. There is also a piece on the Yargish clans and their names.

- Introduction to Yargish
- Yargish Clans and Clan-Names

Meghean is spoken by an Elvish people living west and southwest of the Yargish-speaking Orcs. It's an accusative langaguage, featuring cliticized pronouns and easily the most complex orthography among my conlangs. The basics of the language can be learnt from the Introduction below. Check also out my translation of the Lord's Prayer into Meghean (Mephaph means simply "Our Father").

- Introduction to Meghean
- Mephaph: The Lord's Prayer in Meghean

The Pseudo-Arab Coniverse
This coniverse is quite sketchy; unusually for me, the conlang came first, and the coniverse developed as a mere setting for it. The language Kalini Sapak is loosely based on a Semitic model with consonantal roots taking vocalic infixes to create various word-forms, and the culture of its speakers, the Kalana, is loosely based on the pre-Islamic Arabs.

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Resources
Below follow some links and other material I feel may be of interest or use to readers of this site:

- The CXS ASCIIification of the IPA
The various phonetic transcriptions on this page are given using this scheme, because using IPA fonts is far from safe on the 'Net, and I'm too lazy for using images everywhere. There are, of course, quite a few different ASCIIification schemes to chose from - I have chosen this, which is a slight modification of the popular X-SAMPA scheme, because it is the one most commonly used on the CONLANG mailing list (from where I suspect most of my visitors are hailing), and because it is the one I'm the most familiar with.

- The CONLANG Mailing List
If you're reading this, I figure you probably know of the CONLANG list already. But in case you do not, here is the link to the page of the best list devoted to constructed languages on the 'Net.


Andreas Johansson***andjo at free dot fr