#conlanger things

[impishdullahan]

Worst part about the cookies knowing I'm a linguist, honestly: the only thing they can try and market towards me is grammarly and that's like the last thing I'd touch. I'll still pay attention to when Word gives me a red squiggle because it's very common I accidently metathesise a few letters and don't notice it, but otherwise just not at all helpful. Google docs just has given up entirely, though, just because that's how I store conlang lexicons. And my classmates wonder why I prefer a real word processor for my academic writing...

As a DM, though, AI has been useful for writing campaigns. I give it an outline of important details and what beat I want to hit, ask for a dozen ways of hitting that beat, and then ignore most of it and use a small kernel it provided me with to plan the scene. It's not so much I use it to brainstorm, or to write, I use it to bridge the gap between brainstorming and writing, because I'm bad at that: I can write well if I have a vague idea of what specifically I need to write, and I have all these grand ideas of what to write, I just don't know how to get from point A to point B sometimes. It can also do this in a way my DM friends can't, though I'm sure if I had a writer friend (who weren't one of my players), they could help me bridge that same gap.

Okay. It's time for an AI rant.

My nephew is 13 years old. Whenever he writes a paper for school, I check it over and fix all of his mistakes for him. He said to me, "Maybe I'll proofread your paper for you in exchange," meaning one of the scholarly articles I write for work. I said, "Cool," and gave him the file. And he said, "Well, this is full of errors! See, you always say you have a lot to correct on my stuff, and look at all the stuff you got wrong!" And I said, surprised, "What? Where?" Because I'm sure there are typos in the draft I sent him, but not, like, that many.

And then he pointed to the screen and said, "Look at all the blue and red lines you have."

And I said, "Yeah, but those are wrong. Like, those are blue and red lines I'm ignoring because the computer is wrong." And then I paused and added, "You know you can't proofread a paper by just looking at the red and blue lines, right?" And he gave me the blankest look, because that clearly is EXACTLY what he thinks. And it became even clearer suddenly why, whenever I correct something on his paper, his immediate reaction is, "It didn't have a blue or red line."

There's a very good reason for that: THAT'S BECAUSE THE COMPUTER ISN'T SMART ENOUGH TO KNOW THAT IT WAS WRONG.

I am so tired of being sold the idea that computers are better than humans and so we should just outsource everything to them, which is clearly the lesson my nephew is absorbing in U.S. middle school. COMPUTERS ARE NOT BETTER THAN HUMANS. Like, maybe they are better at humans at crawling through rubble to find people trapped inside. They are also better at preserving things in a searchable format. Things like that. Very limited circumstances.

I don't want to sound alarmist but everything I hear about people using generative AI freaks me out. It's not just that I'm freaked out by people being like, "I use it to write novels!" (Although I don't see how they do, I have tried to have it write fiction for me and the output was truly terrible.) But I recognize my bias around creative writing and so no one needs to credit my views on artificial writing. But! Other things are alarming, too! "I use it to brainstorm x, y, or z." But...why? Why not just...use your own brain...to...brain...storm? The computer doesn't even have a brain to brainstorm with! And you might be like, "But it comes up with things that my brain would never think of!" So would other people! You could also brainstorm with other people! Or even through Google to see what other people have thought before you (not AI). Please don't belittle the wonder of thinking.

I just feel like the marketing around generative AI boils down to "Wouldn't it be easier not to use your own brain to think about things?" Everyone. No. It would not be. Please just trust me on this. I'm not just an old person who is out of touch with technology or something. I promise. USE YOUR BRAINS. IT WILL BE OKAY.

[silverfoxboy]

hey therianblr, ive decided im gonna make a conlang just for therians. and im only going to let therians or alterhumans learn it. if youre interested, dm me (or if you have ideas on how it should sound) :3

the concept is similar to things like pig latin, its a language for a certain group of people, and that group does not want outsiders to learn their language so were gonna basically have our own language to ourselves! but that also means well have to regulate the resources used to learn it since its not meant for non alterhumans

if ur a therian PLEASE reblog this so more therians can know and help me out! pls an thx

[spocks-kaathyra]

thoughts about the Cardassian writing system

I've thinking about the Cardassian script as shown on screen and in beta canon and such and like. Is it just me or would it be very difficult to write by hand?? Like.

I traced some of this image for a recent drawing I did and like. The varying line thicknesses?? The little rectangular holes?? It's not at all intuitive to write by hand. Even if you imagine, like, a different writing implement—I suppose a chisel-tip pen would work better—it still seems like it wasn't meant to be handwritten. Which has a few possible explanations.

