Lexember Day 20 - jugful

Ik bringa hǣma rœčifylin wīnis gā du žultina froðu þulan anmœuǧin þ·ufþlœusin. Þā genǧik wisna inča hēþia mīna.

‘I’ve brought a jugful of wine home for the winter holidays to endure encourage the good cheer. I’ll be in my room.’

Lexember Day 19 - double

Twīfauþs is the result of a rather unusual merger of two similar words with similar meanings. It’s almost not worth commenting on, except that the two words have completely different etymologies. In Early Modern Valthungian, these were two distinct words – twīfnas and twižafauþs. The twi has a semi-common source: twi- is a common Germanic prefix for ‘two’, while twī (with a long vowel) is part of a root form of the same word. The -f- of both words is completely coincidental, however... see below. (This adjective does not have a comparative or superlative form, but I didn’t feel like futzing around with the formatting to erase them.)

Lexember Day 18 - malice

 Today's lexembreme brought to you by Elphaba and pals.

Lexember Day 17 - now

Just a fun neologism-ex-contractio today. 

Lexember Day 16 – extract

This is the word you will find in your kitchen cabinet on the vanilla or almond extract.

“But Jamin,” you might wonder, “isn’t -ins limited to verbal nouns? Isn’t this an actual substantive noun?” 

To which might answer, “Yup! Language is freakin’ weird, man.” Yes, we would normally expect a weak īn-stem noun for the substantive form (giving us **ustréni) but that’s just… not what it is. I dunno what to tell you. It can also be a verbal noun, though (“extraction”).

In Valthungian cuisine, you will also hear a non-descript “extract” called for in recipes. (My own patnabran recipe calls for a full tablespoon of ustrénins!) This is a little bit like curry or dumplings, in that every Valthungian grandmother has a very specific recipe, and they’re all different, and each one swears that hers is the only “correct” one. My own Valthungian grandmother taught me the “prime number rule” for making ustrénins, and I’m not going to share it with you here, because she said she would haunt me, but it involves prime numbers of parts of vanilla, lemon, almond, and blood orange extracts, plus Grand Marnier and a couple of other secret ingredients. It’s definitely the best I’ve tried. The bottle on the left is the ustrénins from my own kitchen; I just refilled it! (And that’s what Valthungian cursive looks like, but that’s for another day…)

Lexember Day 15 - bear

Remember, remember, the Ides of Lexember! We’re halfway there, folks! 

I didn’t have room today to include the full etymology, so that’s your blog bonus today.

Wauðuskīča is made up of the word wauðus ‘forest’ (← MV wawðus ← OV vavdyus ← Grt. *walþus ← PGmc *walþuz) and the verb skītna ‘to shit’ (← MV scîtɴ ← OV *skijtan ← Grt. *skītan ← PGmc *skeitaną) with weak agentive ending ‑ia (← MV ‑ja ← OV ‑ja ← Grt. ‑ja ← PGmc ‑jô), which causes palatalization of the final consonant of the verb (ergo, skītia → skīča).

Lexember Day 14 - anthropology

As indicated on the slide, Valthungian has two suffixes that readily translate to ‘-ology’, but that translation can be more complicated in reverse. 

-wīsi is a field of study or an area of knowledge, e.g. lēkiwīsi ‘medicine, physiology’

-wite is a practice or profession, e.g. lēkiwite ‘medicine, medical practice’ – particularly a specialized medical practice like cardiology or neurology.

And wīte is unrelated to both of the above. It means ‘punishment’, so don’t try to substitute it in if you can’t remember which ‑ology you need! (Lēkiwīte isn’t a word, because we live in a civilised – usmētina – society!) 

So, keep your wits about you. Ahem. 

Some other examples:

• lēkiwīsi ‘study of medicine’
• lēkiwite ‘practice of (specialized) medicine’
• kwižiwīsi ‘biology’
• reðawīsi ‘geology’
• sinigawīsi ‘archaeology’
• tunglawīsi ‘astronomy’
• ǧužawīsi ‘zoology’
• hǣliwīsi ‘medicine, healing’
• hǣliwite ‘medical practice, naturopathy’
• līkawīsi ‘physics’
• rastawīsi ‘linguistics’
• stōmawīsi ‘chemistry’
• tungawīsi ‘grammar’
• forgāftiwīsi ‘history’
• wrotiwīsi ‘botany’
• rīkiwite ‘poitics’
• brǭstawite ‘beer-brewing’
• wiðrawīsi ‘meteorology, study of weather’
• wiðrawite ‘meteorology, weather forecasting’

Lexember Day 13 - thirteen times

Today, in honour of the 13ᵗʰ day of Lexember, I bring you an old word with a new twist. 

The word is missing from the Gothic corpus, but there is sufficient evidence to believe it was either *þritaihun or *þrijataihun, the equivalents of which were likely both present in Griutungi as *þritehun and *þrijatehun. But Gothic also had an alphabetic number system, inspired by the Greek, and in this system, the numeral 13 was rendered as ·ig· and this system continued to be used throughout Old Valthungian. In Middle Valthungian, likely starting jocularly, certain numerals which formed pronounceable words began to be “spoken” in place of their linguistic equivalents, and ig was one of them. 

