Praeta development

[Kaiser Ikol II]

After the unfortunate departure of Nick, I've enlisted the help of the Zompist BB to continue creating Praeta. Con quesa, a regular at the bulletin board, has volunteered for the project and started by creating this phonology. I don't know much about phonology myself, but if someone does, please look it over and tell me whether we should give con quesa our full endorsement on the project.

[Falkner van der Sluijs]

His write up is looking good to me.

EDIT: The only background I have in this field is studying a shitton of languages and taking a linguistics class or two, so trust me if you wish

[CJ Miller]

I would be willing to help with Se Præta Sxiróþes as well.

[Malliki Tosha]

Oh gods no... I thought this was meant to be done professionally?

[CJ Miller]

Professionals are expensive, Mike, and I doubt anyone here would be willing to pay for a conlang.

[Malliki Tosha]

Well, it could at least appear to be done professionally, unlike anything you're ever involed with.

[Kaiser Ikol II]

I'm not sure if there are any professional conlangers (actually, I have one friend with a college degree in world-building, but she's a special case) but there are some very knowledgeable and experienced ones, and one of them has already agreed to help us without charge.

Ey'll probably be reading this thread and using it to get a feel for what our nation is like and whether we're worth helping, so I recommend better behavior.

Falkner, thanks for taking a look.

[Malliki Tosha]

Oh noes...

[con quesa]

Hello! I am con quesa from the zompist bulletin board. Kaiser Ikol II registered on the ZBB and requested a conlanger to continue working on the Shireroth langauge that was apparantly (barely) started and then abandoned by the original creator. I thought that sounded like a cool thing to do, so here I am. Let me state right off the bat that I don't ask for or expect any kind of compensation, I'm doing this purely because I enjoy conlanging and the request was asked. My qualifications are that I've been working on my own conlangs for several years, and that I am an undergraduate studying Linguistics and Japanese with some knowledge of a few other languages from diverse families and locations (I'm most proud of having studied Georgian, because Georgian is awesome ).

You can see a partial phonological description of my conception of Shireroth at the link given in the OP. This is not at all a very complete phonological description from a linguist's perspective (and of course it says absolutely nothing about the rest of the language), but it's an example of what and how I would be writing. The vowel system there is the one Nick made, with the addition of one more low vowel immune to vowel harmony in the same way /i/ and /e/ are. I intend to follow what little description there is already made as closely as possible.

Oh gods no... I thought this was meant to be done professionally?

Ouch

The options for having a professional conlang made ("professional" in the sense of paying money to some sort of organized group) are, to the best of my knowledge, exclusively limited to the Language Creation Society, which is largely made up of people who post on the same message board I post on.

If that was a snipe aimed at the googlepage, I don't like it either! Google pages suck, I just didn't have any other convenient web hosting handy at the moment. If I could use the wiki, that'd be nice.

I might well say here that Zompist, of the aforementioned bulletin board, and his Virtual Verduria project are one of the major influences on my own conlanging, and what I consider to be a well-done conlang and presentation thereof would be to write something approaching his description of Kebreni or Elkaril. Those are good examples of what I consider to be well-done conlangs and that's something like what I hope to make for you guys.

Anyway, I'd like to ask a few more questions about what sorts of things you as a community would like to see in the language, how close to Germanic or Indo-European models you'd like me to stay, and the like. But before I continue, I'd like to know whether I have the community's blessing to continue this project at all.

[con quesa]

Also I notice that this community seems to have put some thought into using 3rd person singular pronouns and being mindful of gender. Personally I am male and have no problem being refered to as "he" or "him". Are there some guidelines about what the community considers appropriate in that respect?

[Falkner van der Sluijs]

But before I continue, I'd like to know whether I have the community's blessing to continue this project at all.

You have my blessing, certainly. And if you want any help, I'm studying linguistics and german in uni and I've created one conlang of my own.

[Malliki Tosha]

"zie" and "zir" are used as gender neutral pronouns here, the second one is possessive. Perhaps that should be worked into Praeta?

And that "oh gods" comment was not in any way directed at you.

[Kaiser Ikol II]

Ouch

The professionalism comment was aimed at CJ's offer to help. Malliki and CJ have a bit of a rocky relationship, and I suggest you ignore them. I certainly do.

But before I continue, I'd like to know whether I have the community's blessing to continue this project at all.

I'm the absolute monarch here. I'm supposed to build a consensus before I act, but based on Falkner's endorsement of you and the general agreement that we need something as professionally done as possible, I officially give you my blessing.