Like, maybe it's just a fancy font for computers, and handwritten text looks a little different. Times New Roman isn't very easily written by hand either, right? Maybe the line thickness differences are just decorative, and it's totally possible to convey the same orthographic information with the two line thicknesses of a chisel-tip pen, or with no variation in line thickness at all.

A more interesting explanation, though, and the one I thought of first, is that this writing system was never designed to be handwritten. This is a writing system developed in Cardassia's digital age. Maybe the original Cardassian script didn’t digitize well, so they invented a new one specifically for digital use? Like, when they invented coding, they realized that their writing system didn’t work very well for that purpose. I know next to nothing about coding, but I cannot imagine doing it using Chinese characters. So maybe they came up with a new writing system that worked well for that purpose, and when computer use became widespread, they stuck with it. 

Or maybe the script was invented for political reasons! Maybe Cardassia was already fairly technologically advanced when the Cardassian Union was formed, and, to reinforce a cohesive national identity, they developed a new standardized national writing system. Like, y'know, the First Emperor of Qin standardizing hanzi when he unified China, or that Korean king inventing hangul. Except that at this point in Cardassian history, all official records were digital and typing was a lot more common than handwriting, so the new script was designed to be typed and not written. Of course, this reform would be slower to reach the more rural parts of Cardassia, and even in a technologically advanced society, there are people who don't have access to that technology. But I imagine the government would be big on infrastructure and education, and would make sure all good Cardassian citizens become literate. And old regional scripts would stop being taught in schools and be phased out of digital use and all the kids would grow up learning the digital script.

Which is good for the totalitarian government! Imagine you can only write digitally. On computers. That the government can monitor. If you, like, write a physical letter and send it to someone, then it's possible for the contents to stay totally private. But if you send an email, it can be very easily intercepted. Especially if the government is controlling which computers can be manufactured and sold, and what software is in widespread use, etc. 

AND. Historical documents are now only readable for scholars. Remember that Korean king that invented hangul? Before him, Korea used to use Chinese characters too. And don't get me wrong, hangul is a genius writing system! It fits the Korean language so much better than Chinese characters did! It increased literacy at incredible rates! But by switching writing systems, they broke that historical link. The average literate Chinese person can read texts that are thousands of years old. The average literate Korean person can't. They'd have to specifically study that field, learn a whole new writing system. So with the new generation of Cardassian youths unable to read historical texts, it's much easier for the government to revise history. The primary source documents are in a script that most people can't read. You just trust the translation they teach you in school. In ASIT it's literally a crucial plot point that the Cardassian government revised history! Wouldn't it make it soooo much easier for them if only very few people can actually read the historical accounts of what happened.

I guess I am thinking of this like Chinese characters. Like, all the different Chinese "dialects" being written with hanzi, even though otherwise they could barely be considered the same language. And even non-Sinitic languages that historically adopted hanzi, like Japanese and Korean and Vietnamese. Which worked because hanzi is a logography—it encodes meaning, not sound, so the same word in different languages can be written the same. It didn’t work well! Nowadays, Japanese has made significant modifications and Korean has invented a new writing system entirely and Vietnamese has adapted a different foreign writing system, because while hanzi could write their languages, it didn’t do a very good job at it. But the Cardassian government probably cares more about assimilation and national unity than making things easier for speakers of minority languages. So, Cardassia used to have different cultures with different languages, like the Hebitians, and maybe instead of the Union forcing everyone to start speaking the same language, they just made everyone use the same writing system. Though that does seem less likely than them enforcing a standard language like the Federation does. Maybe they enforce a standard language, and invent the new writing system to increase literacy for people who are newly learning it.

And I can imagine it being a kind of purely digital language for some people? Like if you’re living on a colonized planet lightyears away from Cardassia Prime and you never have to speak Cardassian, but your computer’s interface is in Cardassian and if you go online then everyone there uses Cardassian. Like people irl who participate in the anglophone internet but don’t really use English in person because they don’t live in an anglophone country. Except if English were a logographic writing system that you could use to write your own language. And you can’t handwrite it, if for whatever reason you wanted to. Almost a similar idea to a liturgical language? Like, it’s only used in specific contexts and not really in daily life. In daily life you’d still speak your own language, and maybe even handwrite it when needed. I think old writing systems would survive even closer to the imperial core (does it make sense to call it that?), though the government would discourage it. I imagine there’d be a revival movement after the Fire, not only because of the cultural shift away from the old totalitarian Cardassia, but because people realize the importance of having a written communication system that doesn’t rely on everyone having a padd and electricity and wifi.