Word games also developed with some of the numbers, and we also see the reverse process happening, resulting in words like fiðrahunda þrižatǣn – literally ‘four hundred thirteen’ – coming to be a slang term for ‘road, highway’, as 413 in Gothic numerals is ·wig·, which is also the accusative of wiǧ ‘road’.

For a while in Middle Valthungian, three words for ‘13’ existed in somewhat free variation: þrizjatæn being the most “correct,” þrîtæn the most common, and ig the most informal. In the transition to Early Modern Valthungian, however,  a metrical change took place in the language and caused many words with two adjacent stressed syllables to get an epenthetic vowel. Indeed, this led to the brief existence of “þrîatæn,” but it quickly fell out of use leaving only the formal þrižatǣn and the informal ig. It wasn’t long before someone smushed the two together, and þrigatǣn eventually became the most popular of the three options. (The other two are still in use, but þrigatǣn is vastly preferred.)

In case that all sounds like a lot to swallow, note that something very similar also happened to nineteen, where the very awkward-sounding njuntǣn or njunatǣn and iþ merged to give us niðatǣn; in this case, however, njunatǣn has fallen out of use completely.

The final element of this story is the suffix ‑þis, which from a distance looks like a simple ordinal or genitive, but is no such thing at all. It is derived from the Griutungi *þīhs (Gothic þeihs), which also exists as the independent word þīfs ‘time, occurrence’, which supplanted earlier *sinþam ‘times’ among the adverbialized numbers.

Anyway, Happy Friday the 13ᵗʰ of Lexember!

Lexember Day 12 - tower

I’m very tired. Practically unconscious already. I don’t even know how I’m still typing. If you clicked on the link from today’s Lexember to see what nuggets of interesting etymology I put on the blog that I didn’t have room to include on the slide, I’m afraid you’ve wasted a click. Sorry about that.

Lexember Day 11 - stovetop

 There's not a whole lot to say about this one. Just a word I invented and liked. 

Lexember Day 10 - imperfect

Imperfect… as evidenced by my spacing and formatting today. I tried to update my template to be suitable for adjectives. It is not.

Edit: This is not the name of the grammatical construct sometimes called “imperfect” in various languages. That particular tense (which doesn’t exist in Valthungian) is called the forgāft fortrampa – something like the “past continuative.”

Lexember Day 09 - spice rack

Sometimes, despite our best efforts, a perfectly cromulent word with a perfectly valid derivation just comes out sounding silly, and this is one of them.

In other news about this word (and some related terms), I may have accidentally implied that East Germanic may have conflated the verbs sūpaną ‘to slurp’ and sūpōną ‘to soak’, which they surely did not, but the Valthungians definitely did. Oops. I’m not mad about it – these are the sort of happy conlanging accidents that I revel in, especially if they’re plausible, which I think this one is (as long as I can establish that it happened after Middle Valthungian when *sûpon would have still had the vowel of the Class 2 weak verbs).

Finally, in Lexember news, what are your thoughts about the new etymology table? I wanted to make it a little less “texty,” but I’m not sure how I like this format. Does it make sense?

PS – another total accident, but bingo for ‘rub’ (from bingun) is my favourite new accidental Valthungian word, and mimžabingo ‘meat-rub’ just brings me some kind of strange joy.

Lexember Day 08 - weeping willow

In case you’re wondering, yes, I did translate the whole song, but there are still a few awkward phrasings in there that I’d like to work through before I try to sing Valthungian country music at anyone.

1615 / 2025 Valthungian Calendar

It’s that time of year again! I just finished work on next year’s Valthungian/Gregorian calendar. If you’ve seen previous calendars, there isn’t a lot of change to talk about this year… Same 7 days of the week (in their abbreviated forms), same 24 months. There are only two differences I can think of from last year’s calendar, all of which centre on the recent L-changes to the language:

• The minor month Blate, due to said sound change, is now Maute (Mautimēnaþs)
• The hlava- element found in the cross-quarters is now hauva, ergo
• Hauvawastra 
• Hauvasumbra
• Hauvahravist
• Hauvawintrus

Nota bene: All astronomical calculations are in Atlantic time, so they should be pretty useless for just about everyone but me.

(Download the full PDF Calendar here.)

Edit: Just kidding, those are still the old day names. Maybe one day I'll upload a new, corrected version, but today is not that day. In keeping with the short month names, which usually use an abstract neuter i-stem ending, the days now also have short forms, mostly using abstract neuter u-stem endings:

• sǭgilo
• mēno
• tījo
• wœuðnio
• þīfo
• frižo
• lǭgo

Lexember Day 07 – to resound

Today’s word is brought to you by a bunch of those “L-Shattering” sound changes interacting within a single paradigm. The word itself, deriving from Proto-Germanic *hellaną (whence also German hellen), is fairly unremarkable aside from being phonaesthetically related to a host of other “-ell” words related to sound such as skellaną (→ OE scellan ‘clang’), hlōaną (→ low, cf. cattle), skallijaną (→ shill), gellaną (→ yell), bellaną (→ bellow and German bellen ‘bark’), and possibly even related to ‘call’ and ‘clambor’. But the really nifty bit here is how a number of distinctive sound changes are showcased in this tiny class 3 strong verb.

