https://www.nilakash.com/worldbuilding daily 0.75 2025-08-10 https://www.nilakash.com/archives daily 0.75 2025-08-10 https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-conlang-family-part-14-planning-aspect-amp-mood-morphology-in-language-1a monthly 0.5 2025-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/d5c4ca22-562b-45ea-9cb6-26829ed3480f/Screenshot+2025-05-29+at+12.48.08%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 14: Planning Aspect & Mood Morphology in Language 1a - I’m calling these affixes preverbs for now, although I’m not particularly happy about it. “Preverb” isn’t a widely accepted linguistic term, and although it is discussed in the context of Caucasian and Algonquinian languages (two major inspirations for this language), it’s used there primarily for location/direction meanings, with the aspectual & modal information that they could convey being secondary. However, I’m calling them preverbs until I can think of something better, because “Harmony-blocking and Non-harmony-blocking modal and aspectual prefixes” was proving far too clunky. https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-conlang-family-part-14-reconstructing-a-middle-stage-of-language-1b monthly 0.5 2025-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/ad490b7e-c9f5-40f4-bdbf-cbc8899e146c/Screenshot+2025-05-29+at+12.47.10%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 14: Reconstructing a Middle Stage of Language 1b - Make it stand out Some things to note: For this language, I opted for vowel doubling to indicate length. I used a circumflex instead on ⟨ê⟩, because ⟨ee⟩ looks like /i/ to English speakers. Besides, I like the circumflex. As vowel hiatus isn’t a thing, I can use vowel letters for glides. I opted for historical spellings for ⟨eu⟩ and ⟨au⟩. They look cool and aren’t that uncommon for open front and back rounded vowels respectively. https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-conlang-family-part-13-the-verb-agreement-of-proto-language-0 monthly 0.5 2025-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/b3400c89-6e27-4447-b9f6-c550d073f594/Screenshot+2025-05-29+at+12.42.10%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 13: The Verb Agreement of Proto-language 0 - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/f3e37db1-b968-49a2-bf8f-206f2cb2c435/Screenshot+2025-05-29+at+12.38.51%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 13: The Verb Agreement of Proto-language 0 - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-conlang-family-part-12-reconstructing-protolanguage-0-part-2-vowel-loss monthly 0.5 2025-05-29 https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-conlang-family-part-10-reconstructing-protolanguage-0 monthly 0.5 2025-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/e61db339-24e2-4976-92a2-790f3fbfbf09/Screenshot+2025-05-29+at+12.30.40%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 11: Reconstructing Protolanguage 0 - Make it stand out (Notice that I deleted /j/ and /w/ from this table. I’ve decided to delete them from protolanguage 1 as well - it just felt like they weren’t fitting.) https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-conlang-family-part-10-romanization monthly 0.5 2025-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/6a9b16d3-da0d-42f7-80fe-708e2baddd28/Screenshot+2025-05-29+at+12.22.22%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 10: Romanization - The vowel system’s romanization is very wacky, probably because the vowels themselves are pretty weird. That’s one of the shortcomings of romanization – it has issues when dealing with extremely non-latin-like phonologies. This may not be the final version, but it’s good enough for now. Some things to note: Acute accents for long vowels, including double acutes for long umlaut vowels – think Hungarian. I like this better than double letters, because ⟨oo⟩ and ⟨ee⟩ are weird for English speakers, and I just don’t like the look of ⟨öö⟩. A digraph for /ɯː/. I just couldn’t figure out how to distinguish ı with an acute accent from í. Besides, ıı looks cool. However, it’s not great, and I may change it later. The very English-y ⟨o⟩ for /ɒ/. The digraphs for the approximants. Yeah, I could have used the single letters /b d g/, but the language is already non-intuitive enough. The vowel system’s romanization is very wacky, probably because the vowels themselves are pretty weird. That’s one of the shortcomings of romanization – it has issues when dealing with extremely non-latin-like phonologies. This may not be the final version, but it’s good enough for now. Some things to note: Acute accents for long vowels, including double acutes for long umlaut vowels – think Hungarian. I like this better than double letters, because ⟨oo⟩ and ⟨ee⟩ are weird for English speakers, and I just don’t like the look of ⟨öö⟩. A digraph for /ɯː/. I just couldn’t figure out how to distinguish ı with an acute accent from í. Besides, ıı looks cool. However, it’s not great, and I may change it later. The very English-y ⟨o⟩ for /ɒ/. The digraphs for the approximants. Yeah, I could have used the single letters /b d g/, but the language is already non-intuitive enough. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/33022a68-bc45-47f5-8292-4453a4e4b4af/Screenshot+2025-05-29+at+12.21.16%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 10: Romanization - Some things to note: The use of ⟨ă⟩ for /ɐ/, inspired by the Romanian use of ⟨ă⟩ for /ə/. The use of ⟨rh⟩ for /ʁ/. As far as I know, this isn’t precedented. However, in the languages that have /ʁ/ as a dedicated phoneme, the prevailing standard seems to be ⟨ğ⟩, which I am not a fan of. The use of ⟨j⟩ instead of ⟨zh⟩. I just like it better for this language. https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-conlang-family-part-95-underspecified-phonemes-and-verb-agreement-in-descendant-languages monthly 0.5 2025-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/9a96965d-7464-4c63-8c29-2e26741cf880/Screenshot+2025-05-29+at+12.19.08%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 9.5: Underspecified Phonemes, and Verb Agreement in Descendant Languages - Make it stand out *(Note that the suffix form of the second person plural will always be close/velar, because the [ç] blocks backing harmony.) