#Gweydr

[dedalvs]

The Gweydr word for stone stirred something in my subconscious, and as I was flipping through The Art of Language Invention, as one does, I realized I'd seen it before... it's almost identical to the *Dothraki* word for stone! You self-plagiarized! (Either that, or the speakers of Gweydr introduced rocks to the Dothraki.) Don't think I didn't notice! — Zhyler anon. P.S.: I also noticed that Zhyler and Kamakawi have oddly similar words for both "good" and "see". It's all connected...?!

I mean, neither of those? It's just an Easter egg. (Not a very good one, though. Negwin technically fits the phototactics of Dothraki, but it doesn't feel like a very Dothraki word to me—especially not for rock.)

[dedalvs]

I have this problem where I put all my time and effort into a conlang and I’m really happy with it, then I leave it for a bit and when I come back to it I see it’s kind of amateurish and I don’t like it anymore, so I scrap it and reboot it, and this keeps happening, so now most of my languages are on their fourth or fifth draft. If you've ever felt his way, did you ever overcome it, or do you still have the urge to revise your old conlangs? Am I doomed to never feeling satisfied with my work?

I don’t like to redo a conlang unless I have a very good (and clear) idea about what I want to do with it. It’s fine to just leave a project as is and start a new one—even one that’s either phonologically or morphologically similar. I personally find that approach much cleaner. It’s easier to just say, “This is a conlang I created in 2002 and worked on for two years until I realized it wasn’t any good. It was a useful exercise, and there were some neat ideas there that I may be able to use later. At present, though, the project is done, in that I don’t wish to work with it any longer.”

Personally, if I weren’t cutting these things off, it would just exhaust me. It’d be hard to keep track of what was good about the original draft and what wasn’t and what had changed… It’s hard to rip stuff out that’s integral to the language itself, because it necessitates potentially hundreds of tiny changes throughout the language, and if you miss one, the result is messy. I can’t stand that. It’s better to just start fresh, for me.

I can give you one example of a language I actually did reboot and why. The second ever (I believe?) language project I started was called Gweydr. I heard about palatalization in class, and so I created a language that I thought of as “backwards” palatalization. Specifically, there were these sets of vowels:

Front: i, ɪ, y, ʏ, e, ɛ, ø, œ, æ

Back: u, ʊ, o, ɔ, ɑ

And I had this idea that there would be certain consonant changes before the front vowels—specifically:

k > ks, t >ts, p > ps, g > gw, d > dw, b > bw

This is just silly. But yeah, the name of the language is /gejdr/ and comes out [gʷejdr]. That’s how the original version of the language worked.

It wasn’t long before I abandoned it, and I just let it sit there. Then some time in graduate school, I had an idea for a way to create some interesting declension classes for a case system. I thought this might be a way to reclaim Gweydr, so I redid the phonology (still plenty of [gw], and the like, but no longer surfacing as a result of different vowels. Instead, there was a full rounding, fronting, and ATR harmony system that didn’t affect consonants), and redid the grammar, while still keeping the spirit of the language. That version of the language is documented (to an extent, since I stopped updating the site) here.

Eventually, though, I realized even this revision wasn’t that good, and so I left it be. Recently, I’ve started to use it for a D&D campaign I’m running as the “default” language (i.e. the languages all the players and most NPCs they encounter speak). It mainly gets used as a way to name things, but in using it, I’m running up against the issues I had when I abandoned the language a second time. Since I’m using it actively, I’m going to give it a third (light) revision, when I get some free time here next month, but I’m only going to change the elements that I’m having problems with (going to do a new font, since the one I did for it is irredeemable; going to reorganize the dictionary; going to work on derivational strategies; going to calm down those declension classes, most of which don’t need to be specified, etc.).

Each time I went back to this language, though, there was a reason. Like the reason I used it for my D&D campaign was because I like the sound of it for character names: The phonology isn’t difficult for English speakers (outside [ø] and [y], which I ignore for the campaign), and it produces names that sound name-like to English speakers, but still sound both foreign and “old”. If I didn’t have a specific reason to use the language I would just build a new one, or choose a different language.

So in your case, you might try leaving some of these projects and starting brand new ones. They’ll still be there! You can still come back to them! It just might help if you feel deflated having to constantly revise and rework the same material.

Regarding your very last question, though, that’s entirely personal. I’ve never been satisfied with anything I’ve done for long, but that’s me. It’s not something that’s endemic to conlanging—or art, in general: it’s something that occurs in many conlangers and artists. You can either work to become more positive and focus on the good elements of your projects, or you can work to accept that your work will never be perfect, but can be good enough—and good enough can feel pretty darn good, if you let it. At the same time, it’s nice to hold onto some of that old perfectionism simply because it can serve as a motivator. That is, you can let the perfectionism serve you, rather than dominate you. It can be quite empowering if you’ve been suffering under it for a while. Make that perfectionism your servant—something you can let out on purpose every once and a while to help you achieve your goals. Then when you don’t need it, put it back in its cage and remember that’s it’s a pretty cool thing to create a language—or even a piece of one—and that it never would have existed were it not for you. That’s pretty awesome.