I've just named you Director of Constructed Language by Imperial Decree, the highest form of law. That gives you complete creative control over the project and means you can only be removed by a formal decree of myself or my successors. It also means you can collect a salary if you ever join Shireroth.

If you haven't already, you might want to check out the Basic language outline thread.

[Falkner van der Sluijs]

Also, I hate to do this here, but it seems that the zompist boards won't let me register. It keeps telling me that my username is disallowed (I tried about a dozen different distinct names). Is there anything you can do to help, con quesa?

[CJ Miller]

You have to send Rosenfelder an email, the instructions are around there somewhere.

[Falkner van der Sluijs]

Ah, found it in the middle of nowhere. They need to make that a bit more obvious...

Thanks.

[con quesa]

Well, alrighty then. Glad to be on board

Malliki, I think I falsely interperated your comment as hostility toward myself, and I apologize for that.

So, from what I gather, Shireroth is to be the dominant langauge of a multiethnic and multicultural state, in something like the way that Latin was the dominant language of the western Roman Empire. In other words, it's the langauge of government and high culture, and perhaps the ethnic group that originally spoke Shireroth was the one who conquered everyone else nearby in the past, but it is hardly the only one spoken in the area. This is important because every language needs a history, and langauge contact in the past affects the langauge in the present - loanwords, loaned grammatical structures, and the like. It seems that several other people have created conlangs in this setting, and it appeals to my own sense of realism to try to incorporate loanwords from those conlangs into Shireroth, if constructed history, geography and the like permits. I need to look more in-depthly at the wiki first, though.

Another important thing to think about, which Nick brings up in the Outline Thread, is the aesthetc feel of the language. Given that Shireroth already uses a fair number of German-inspired titles (Kaiser, for one), I'm inclined to make the Shireroth language vaguely Germanic or otherwise European in feel. That's the case with what me and Nick have already created - the sound system is very Germanic, the vowel harmony is very reminiscant of Finnish, having four cases + two genders is a kind of almagation of several different common patterns among Indo-European subfamilies. (By contrast if I wanted to evoke a non-Indo-European aesthetic I'd give the language four vowels, contrastive tone and 15 genders with gender agreement on the verb like in Bantu langauges). Since English is a Germanic language, this has the added benefit that most of the people on this board won't have too much trouble pronouncing the language, if they care to. And I will try to keep the number of non-ASCII characters used in the orthography to a minimum, since that is a concern for some people.

That being said, I don't like to make conlangs that are so similar to natural languages that they are borrowing words directly. I wouldn't want to make the Shireroth word for, say, "apple" æpfel or apul or anything like that, it would have to be something like kudro. By the same token I would want to change the 2nd person pronoun to something other than "thu", which strikes me as far to close to "thou" or German "du". Borrowing a general aesthetic feel from a natural language is okay for me, but borrowing words and structures outright breaks the illusion of conlanging, for me. I recognize, though, that having words that are "cognate" with natural language words does make that vocabulary easier to remember, but I think a general policy of not outright borrowing natural langauge words or close variants thereof is a good one.

I think from here on out I'll start posting in the Outline Thread. I should have some more stuff on the bare-bones of nominal and verbal morphology up in the next few days.

[Malliki Tosha]

I think one of Nick's points was to make Praeta more than vaguely Germanic to encourage use of the language. I think there are many of us that would hesitate to use the language if it feels and looks too different, and if we hesitate to use it, the point in having a Shirerithian language disappears.

[Kaiser Ikol II]

This is important because every language needs a history, and langauge contact in the past affects the langauge in the present.

Oh God, if you want to start dealing with Shirerithian history and local culture you're going to be here forever It's kind of a mess, created by dozens of people with wildly different conworlding talent over the course of a decade, with only a few of them ever bothering to read the others' work.

The basic summary is that long ago the southern part of Benacia (the main Shirerithian continent) was ruled by the So Saran Empire, which blew itself up through inadvisable use of magic. It left behind a few colonies, most notably Brookshire, Musica, and Goldenmoon. Between four thousand and seven thousand years ago (the exact date is a matter of some debate), Raynor I of Brookshire took over Musica and Goldenmoon and started the Shirerithian Empire. His successors took over the land of Eluinea to the north and the advanced island empire of Yardistan to the south. A while later the eastern continent of Apollonia, the original cradle of civilization, fell into a dark age and the southwest part of it ended up annexed by Shireroth too. At various points we also gobbled up random colonies like Hyperborea, Marsara, and Melangia (everywhere marked in dark red on this map). Now we're a loose feudal confederation ruled from Shirekeep, with some lands like Brookshire more under the Kaiser's control, others like Hyperborea and Straylight preferring to ignore him completely except when they absolutely have to, and the whole lot rebelling like clockwork every couple of decades.