First, the basic forms – if you’ve been steeped in Germanic linguistics for decades like some of us, I’m talking about the “First Principal Part,” which consists of the infinitive and gerund, the present indicative and subjunctive, and the imperative forms – in this case: šul /ɕul/. This comes from MV hsjul /ʃjul/ ← OV hivl /hjul/ ← Griutungi hill ← PGmc hell. To really break it down for you, here are the important changes going on:

• hill → hiwl (Geminate sonorants go through some stuff. /ll/ becomes /wl/ before a vowel.)
• hiwl → hjul (This is a general change of /iw/→/ju/ that took place prior to the Old Valthungian era, though it was still written as ⟨iv⟩ in OV.)
• hjul → ʃjul (A change just prior to Middle Valthungian where /hj/ → /ʃj/, possibly with an intermediate /ç(j)/. Written in various ways in MV (hj, sj, hsj, shj, &c) now usually standardized as ⟨hsj⟩ to distinguish it from ⟨sj⟩ /ʃj/ from a different process.)
• ʃjul → ɕul (Palatalized consonants followed by /j/ lose the /j/, and at some point become true palatals, though not necessarily both at the same time.)

A little odd, maybe, but not too weird so far. But moving on the Second Principal Part: The preterit singular: haul /hau̯l/ ← MV hawl (/idem/) ← OV havl (/idem/) ← Grt. hall. There’s really not much going on here at all aside from the same Geminate Sonorant change from above. This one is remarkable only for its complete lack of doing anything interesting. The only other thing to note is that the second person singular, hault, is an analogous form: It should have avoided the initial Geminate Sonorant rule because it was followed by a consonant, but hallt → *halt was probably quickly assimilated to match haul.

Finally, the Third and Fourth Principal Parts are the same (as in most Class 3 strong verbs), but they get some extra weirdness from the L-Shattering Times. (The 3PP consists of the preterit plural and the past subjunctive, and the 4PP is the past participle.)

Here we start out simply enough with Griutungi hull, but the Geminate Sonorant rule has a twist when the preceding vowel is /u/, so:

• hull → hujl
• hujl → hwil (Normally, the new-found diphthong would remain /uj/ but in this case it interacts with preceding /h/, and /h-ui̯/ gets reanalyzed as /hu̯-i/. Though it is not reflected in Valthungian’s marginally more popular Romanization, ⟨hu⟩ is distinct from ⟨hw⟩ in the Valthungian script, and this form has become ⟨hw⟩.) 
• hwil → xwil (This change was never reflected in writing.)

The final jank in this putative frankenverb is that if you are familiar with Valthungian verbs at all, you may have noticed a lack of Valthungian’s distinctive “Metathetical Unpacking,” as the kids like to call it, which is where a lot of infinitives, participles, gerunds, and various other inflections tend to “flip” their final syllables, so you might be expecting **šulna, **šulnaþ, **šulnas, **šulnaþs, and so on. There’s not much to say about that except that that particular process is blocked by L in another L-Rebellion more than a thousand years after the previous one.

Lexember Day 06 - moonlight or maybe vodka

Most strong nouns add the stem vowel to the end of the first element, but weak nouns usually add -in-. There are a few examples where a masculine or neuter first element will add -a- or a feminine element will add just -i-, but there are usually some awkward historical reasons for this. In the case of this particular compound, though, the N in -in- shifts to M before the following B. (And, of course, the same thing happens when the second element of a compound begins with M or P.)

Speaking of compounds, another fun example appears in the related terms: The word for ‘alcohol’ is miðurāma, comprised of miðo ‘mead’ and āma ‘spirit’ – i.e. “Spirit of Mead,” but where does that R come from, you ask? When two compounds come together with two irreconcilable vowels, R is added for liaison, like in skātarǣftrins ‘invoice’ (skāta ‘coin’ + ǣftrins ‘request’). There are some other phonological factors at work that I’ll spare you for the moment, like not allowing two stressed syllables to occur in a row in compounds, but let’s save that for another day.

Lexember Day 05 - to transplant

Today’s word is brought to you by my guilt as I gaze across the room at an Alocasia that’s been giving me the stink-eye for a few weeks now. Nothing too interesting to note today except that I’ve adapted my template for verbs and tried to leave space for an example sentence, which I’d overlooked in the last few days. This word also contains another of those “L-Shattering” changes: Muiða is similar to yesterday’s wuila, but in a slightly different order; in this case: PGmc. muldō → Grt. mulda → muwða → mujða (OV spelling mvidya) → muiða.

Lexember Day 04 - cotton

For blogular purposes, I think it’s worth talking about some of the disparate sound changes that have led to this word, beyond just the few I’ve mentioned in the etymology.

I’ll start with the easy one (already hinted at): Why the orthography change from 〈ju〉 to 〈eu〉? In early modern Valthungian, there’s a new rule that kicks in causing /ju/ to lower after liquids; more specifically, /rju/ → [rɛʊ̯] and /lju/ → [ljɛʊ]. (Why does /l/ get to keep its palatal glide? That’s a story for another day!) In most cases, this change isn’t reflected in writing, but /ɛʊ̯/ does already exist phonemically from other processes (usually related to umlaut), so when collapsing the unwieldy /trjuˈwujla/ into something less tangy, it became common to change the spelling accordingly, and by the and of the first half of the 20th century, it was standard.