[dedalvs]

Hey there. I ask this despite knowing that you haven't have much spare time in the past few months (years?): do you still conlang for yourself? That is, do you create languages just for the sake of your own amusement, not having been payed to do so? Thanks

When I’m working on a show or movie, it’s an active project, and I work on that exclusively. When I have no active project, I work on whatever I happen to want to work on at the time. That includes every language I’ve ever created. At this stage, what are the languages of Defiance other than personal projects (since Trion can’t be bother to give a single shit about the languages I created)? They’re all my own conlangs; I was just paid to create some of them and given a few extra constraints.

Also, now that I’ve been running my own D&D campaign, I’ve been working with languages I’ve created in the past that I’m using for the campaign—specifically, Bodzvokhan and Övüsi from Bright (figured in case I get to work on the sequel, it’d only help to beef up the vocab of each); Shiväisith from Thor: The Dark World; and Gweydr, one of my old ones. The latter is just awful. It needs so much work to be respectable. And the font is an abomination. I really want to rework it, but it’s really not a good use of my time (Gweydr is simply a naming language, since it’s the language that everyone speaks. Consequently, you don’t hear it—it’s just English—but if there are decorative signs, etc. that players don’t need to read, they’ll be in the Gweydry script).

Honestly, though, I really don’t draw a distinction, or think of one. These are all simply languages I created, and I work on them because I love them.

[dedalvs]

welcome back! i’ve really been enjoying langtime studio. it’s been really inspirational for my own conlanging, both regarding the linguistics stuff you guys use as well as your general workflow

Thank you! That was the hope.

For those unfamiliar, LangTime Studio is a joint project by me and Jessie Sams (@quothalinguist). Jessie and I created the Méníshè language for Motherland: Fort Salem, and we loved working together so much that we wanted something else to do in the downtime between that first season and a potential season 2 (which was no guarantee, at the time). I couldn't wait for some other job to come along, so I decided to do something with a project I'd been neglecting.

For a long time, I've wanted to do something that was essentially a board game version of the Sega Genesis game Shining Force (for newer gamers, it's like proto-Fire Emblem, but better). I wanted to set it in a post-human Earth featuring anthropomorphic animals (mutated somewhat like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), and I wanted them all to speak their own languages. They'd have absolutely no connection to previous human languages, just as they'd have no connection to previous human culture. In order to have any characters in this game, I'd have to create actual languages to draw names from, and I kept stalling.

Originally my plan was to "upgrade" my old languages. I was goingj to have five different anthropomorphic species, and I was going to take the following languages and redo them, bringing them up to my current standard:

Cats: Zhyler

Rabbits: Kamakawi

Opossums: Sidaan

Dogs: Gweydr

Mice: Njaama

I even started with Zhyler (I have a tiny little document called New Zhüler on my computer), but there was just too much to change... It ripped the heart and soul out of the original projects, and the new versions simply weren't as good as I wanted them to be.

Then I hit an idea that combined this idea with one I'd had earlier (to wit: Some famous author could set up a subscription service where essentially they write their new novel on, like, Google Docs, and they let people watch literally while they write). What if Jessie and I created these languages together, and did it on YouTube, and then started a Patreon to justify the work hours we were putting into it?

And this is where LangTime Studio was born. Jessie and I worked together to come up with the details, and ultimately we decided we'd stream every Thursday at 2 p.m. Pacific. We've been doing it now since February of 2020, and we've worked our way through the languages for the rabbits, opossums, and mice, and we're nearing completion on our cat language. Only the dog language remains!

I'd always hoped that anyone could pop in at any time and not have to be there from the beginning of the season. I mean, if you're watching Bob Ross, it's fascinating to see him start from a totally blank canvas, but if he's already got a sky, ground, and a mountain on there, it's not like you turn it off. It's still fun to see a happy little tree come into being!

Most of the time it looks like this:

That is, Jessie and I spend a lot of time to thinking and trying to figure out what to do next, and people watch and chat and give us ideas, answer questions, etc.

It's been a fun Thursday tradition for us for what's coming on three years now, and we're looking to keep going!

So that's partly what we've been up to. We didn't know how well we'd be able to keep it up with my travel schedule, but you'll notice this started in February of 2020. February 27th, in fact. I actually did have a talk in between then and the total lockdown which put our second episode on a Wednesday. The next talk I had was canceled. And the next one. And the next one. And the next one...

Of course, catching a live stream isn't something everyone can do or wants to do, but hey, if you want to know what it's like for a conlanger to work on a language from absolute zero to fairly functional, this is it. I'd always hoped especially that beginning conlangers would find it inspiring and encouraging to see how utterly and completely lost we get—and how often it happens. Like anything else, you just gotta keep plugging away. :)