#Gweydr grammar

[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.