The spicier change, though, happened 1200 years earlier in the period leading up to Old Valthungian. Remember on Lexember Day 1, when I mentioned some “L-changes” that I hadn’t publicly codified yet? This is one of them. Sometime around 700ᴀᴅ, a Series of Unfortunate Events occur, first to the geminate consonants, and subsequently to the liquids. First, /Vll/ and /Vrr/ undergo an implausible sort of metathesis, becoming /lVl/ and /rVr/, respectively. Some weird things later happen to R, but we’ll catch up with them another time. Meanwhile, this is the first stage of a rule I’m calling “L-shattering,” a 300-ish year process during which something slightly different happens to almost every conceivable phonological combination involving /l/. So first, /wulla/ → /wlula/, as described above. Next, /lul/ becomes /uil/, leading to /wuila/ (Old Valthungian vvila). Not much actually happens after that to this combination in particular, but a number of different things happen to other L-having segments.

It is probably also worth mentioning, if you’ve bothered to read this far – first of all, thank you! – and also the final back-and-forth of the ending of trio… So, a good 2000 years ago, during the formation of East Germanic, the neuter ending /wã/ lost its vowel to a final unstressed vowel deletion rule, leaving /triw/. By Old Valthungian, this /iw/ had come to be /ju/, despite spelling it 〈iv〉. In Middle Valthungian, final unstressed /u/ became /o/, but I obviously have a typo in the image, so please ignore that because I’m not regenerating it now for the sake of a single O. And finally, an early Modern Valthungian rule vocalizes glides before final vowels, resulting in /trjo → tri.o/, shortly before the aforementioned shift of /rju/ to /rɛʊ̯/, so the standalone form does not have this change (trio /ˈtri.o/, but dative trjuga /ˈtrɛʊ̯.ɡa/).

There’s some other stuff to be said about compounds, but that’s enough for today. Happy Lexembering!

Lexember Day 03 - hemisphere

Today’s word isn’t new, but it’s been reconfigured because of that liquid shifting rule I mentioned: Heretofore it was **hreuvahlava, which was more annoying to say. Those sequential diphthongs are still a little awkward to say, but I’ll get over it.

Fun fact about this (and may three or four other words): hauva itself (‘half’) is a weak noun, but in compounds it is usually strong. I don’t know why this is, but the answer is most likely that I wasn’t paying attention somewhere, and now it’s permanent. (If it is my mistake, though, those are the sort of mistakes that I like to bake in to make the eyelids of future etymologists twitch.) (They know what they did.)

Lexember Day 02 - kiwi (fruit)

Since it looks like I’m going to do this, I spent some time last night futzing around with my formatting to try to make a nice (perfectly square) template for my Lexember entries this month. I’m not quite sure I’ve succeeded, and I have no idea what will happen if my word of the day is not a noun, but we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. For now, have a kiwi!

kenināde n.st.n.ja ‘kiwi (fruit)’

Is it Lexember again already?

 I woke up this morning to discover that Lexember has crept up on me once again. And once again, all of the old arguments of “it’s a bad time of year for this,” “I’m probably just going to run out of steam after a few weeks,” “…but the holidays…” “but I haven’t got a language in mind to work on…” Meh. No angst this year. I’ll join in and play along, and when it gets overwhelming, I’ll stop. I might skip a day here and there. No use working myself into knots about it.

After a great deal of thought – well, as great a deal as I’ve had time to think since the first #Lexember hashtag floated by on my screen this morning and I realized what month it is – I’ve decided to avoid working on Europic, because everyone is probably sick of seeing it, and I’ll be working on it throughout the month anyway without making it a part of Lexember. Gothic Romance isn’t any better off than it was 350 days ago. If I were smart, I’d work on Ox-Yew (Adzaay), because I’m going to need to get it beefed up soon so I can start using it to influence future Europic, but… I don’t wanna. 

I think instead I’m going to spend some quality time with Valthungian, which I’ve been ignoring for a while now. Before I got too wrapped up in Europic (and descendants), I had implemented a liquid  exflunctification rule in Old Valthungian that rejiggernated a lot of words containing L’s and R’s, but I never sat down and sorted them all out properly, so even though there are a lot of words that aren’t really “new,” they’ve definitely never been seen before in their current pokéform.

With that in mind, here’s new Valthungian word for Lexember Day 1, updated for new L rules…

šuvaþljúþ, n. vowel. 

What's in a Name? - Extended Remix

I often hear the question “How do you name your conlangs?” and I have answered parts of it in various fora, but I wanted to put together a comprehensive history here. The short answer is that there is no one source, and often I just don’t bother until I have been working on a project for a while. I’ll try to keep this chronological, so that in the future I will be able to edit it as I add more. It can also serve as a nice overview of my conlanging timeline.

1994: The first and second conlangs I created never got far enough to have names. But one should never talk about their first and second conlangs in polite company anyway. The first conlang I created—okay, the first six or eight words I scribbled down with the intention of creating a language from them—was entirely a priori, but I don’t remember anything about it other than that there was an animacy distinction, and na was the animate definite article. I had a brilliant idea about nouns, and I subsequently “invented” animacy; later I was gutted to learn that it already existed: My first and most devastating anadew! The second language still exists as snippets of terrible poetry, but most of the actual nouns, verbs, and adjectives seem to be made up randomly of French, German, Italian, and Russian, with some Hebrew, Greek, and Italian for good measure. The word ‘whatever’ was shto zhamei. I’m sure I thought that that was very clever.