There's not a lot of work written down about the ethnic groups, but working from inside my head: everyone in Benacia (the western continent on the map) originally came from Apollonia (the center of human evolution). There were three waves - one about forty thousand years ago, which made it all the way down south to Istvanistan and beyond and became the ancestors of the Yardistani, a second which made it down to Brookshire and became the Brookshirerithians and therefore the group that most modern Shirerithian nobles and the seventeenish royal bloodlines of Raynor would be descended from, and a third that became the Elw, the inhabitants of Eluinea. A fourth migration never made it too far past the area of Cimmeria and Hyperborea, although I think the Absentians are distantly related to them.

The first wave spoke proto-Yardistani, the second wave spoke something distantly related to Lakhesian (traditionally we thought of Brookshire as using del-al'Enetet, but I think by now that's just supposed to be a holy language for the tecnomaezji), and the third wave spoke Elw which is still spoken around the Cape Farewell area - I usually just fake Elw by using Swedish or Norwegian when I can't track down Daniel. The irrelevant fourth wave spoke Fabonaar, which was never developed in any meaningful sense but which is distantly related to Hyperborean.

But there's more! Goldenmoon was settled in So-Saran times by the Treesians, whose culture is based totally on Irish and who all had Irish names, so I assume they spoke something Celtic. The whole empire was ruled by the Audentes (a dawn-of-civilization type from the eastern continent of Apollonia; you can find their homeland of Audentior on the map) for several centuries a long time ago (around 300 ASC I think; 1 real day = 1 ASC year, and you can see the ASC counter at the top of the forum underneath the box with the scary-looking tree), and Bill made the Audentes a very well-developed language (which is closely related to the original language of Apollonia and to the modern-day language of Hyperborea, because Hyperborea was an Audente colony founded in a land of native Fabonaars). Southern Eluinea was colonized by the Babkhans, who are Zoroastrian and speak something that sounds suspiciously like Farsi, and despite some very enjoyable crusades we never quite managed to kick them all out. And the So-Sarans themselves probably spoke a Yardistani-family language, and their descendants were the ruling class during the time of Raynor, so who knows what happened there?

Right now I imagine a core of Brookshire, Goldenmoon, southern Eluinea, and the more settled parts of Apollonia speaking common Shirerithian (although I hear the Apollonians have ridiculous accents). The northern parts of Eluinea, all the southern islands, Hyperborea, and the less civilized parts of Apollonia still speak their native tongues, probably with a bunch of Shirerithian loan words, although everybody who's anybody also knows the national language so they can communicate and get government jobs.

Everyone in Shireroth gets cultural responsibility for a certain territory, so they have final say on what exactly their area does linguistically.

And this is mostly my personal musing and you'd be wise to ignore as much of it as you need to ignore to stay sane

[con quesa]

I think one of Nick's points was to make Praeta more than vaguely Germanic to encourage use of the language. I think there are many of us that would hesitate to use the language if it feels and looks too different, and if we hesitate to use it, the point in having a Shirerithian language disappears.

That's a fair point too. I'd hate to make a langauge that isn't going to be used because it's too complicated for people used to English and other Western European languages, and that's something that I'd keep in mind when designing the grammar. I believe that I can create an interesting language that is unique without straying too far from Eurpean models. At the same time, I do feel strongly that actual vocabulary words ought not to be borrowed directly or in slightly altered form from actual languages, and that is something that I intentionally avoid doing in my own conlangs.

Ultimately, this is something the community needs to decide as it creates words for the language. I intend to follow Nick's comment in the other thread that "The immediate goal will be to create a basic framework on which to build. From there, the language can be extended to suit the needs of the nation. At that point, I can leave it in the capable hands of the citizens of Shireroth to do as they please with it.". But words that I personally create are gonna be a priori, and I'm gonna change the 2nd person pronoun

This does bring up the issue, though, of what to do about names and titles that have already been created. Obviously titles like "Kaiser" and "Duke" are from natural langauges - should these be customary English translations of native Shireroth terms (I'd personally suggest Mæzena and Sxulomåt respectively). Or should we treat "Kaiser" and "Duke" as Shireroth Kåjsur and Duk? What if names of past Kaisers already created violate vowel harmony? Do we change the names or the vowel harmony rule, or say that the name is in another language that's not Præta Shireroth? Should "landsraad" be an odd Anglicization of lænzrad or landzråd or what?