[vynnyal]

Of all games why this one

[obibail]

my favorite personal headcanon is that most Tevinter citizens don’t actually speak Trade tongue as a main language, or if they do it’s strictly a public language and not a home language. instead the non-Altus citizenry (esp. grunt military/lower class civilian Soporati, Liberati, and new Laetan) especially in Minrathous and other large cities with trade connections to countries outside Tevinter and/or a history of Qunari occupation speak something closer to Romanian in the home/among themselves

the language still has obvious Tevene/Latin-vaguely Greek roots and is very much a modern/less formal evolution of Tevene but it's got a fair bit of Antivan/Spanish-Italian and Qunlat/Arabic-Turkic influence on top of that. the language has been evolving for centuries but more recent wide-spread public use partially started out as something of a more liberal-minded reclamation of Tevinter roots while not wanting to revert back to speaking like they’re leading the full Latin mass at all times

it’s not nationalism, exactly, but it’s still a love of country, or at least a desire to love your country and reclaim or reshape (rather than entirely reject, by doing something like only speaking Trade) a part of a contentious and problematic heritage and culture without taking a hard right into Venatori-style Tevinter nationalism that either ignores, excuses, or outright exalts all the worst parts of Tevinter history and wants to bring back the Empire at its worst

a lot of Altus/higher socially ranked Laetan/higher military ranked Soporati families (especially ones that skew more conservative) scorn or reject the use of modern Tevene because it’s such a distinct and noticeable move away from ancient Tevene (or at least the version of the language still used in religious, military, and magic practice, as well as debate in both houses of the Senate, probably), and feels - to them - like a rejection of Tevinter history and culture rather than an evolution of it, so it’s very much a Soporati and Liberati thing to speak modern Tevene

(in my mind slaves either know Tevene and Trade, like Fenris, or only know one (unless they knew it before they were enslaved). no one who willingly owns slaves would lower themself to ever speak, little lone teach, “bastardized”/modern Tevene, and probably come down hard on slaves that do know or learn it)

most Shadow Dragons use it pretty liberally in missives and when speaking to each other about business, especially with the Venatori being one of the major factions that detest it and thus don't know it, and is something that the Shadows leadership that comes from Altus/other higher socially ranked backgrounds have to learn

of the Shadows leadership we meet in Veilguard, Tarquin would probably be one of the only ones that speaks it fluently/has likely spoken it all his life and is comfortable speaking it. Neve would very likely be fluent as well, being from Dock Town and likely being new Laetan. Dorian and Mae might have known some before, but, considering his background, Ashur definitely knew next to none originally

this obviously doesn't change that they're doing good things and that they're making positive change but it would probably be a point of contention somewhere within the group hierarchy that regular Shadows can't easily communicate with their top leadership in a language they consider socially revolutionary/a symbol of a more liberal and modern Tevinter

[serpentface]

Here's the intended pronunciation of the 'balls in my mouth please' conlang dialogue btw

[randomwordzard]

I need a linguistics workbook with little tables and sentence stems I can fill out. I need conlang templates to print and experiment with. I need guides to grammars and phonological inventories. I need offline enrichment. I need

[iislak-mewu]

Īslak Mèwu intro post

Shishīkwa prana!¹ Welcome, travellers! I'll try and keep this post friendly and readable to non-linguists, I just wanna infodump about my language lol. This post has gotten a little long though, so apologies! Hopefully it serves well to give you a feel of it <3

¹/ɕiˈɕiə̯kʋa pʁaˈna/ PL~foreigner.PAT welcome

Consider this a formal introduction post to the conlang (constructed language) i've been making for like, over a year now at this point? on and off, mostly off tho lmao. The vast majority of stuff i've made is the grammar (this is very much my favourite area of langs lol, closely followed by the phonetics side of things), and as a result i really don't have many words or actual forms for things lol

Īslak Mèwu² (lit. valley's language) (or just Īsla for short) is a language spoken by the fictional Rūsawlitwā³ people. While the majority of them are a vertical transhumance culture, living in valleys and farming cattle (herders move the flock up and down the mountains in line with the seasons, while the majority of people live permenantly in the village), some groups have moved further afoot and are living in a more settled way in towns and cities in neighbouring regions.

²/iɐ̯ˈsla-k m��ˈʋu/ valley-GEN language (lit. "valley's language") ³/ʀuɐ̯-ˌsaʋli-ˈtˠaː/ cow-herd-AGN (lit. "cow-herders")

I'll start with Īsla's sounds, then give a (not-so-brief) tour of the grammar.