1995: Dlatci /ˈdla.ʧi/. The name just came to me. I really enjoyed the unusual sound (for someone who only had experience with European languages at the time) of the initial consonant cluster. I can’t remember how I initially spelled the affricate – I don’t think it was ⟨tc⟩, but it’s been ⟨Dlatci⟩ for as long as I can remember now. Dlatci has undergone several revisions over the years, and the current one is “Dlatci v5.1.”

1999: Latinovesa. An early Romance auxlang we are not going to talk about. It was also briefly called “Latinova,” but I later decided to add the -esa ending, which indicates language names. This was still before I had ever heard of any conlangers aside from Tolkien, though I later discovered that there were at least a dozen other Romance auxlangs called “Latinova.”

2000: Northeadish /nɔrˈθi.dɪʃ/, (endonym Druðþþᵫ̄ðesc [dɾʊˈθyːðɛsk]). Initially my Germanic answer to Latinovesa, but I couldn’t compel it into being an auxlang, because I loved my ablauting strong verbs too much! Of course, I had no concept of auxlangs as compared to artlangs at the time; this was during an era when conlangers were just starting to discover each other on the internet and find out that they weren’t the only ones out there with this “secret vice,” and at that time, it was hard to conceive of creating a conlang for any purpose other than to be used in a fantasy novel or an auxiliary language. The original name was not Northeadish, and this was also years before it occurred to me that a decent language should have a proper exonym as well as an endonym: Initially it was called Tsœxisca [ˈʦœçɪskə]. I have no idea where that name came from, but I think it was just a series of sounds that I liked that I thought represented the language. (Almost none of those sounds still exist in the language now.) At some point, initial ts was no longer licit in the language, and since I was on an Old Norse kick at the time, I renamed it Norðiska [ˈnɔɾðɪskə]. Later I had the Brilliant Idea™ to call it Theadish/Þᵫ̄ðesc, from *þeudiskǭ (the same root that gave us Deutsch and Dutch). It wasn’t long before I discovered that there were at least half a dozen “Theadish” languages on the internet at the time (along with variants like Theedish, Thiedish, and Theidish). At this point I had renamed it so many times, I just decided to stick “north” back onto the beginning, and the Northeadish exonym was complete. The endonym, however, had a few more sound shifts to undergo, and Norþᵫ̄ðisc became Nurðþ-þᵫ̄ðesc and eventually Druðþþᵫ̄ðesc. And so it remains, though I haven’t worked on it since Valthungian took over the Germanic side of my conlanging. I think it counts as abandoned by now, though I’ve rolled a lot of what I love about it into Middle Valthungian.

2000: Maltcégj /malˈʧɛɡʒ/. I often tell people that “I literally pulled letters out of a hat,” and I’m not quite sure why I started saying that, because it’s not true. It was a legal-sized inter-departmental mailing envelope—you know the kind with holes and a red string that you can “seal” it with by winding it around two paper disks by the flap? I guess that just doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily. But once I had got the basics of the phonology sketched out, I wrote out all my phonemes on scraps of paper, threw them in the envelope, and then pulled out a handful and tried to arrange it in a way that was vaguely pronounceable. At the time I documented it, poorly, here. I’m pretty sure that’s originally where Maltcégj’s signature [ɡʒ] cluster came from. This was a period in my conlanging life when I didn’t really understand the concept of “less is more,” and I was under the impression that if you could pronounce a particular cluster or sequence, it wouldn’t be fair not to include it in the language. FF’s sake, the word for ‘fish’ is ðbrukc [ðbɾukʃ]. Anyway, the name hasn’t changed much over the years aside from a few minor orthographic variations: For a while [ɛ] was ɛ, and that made the mandatory stress-marking diacritics time-consuming to type on a regular basis. Also, [ʃ] went through a number of iterations including ж and even § before I finally reassigned /k/ to k and assigned /ʃ/ to the now-free c.

2001: Something called “Fricative Chant Project.” I dunno, man. It’s just a few pages of lists of syllables. Not a plosive in sight. I think this was the abandoned project that taught me that languages without stops end up feeling a bit “floppy.”

2002: Baraq /baˈɾaq/. For the record, this was a few years before I’d ever heard of Mr. Obama: no relation. I have no idea where the name came from, but I later created/imagined a language family called Baraqesh, of which Maltcégj and Dlatci were also a part. There were so many vowels, and so many declensions. It was really ridiculous.

2002: Bálabhádh /baːlaˈvaːð/. My first collablang, with the incomparable Zeke Fordsmender and William Annis. This was an adorable little language, and I’m still quite fond of the orthography we came up with for it. As with most collablangs, we all got distracted and sort of wandered away before very long, though I like to say it collapsed under the weight of its own pronouns: We had had the idea that there should be a complete array of pronouns to describe every gender and sexuality on the spectrum, and this was still back when there were really only four letters. I think we made it up to something like 21 first-person pronouns before it caved in. (These days I lean towards completely non-gendered pronouns. It makes life a lot simpler: I recommend it.)