My personal bias here is to strike a balance between trying to design the language to accomodate names already created and changing the names to the fit the rules of the langauge, But this is something else the community ought to decide. How attached are you to those names as such?


Regarding history, from a cursory reading of the wiki and Kaiser Ikol II's summary, I feel like this would be a reasonable short description of Shireroth's history: Shireroth is the native language of the local people of Brookshire (Bruksxir?), and is distinct from the langauge of the So Saran empire, which conquered them. When the state rose to ascendancy after the collapse of the So Saran empire and started conquering its own territories under Raynor (Rajnor?), they naturally used their own langauge instead of that of the defunct empire for administration, and that's why it's Shireroth rather that some other language that is the dominant one.

Like I said, I've only so far skimmed a few wiki pages, and I don't know how well this story meshes up with other peoples' work, but it seems to make sense to me, and it leaves the problem of loanwords as something that can also be put off a while yet.

[Malliki Tosha]

I don't think Nick's goal was to create an a priori language, and I don't think Shirerithian should be one either. The words are supposed to be vaguely familiar, a feature that disappears with an a priori language. If you go ahead with creating vocabulary that in no way is related to any living or dead natural language (a priori), I don't really see much use for the language at all. The understanding when this project was initiated was that the language would be familiar. If that feature is removed, the entire basis for this project is also removed, as well as the consent of at least me and I think some of the older citizens.

[Daniel Farewell]

THAT PHONOLOGY SHEET IS AWESOME! I love it

You have my full support, con quesa.

[Malliki Tosha]

I like the phonology too, but as I said, the point of the language disappears if it's made a priori.

[Harvey Steffke]

While I'm not all that hot on the language project in general, it's extremely refreshing to see it being done by someone who not only has the capabilities but has the interest as well. con quesa, you have my full support sir.

[Kaiser Ikol II]

I don't have a big preference on a priori versus copied. It would be nice to have a few words that are easily recognizable (like Kaiser), but it would also be nice to have some uniquely Shirerithian ones.

Maybe...maybe modern Shirerithian is a combination of Brookshirerithian with the language of their So Saran rulers in the same way that English is a combination of Anglo-Saxon with the language of their Norman rulers. Yardistani is a copied-from-real-world language, so if So-Saran was from the Yardistani family it could be too. The Brookshirerithian element could be a priori. Then we could have the best of both worlds.

Sxulomåt is a pretty nifty sounding title, though. I'd think twice before messing with anyone called Sxulomåt.

[Malliki Tosha]

That could perhaps work.

*Needs to work on Lakhesian more*

[Falkner van der Sluijs]

*needs to do more work on swnndyrrrin*

[Erik Mortis]

I support this......

[con quesa]

I don't have a big preference on a priori versus copied. It would be nice to have a few words that are easily recognizable (like Kaiser), but it would also be nice to have some uniquely Shirerithian ones.

Maybe...maybe modern Shirerithian is a combination of Brookshirerithian with the language of their So Saran rulers in the same way that English is a combination of Anglo-Saxon with the language of their Norman rulers. Yardistani is a copied-from-real-world language, so if So-Saran was from the Yardistani family it could be too. The Brookshirerithian element could be a priori. Then we could have the best of both worlds.

Sxulomåt is a pretty nifty sounding title, though. I'd think twice before messing with anyone called Sxulomåt.

Alright, until more people chime in with their ideas on this subject this is the philosophy I'll adapt when creating vocabulary.

Over the next few days I'm going to transfer what I have on my google page to the wiki, and start adding some basic stuff about the noun morphology. I'll stick to Nick's schema of four cases and two genders, which is a very Germanic pattern, although I'll try to find some ways of making it more interesting

[con quesa]

I'm making http://shireroth.org/shirewiki/User:Con ... th_conlang my own public scratchpad for the Shireroth langauge. Anything I change now is going to be on this wiki page now, instead of my google page. I changed ø to ö, mainly because I think it looks better than ø (even though /ø/ is the IPA representation of that sound). I also added a new phoneme kx, the velar fricative /x/, because a Germanic-esque conlang isn't really complete without that sound, I feel (of course English doesn't have it but English is the eccentric uncle of the Germanic family anway ).

Apart from that, I think at this point I'll leave the orthography the way it is. That includes having þ and ð, as Nick insisted upon, and c and ç for /tʃ/ and /dʒ/, English "ch" and "j". Are enough people bothered by having those special characters that I ought to take them out? There's nothing to do about the accented vowels, there needs to be some sort of marking on them.