Phonology / sounds

Īsla has the following consonants: (If you don't recognise these symbols, you can find and listen to them here. You won't find ˠ in there, but it makes things sound more "dark".)

Īsla has eight short vowels, /i e ɛ a y ø u o/, along with the long vowels /iɐ̯, uɐ̯, iː, yː, uː, eː, aː/ and the rather distinctive syllabic fricatives /ʝ̩, ɣ̩ʷ, ɣ̩~ɦ̩/. These syllabic fricatives are high pitch, and often realised instead as breathy voiced vowels depending on dialect.

The syllable structure is (C)(C)V(C). Stress is assigned to the last "heaviest" syllable.

I am currently in the middle of reworking the past maybe 100 years of sound shifts, so this is subject to change (especially the vowel system)

Grammar

For the linguistics nerds among us, Īslak Mèwu is a synthetic language that features noun incorperation, a pretty free word order, 3 grammatical genders, split-S alignment, converbs, a shitty verb agreement system that will likely fall out of use in a generation or two (role marking is mostly done by the case system and emphatic pronouns), and TAM is typically marked via auxiliary verbs (tbf these are a lot more irregular so you do get decent verb agreement thru this). I'll explain these features briefly and how they work in Īsla:

Noun incorperation is a process where nouns and verbs are put together (compounded) into one word. We kinda have this in English - think about mountain-climbing, berry picking, horse riding, dishwashing, etc. In Īsla, this is MUCH more common than in English - this is used for basically every conventional activity. Natives talk about dinner-eating, sheet-changing, cow-chasing, dust-sweeping, fish-chopping, etc. These aren't always obvious from the words they're made of though! "whisky-swimming" actually means "to have thrown, to have deliberately lost a game", named for drinking games where people deliberately lose for the aim of getting drunk.

Grammatical gender. Like in French, German, etc. Īsla has 3 of them, and verbs, adjectives, pronouns, and determiners (think English "some", "most", "the", etc) "agree" with nouns in gender. Case markers merge with the gender markers.

Auxiliary verbs are little "helping" verbs that convey grammatical info alongside a more meaningful verb. English has these - "I will do X", "I should do X", "i have done X". Īsla verbs operate in basically the same way, but they come after the main verb, not before:

/niəsɛ sˠɣ̩mˈmuːs-a ɫʋin/ 3M.SG:ERG cook_dinner-NOMIN 3M.SG.IMP "He should cook dinner" /niəsɛ sˠɣ̩mˈmuːs-a tˠʋo/ 3M.SG:ERG cook_dinner-NOMIN 3M.LOC.COP "He is cooking dinner (for a while)" (lit. "He is in cooking dinner")

Case marking: Like in languages like German or Finnish. Little suffixes added to words to show what their role is in the sentence. In Īsla, the cases are the agentive case (do-ers), patientive case (things that have things done to them), genitive case (possessors), dative case (recipients of things, destinations, also used for expressing opinions as in "to me, X is cool"), the locative case (locations), and ablative case (sources and instruments).

Split-S alignment. ohhhhhh boy. this is FAR too complex of a topic to properly get into in an intro post like this, but the short of it that, Īsla just, can't make up its mind about what case to mark Ss with? For ease of writing, I'm gonna use "S" to refer to the only noun in an intransitive sentence (e.g. in "he walks", S is "he", but in "he hits him", there is no S, because this is a transitive sentence)

In Īsla, the main verb chooses what case the S should be in. There are two (main) categories of this:

"Unaccusative verbs" - S is marked with the "patientive" case (the case given to e.g. "person" in "i chase the person") /ˈtaːmu-∅ miɐ̯ˈlij/ person-PATIENTIVE lie "the person is lying down"

"Unergative verbs" - S is marked with the "agentive" case (the case given to e.g. "person" in "the person chases me") /ˈtaːmy jeˈiɐ̯s/ person:AGENTIVE walk "the person walks"

However, this case preference is overridden by most auxiliary verbs. For example /ʀom/, the inchoative auxiliary (="to begin Xing"), demands an agentive S: /ˈtaːmy ˈmiɐ̯lja ʀom/ person:AGENTIVE lie-NOMIN 3N.SG.INCH "the person starts lying down" /miɐ̯ˈlij/ "to be lying down" is typically unaccusative, but the presence of the inchoative auxiliary means that /taːmu/ is marked with the agentive case, rather than the patientive case as in the earlier example.