2002: Bruga (/ˈbruɡa/, I guess). Aside from the name, a short phonology, a list of all possible syllables, and a handwritten present tense conjugation scrawled in a notebook, nothing ever really came of this one. In fact, I didn’t even remember that it existed until I found it while compiling this list.

2003: ɮaxu /ˈɮa.xu/. An early stab at a philosophengelang. 49 cases. 63 screeves. No idea where the name came from. I don’t even want to talk about it. It was a lot.

2004: Iatu Nukta Amat /ˈijatu ˈnukta aˈmat’/. I never did much with this conlang, but the name was shouted at me by some demonic force in a nightmare. This was later conflated with something I called the “4x4 weekend challenge,” in which I had 44 hours to create a minilang using 16 phonemes (4 stops, 4 fricatives, 4 sonorants, 4 vowels). That itself was an extension of an earlier 3x3 challenge, which never had a name and is probably lost to history, though some of the “3-based” elements later found a home in Ox-Yew.

2010: Valthungian /valˈθʊn.ʤi.ən/, (endonym Grējutungiška [ɡrai̮juˈtuŋɡiɕka] or So Grējuga Tunga [so̞ ˈɡrai̯juɡa ˈtuŋɡa]). This started out as Gutish/Gytiska, which was horrible from the start, but the logical diachronic development of Gutiskō ‘Gothic’. There’s a whole story about when and why I changed it in 2018, here: The Grey Tongue. Tl;dr, the important take-away here is that the exonym is an English mispronunciation of a Latinate mispronunciation of the name of the wrong tribe of Ostrogoths (the Walthungi, cf. Tervingi), and the endonym is a Valthungian rebracketing of a different tribe, Greut-ungōs (“the Gravel-people,” perhaps referring to the rocky shores of the Black Sea) as Grēw-tungōs (“Grey-Tongues”). I’ve been toying with the idea of changing it again, slightly, to “Valthingian” or “Valthengian,” for reasons I won’t go into, but I think it’s probably permanent now. In addition to Valthungian/Grējutingiška, there are also historic forms – Old and Middle Valthungian (nothing too interesting there, name-wise), and Griutungi/Griutuggō (basically a dialect of Gothic which is how Greutungi would have been rendered in Gothic).

2014: Brooding /ˈbrudɪŋ/ (endonym: Brooding [ˈbru.dɪŋ] ‘Related to the Brood/Family’ or Baus Broodingee [baʊ̯s ˈbru.dɪ.ŋi] ‘Language of that which is Related to the Brood/Family’) This is the first conlang I worked on that I wasn’t directly involved in naming, and the first “professional” conlang I worked on. I didn’t create Brooding – I was originally created in 2012 by V. Hamilton for the Riddlesbrood Touring Theatre Company, and I “adopted” it and have been expanding it ever since. The origin, though, is interesting and worth mentioning here: I’m not sure where the name “Riddlesbrood” came from – I believe it was just imagined by the troupe’s director, Ryan Long (a.k.a. Clyde Riddlesbrood), but the name and logo were both elements that Vee took into account while creating the language, and ‘Riddlesbrood’ riduhlzbrood ended up meaning something akin to “family of mystery,” from riduhz ‘mystery’ + -l- (possessive) + brood ‘family, troupe, tribe, social unit’. The language itself was named for Brood ‘family’ + -ing ‘relation/association’, or Baus ‘language’ + Brood ‘family’ + -ing ‘relation/association’ + -ee (adjectivizer).

2014: Nurbia Nacura. This was a very short-lived project that still makes me a little anxious to talk about. It was never really a proper conlang or even an attempt at one, but rather a sort of cipher I created to convert Latin or Latin-sounding words into something unrecognizable that still had the same general phonaesthetics of a generic Romance language. The name “Nurbia Nacura” is literally just Lingua Latina run through that cipher. I hadn’t got far beyond just setting up the formula, though, when I posted a little blurb about it on social media, and some jerk immediately commented, “Wow, so cool. I’m going to use this!” and proceeded to rip off the idea wholesale. I wouldn’t even have minded if they wanted to do something similar, but they literally took the entire formula, ran a Latin word-list through it, and then started posting about “their” new conlang. It made me feel kind of gross and violated. You know that meme about English chasing other languages into dark alleys and beating them up for their grammar? Yeah, I was lingui-mugged.

2018: Grayis /ˈɡreɪ̯.əs/ (endonym: Grayis [ɡrä.jɪs]). Another name I didn’t create, directly, but it’s an interesting story. I had posted something on social media about Valthungian (a.k.a. “The Grey Tongue,” as described above) and I was subsequently contacted by a game designer who noticed the post because the name was similar to one of six alien races he had created, the Grayis Kin; he needed a language for them, and subsequently hired me to create it. The game, Pilots of Gallaxia, was eventually released in 2020, and as far as I can tell, had no trace of the language in it, but in case you play it, just know that they do have a language out there!

2019: Ox-Yew (endonym: Adzaay [adɮaːtɬ’]). When I initially created the language, I used all of the Latin letters except for E, O, W, X, and Y, so I put them together and made up a crazy back-story about the Ox-Yew people, or the People of Cows and Trees.