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/4be52872-a330-44df-a0ee-9b82eb7165cd/Screenshot+2025-05-29+at+12.17.40%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 9.5: Underspecified Phonemes, and Verb Agreement in Descendant Languages - Same deal applies here. Note the underspecified phonemes Yː and Oː, which were formed when diphthongs with an off-glide [u̯] coalesced. We won’t see these here, but we’ll be dealing with them later. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/28b1f47b-d76c-4fe7-9a46-a28eff0ec71f/Screenshot+2025-05-29+at+12.16.39%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 9.5: Underspecified Phonemes, and Verb Agreement in Descendant Languages - (When one of the underspecified vowel phonemes is followed by a long mark, ː, that means that it’s a long version of whichever vowel the underspecified phoneme becomes.) https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/04c1fa1b-f3ad-4f31-9b00-8d0bdff86299/Screenshot+2025-05-29+at+12.20.03%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 9.5: Underspecified Phonemes, and Verb Agreement in Descendant Languages - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-conlang-family-part-8-making-euphonous-affixes-may-4 monthly 0.5 2025-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/61e6403c-46d5-4ea1-a5fe-fcb35e10d304/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+5.00.48%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 9: Making Euphonous Affixes - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/4c98ab7f-0628-4b0d-8650-e0b8193afdcd/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.59.02%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Conlang Family Part 9: Making Euphonous Affixes - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-fictional-language-family-part-6-last-sound-changes-in-language-1b-t2k6j monthly 0.5 2025-05-29 https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-fictional-language-family-part-6-last-sound-changes-in-language-1b monthly 0.5 2025-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/6d524826-51ef-4b9e-9685-6aaa05b7bd26/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.56.16%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 7: Last Sound Changes in Language 1b - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-fictional-language-family-part-5-rounding-harmony-atlrj monthly 0.5 2025-05-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/bf0a1dcf-510f-4eb5-8b75-279a37854330/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.53.51%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 6: A Discussion of Phonaesthetics, and Language 1a Consonant Shifts https://www.nilakash.com/archives/creating-a-fictional-language-family-part-5-rounding-harmony monthly 0.5 2025-05-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/0e0c6383-2172-46fe-82d4-bc85d9b447ef/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.48.04%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 5: Rounding Harmony * opaque progressively to backing harmony † sometimes transparent to rounding harmony § opaque progressively to rounding harmony https://www.nilakash.com/archives/blog-post-title-one-3l2b9-5l6af-dt224-ec63j-rhjbr monthly 0.5 2025-05-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/2b951f9e-f8d6-4e93-8fb8-ee520b9a26b5/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.40.07%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 4: Vowel Hiatus, Diphthongs and Monophthongization - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/75636ce7-2dac-416a-aff3-83b8a3f428e9/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.43.08%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 4: Vowel Hiatus, Diphthongs and Monophthongization - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/cc4c8db5-a33e-4390-b4d1-28427bab0903/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.42.07%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 4: Vowel Hiatus, Diphthongs and Monophthongization - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/3305e058-a378-4e34-91f5-2f48b70292b7/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.41.11%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 4: Vowel Hiatus, Diphthongs and Monophthongization - Make it stand out Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference. https://www.nilakash.com/archives/blog-post-title-one-3l2b9-5l6af-dt224-ec63j monthly 0.5 2025-05-27 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/22b372c7-f1a6-46b0-a0aa-cf43649bf1ee/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.37.28%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 3: Evolving Vowel Harmony in Language 1a *opaque progressively †sometimes transparent bidirectionally https://www.nilakash.com/archives/blog-post-title-one-3l2b9-5l6af-dt224 monthly 0.5 2025-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/20098f51-6cfc-4401-aece-e195c876c53e/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.35.32%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 2: Evolving Vowel Harmony in Language 1b *opaque progressively †sometimes transparent bidirectionally https://www.nilakash.com/archives/blog-post-title-one-3l2b9-5l6af monthly 0.5 2025-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/8bf6d710-6959-4d31-ac12-72b6f322e453/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.25.37%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 1: Proto-phonology, and a Discussion of Emphasis Harmony - Phonotactics: (C)V(C) permits vowel hiatus up to a sequence of VV permits word-initial sP sequences, where P is a voiceless plosive https://www.nilakash.com/archives/blog-post-title-one-3l2b9 monthly 0.5 2025-05-26 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/d5509efc-8a6e-4cbe-8fcd-98a6cb1d7996/Screenshot+2025-05-26+at+4.18.23%E2%80%AFPM.png Archives - Creating a Fictional Language Family Part 0: Introduction - The Plan & Terminology I’m not yet at the point in this process where I can give these languages endonyms, and I don’t have enough worldbuilding around them to give them exonyms either. As such, I’ll be referring to them like this: https://www.nilakash.com/thoughts daily 0.75 2025-08-10 https://www.nilakash.com/home daily 1.0 2025-08-06 https://www.nilakash.com/music daily 0.75 2025-08-08 https://www.nilakash.com/nilakash-what-on-earth-are-you-talking-about daily 0.75 2025-06-02 https://www.nilakash.com/welcome-to-kzhol daily 0.75 2025-05-31 https://www.nilakash.com/bio daily 0.75 2025-08-10 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6834ee187aa56e563099f46a/f2dc10ef-ae9e-47c5-91f2-16195fc3492a/IMG_9731.jpg