2019: Veonic /veɪ̯ˈjɑ.nɪk/ (endonym: Veionasi (Uthral) [ve.joˈna.si (uˈθral)]). Another professional conlang; not really allowed to say much about it other than “Veonic” was the author’s working name for it and the Veiona-si of the endonym is the genitive of the same. Uthral just means ‘language’.

2019: Iskan /ˈɪskən/ (endonym: Iskān (Shaskua) [is.kaːn (ˈʃas.kua̯)]) Another professional conlang, for author Gavin Hamilton. A nice little Greek-meets-Hebrew-flavoured language I created for an upcoming novel. The author had already created a number of names in the language; Iskā is the name of the ancient homeland of the protagonist culture; Iskān is the genitive thereof. Shaskua means ‘language’. It readily ported over into English as “Iskan.”

2020: Zjenavi (endonym, Zjenav [ʒeˈnav]) Another professional conlang, for author Luca-Fabio Di Franco. The author had already created a number of names in the language, and there was a lot of dithering about the exact name of the language itself, and I’m not sure the dithering is done; as far as I know, the name is currently fixed at Zjenav (it was formerly Zjenaviv), with Zjenav-i as its exonym. It is the language of the Rahavahi people.

2020: Modern Standard Imperial (endonym: Drikva Yakke [ˈdɾi.kva ˈjak.ʃe]) The first of seven languages I’ve created (or am still in the process of creating) for graphic novelist Anthony Gutierrez. Many of the names of his languages have exonyms already as they are translated into the graphic novel The Lost Children; the endonyms have been a little trickier to come up with, but Imperial (or, officially Modern Standard Imperial) was easy: drikva ‘language’ and yakke ‘of the Empire’. It is also known colloquially as mekra lekron ‘the common tongue’, because every evil empire needs to have a Common Tongue that the Common People speak! (NB: The writing system is called kuggi yakke ‘Script of the Empire’. One does not say exactly “I speak Modern Standard Imperial,” but rather kvepa yakke gvida meu: “I say the words of the Empire.”)

2020: Lezyalu (Okau) [ˈleʒalu (oˈkaw)] A language I created for author and musician Ty Sheetz. It doesn’t really have an exonym. There’s not much I’m able to say about it yet except that the full name means ‘Language of the Holy Ones’, and it’s very cool and I’m very happy with how it turned out and I can’t wait to be able to tell folks about it when the book comes out!

2021: Gothic Romance (and periphery) (endonym: Gotica Romana) Officially, the backstory here is that Valthungian was originally slated to be “What if the Goths who sacked Rome in 410ᴀᴅ just kept speaking Gothic and it continued to evolve within the Romance Sprachbund,” but it ended up going in a very different direction, and Gothic Romance was my attempt to complete that original goal. But mostly it was born of puns. Not only do I have an immediate audience of every member of the Dark and Spooky Nation who would want to learn it (especially because it really does sound kind of dark and spooky in a lovely way), but its direct ancestor on the Germanic side is called Bad Romance, and Romance Novelle on the Italic side. I’ll show myself out, but there’s some background here. I continue to fool around with this language every few months, and it’s far from ready for primetime (as you can see from this past Lexember), but one day soon it will be a deliciously dark and sumptuous language.

2021: Northern ~ Alder’mane /ˈɑldərˌmeɪ̯n/ (endonym: Alderxmanuvgöm [al.der..ˈman.uvˌɡɤm] ‘Language of the Cradle’ ~ Dhënuvgöm [ˈðøn.uvˌɡɤm] ‘Language of the North’) This is the second of seven languages created for Anthony Gutierrez’ graphic novel The Lost Children. The name came pre-baked; I just added the -uvgöm ‘language of’ suffix.

2021: Nymeran /ˈnɪ.mə.rən/, (endonym Tlíl Nime [tlil ˈnɪmɛ] “Language of Nym” or Ní Tlíl [ni tlil] “Our Language”). I didn’t originally create this language or choose the name. The language was created by Niamh Doyle in 2015, and I believe the exonym existed even before that, created by Ray Chou and Vince Ferreiro, founders of MythWorks (formerly Mythopoeia) and creators of the comic Glow, taking place in the land of Nym where Nymeran is spoken. I’ve heard it called both / ˈnɪmərən/ and /naɪˈmiri.ən/, so do with that information what you will.

2021: Arbulian /ɑrˈbu.li.ən/ (endonym: Seprotu Baet [sɛˈpro.tu bäˈɛt] ‘our way of speaking’) The third language created for The Lost Children. The endonym is a little half-assed, I’ll admit; the exonym refers to the shadow realm of Arbul, where the deities who speak the language dwell in exile.

2021: Ashian (endonym: Kéðryňa [ˌkeːðˈrʏ.ɲa] ‘Language of the Kaede’) The fourth language created for The Lost Children: The Exonym was created by the author. The endonym is a little more roundabout: The author required that the name of the Ashian people contain certain sounds and be derived from a particular sequence of letters that had historical importance. That name ended up being Kéðaš, which, paired with the word for language, ʀýňa, gave the endonym Kéðryňa.

2022: Hakdor /ˈhæk.dor/ (endonym: Iuqilol (Taqetis) [juˈʤilol (taˈʤedis)] ‘The Language (of the Hakdor)’) The fifth language for The Lost Children, this language was a lot of fun to construct. The Hakdor are a genetically modified race of humanoids who do not think in quite the same abstract and symbolic terms that humans do. They are very literal and procedural, and that comes through in the language. The exonym was provided by the author; the endonym just means “the language” – itself a compound meaning “word-collection” – though it can be modified with Taqetis ‘of the Hakdor’ if further specification is necessary. The word Taqet ‘Hakdor’ had a particular meaning – maybe something that the Hakdor were called by the Alder’mane? I can’t remember – but I forgot to write it down and now it is lost forever.

2022: Braereth /ˈbraɪ̯.ərˌeθ/ (endonym: idem [ˈbrae̯.re̞θ]) I was approached by author CJ Kavanaugh to create a dialect or creole of French for The Chronicles of Braereth, a novel series she was writing, and after some initial discussions, we concluded that a dialect wasn’t quite right, and instead we would need a separate branch of Romance languages that should still be more or less intelligible to other Romance speakers, but didn’t “belong” to any particular area. She came up with the name Braereth (and I fiddled around with the spelling a bit). It is also the name of the Shadowland where it is spoken by a range of fairy-tale creatures. I created a Classical (extinct) dialect and a modern “official” dialect. We later added three additional dialects, which are not quite mutually intelligible: Tenibvreth /ˈtɛnɪvrɛθ/ (endonym: idem [teˈnivreθ] ‘Language of Darkness (Tenebres)’) spoken by Vampires, Eomentesa /eɪ̯(j)oʊ.mɛnˈtɛ.sə/ (endonym: idem [e̞.u.me̞nˈte̞.sa) ‘Elemental Langauge’) spoken by witches, and Merineth /ˈme.rə.nɛθ/ (endonym: idem [ma.riˈnit’] ‘Language of the Sea’) spoken by Mer-folk and Shapeshifters. The latter has some pretty dramatic sound changes that make it particularly unintelligible with the usual Romance crowd, but make it much easier to distinguish the sounds under water.

2022: Western (endonym: Nƛeňǰax [dɮeɲˈʥax]) The sixth language for The Lost Children. This one really took it out of me! I don’t think the name means anything specific – at least, if it does, I don’t remember and I didn’t write anything in the notes about it. Nƛe ňǰa means ‘the mysteriously unknowable red one’, so I’m pretty sure that’s not where it came from. I’m almost positive I just ginned up a word and declared it a name.

2022: Chardane. The seventh (and final… so far?) language for The Lost Children, spoken by a sort of sentient pack-animal with independently movable eye-stalks. This one is still under construction and currently paused while I finish other projects, so no endonym yet. The name Chardane was provided by the author.

2023: “Pulselang” – a sketch of a language created for B.A. Bellec’s 2023 Novel Pulse: Book Two, for which I will come up with a proper name if it becomes appropriate later on. I’m credited in the book with creating an “Alien Language,” but it’s really not from an alien source, which won’t be revealed until book 3: Stay tuned!

2023: Europic ~ Eulingo ~ Fauxperanto (endonym: Yevropicu [jev.roˈpi.ʃu] ‘Europese’) This is ostensibly a proto-language for a series of languages spoken about two millennia from the present. It is very Euro-centric, by design, but not quite as transparently as Esperanto (though it went by the code-name “Faux-speranto” for a while before I had really hammered out a lot of the details). I’m keeping this one pretty tightly under my hat until things get worked out a little more fully, because frankly, people are horrible, and the internet is dark and full of terrors. There’s a short-term descendant / variety / dialect of it (intended to be) about 250 years after the original language that I’m calling, variously, “Vulgar European” or “Late Western Europic” which has an endonym of Iropicu [i.roˈpi.ʃu], but I don’t think that quite counts as a separate language yet.

2024: Rupesh ~ Proto-Human (endonym: Ropich [roˈpiç]) This is a direct descendant of Europic / Yevropicu / Iropicu, above. While it is probably gauche to call something a “proto” language that has a documented direct ancestor, this refers to the in-world detail that this was the language spoken by a group of humans who left the Earth in the 26th century, so it is the first and only Terran language on the new planet. (Update: The time-line on this language is still shifting a little, and “Proto-Human” might actually end up being something more like Iropicu. There’s also a descendant of Rupesh going under the code name “Arxippian” [i.e. what they speak on the arc-ship], but that name is definitely not going to stick, so I hesitate to mention much about it until it “congeals” a little more… stay tuned! There will also be two more stages of the language after Arxippian which have even less worked out.)

2024: Quathach (endonym: Cwathah [kwaˈθax]) This is a personal a priori language I started playing around with just for the joy of my heart, but I haven’t had much time to make a lot of progress on it so far. I wanted it to sound a bit like Welsh, but with a slightly simplified phonology (none of the orthographic gymnastics with ⟨w⟩ and ⟨y⟩, for example); the current endonym is an initialism that stands for “Cymraeg Without All The Hootin’ And Hollerin’.” Being a private language, I doubt I’ll ever say much more about it than this, even if I do manage to develop it fully.

Wow, did you really just read all of that? Thanks, but why?