On the other end of that, /xe/, the past tense auxiliary, demands a patientive S: /ˈtaːmu jeˈiɐ̯s =xe/ person-PATIENTIVE walk =3N.SG.PAST "the person walked" This is the opposite thing - "walk" suggests an agentive S, but /xe/ overrides that.

The actual system is ofc more complicated than this, but this is enough for a quick overview.

I'm gonna stop talking here, before I make a post so long no one will want to read it, but there's absolutely more posts coming! …when i can fit them in between coursework and the adhd distractableness ofc. Hopefully this has given you a decent feel for the language, and please send asks about stuff if you're interested!! (i hope i've explained things ok) There's a lot I didn't touch on here, and a lotta detail I've left out, and I'd love an excuse to talk more about this stuff <3

[dapurinthos]

so i finally got around to actually reading @dedalvs's the art of language invention for the purposes of its purpose (nine years later. this is why you buy the books, people! that giant pile is going to be read). i have copious highlights and notes on paper and here are some of the replies i had for parts of the book.

(i always get a kick out of when someone positions themselves as the ‘default’ for pronunciations because i have some quirks in my pronunciations, like the absence of the cot-caught (lot-thought, also father-bother which makes me go ??? those aren’t even near the same vowel) merger present in nearly all canadian english (most north american english, really) in my vowels. that was a fun day in linguistics class (everyone else: /kʰɒt/ /kʰɒt/. me: /koːt/ /kɔːt/).)

anyway, select passages behind the cut as to not crowd up your flist dash.

oh hildegard. you would have loved the bardcore version of 'hips don't lie'.

this is the gospel truth. go look at how japanese verbs function. they’re categorized as godan, ichidan, and irregular. how are they categorized? like a nightmare. godan verbs are ones that end with -u and move through the whole fucking vowel row of the hiragana chart, which is why they’re called ‘five-level’ verbs. u want to know where this vowel change takes place? oh it’s not a suffix or a prefix. nooooo it’s in the middle of the word (only the end when it’s the -u form). kikanai > kikimasu > kiku > kikeru > kikou, for the base godan verb bases (negative, polite, dictionary form, potential, volitional conjugations).

ichidan bases are easy in comparison. the -ru ending is the only thing that changes. and then there’s the godan ones that disguise themselves as ichidan verbs.

the irregular ones are fine. they're normal. there are only two of them — suru: 'to make'; and kuru: 'to come'. they're like particles so you get things like kaiten suru: 'to rotate, spin', where it's made up of the noun kaiten: 'revolution, rotation' and my verb friend suru: 'to make', so it's literally 'to make' + 'rotation'.

i took one look at japanese godan and ichidan conjugation, kidnapped the way the irregular verbs work (suru: to do/make/etc, kuru: to come; used like particles, after an action & such, like kaiten suru: to rotate, spin, lit. rotation + to do/to make), and then backed away slowly, not making eye contact. this was the correct choice. i also believe it was why i chose not to go further in my japanese study when i was eleven/twelve-ish. that and it was impossible to study japanese in a 20 000-person town excuse me unincorporated community in southern ontario during the previous millennium.

this poor caribou. i need to work this word into my vocabulary immediately.

i have the opportunity to do something really funny with what the word for the number four will be in taizhan-jen, in the grand tradition of four = death like: sì/sǐ (mandarin), sei3/sei2 (cantonese), shi for both (japanese), tứ/tử (vietnamese), sa for both (korean). like how i decided andobi (the name of a mountain range on ando) was a compound of ando + obi, so obi now means 'mountain', 'fixed/firm' and adding the adjectival suffix gets obi'i: 'steadfast'.

[sannehnagi]

Iyilii a’nitlii kaliilaq

When casting spells of searching and finding

Arhaqq aag na’haneqaapia iinikiitšyaneqig

It is best to have an object the person holds dear

Au’nyahig aag šiinikiitšaš

Or at least an object they owned

Au’nyahig aag šiinikiitšaš aag yatšaapia

Or at least an object like an object they owned

Haqaš, gaalaaqavilaapia haqayaneqig

Of course, it is actually best to have a piece of the person

Aag askiš gigiilit.

Living things remember.

[wyverwithy]

i highly doubt Slugterra's human residents speak Surface language, given they've been separated from the Burning World for thousands of years. not to mention the fact that they've been surrounded by many non-human species, one of which canonically has their own language (the Shadow Clan). they also have their own unique written language, so it wouldn't be far-fetched to say their verbal language is different, too.

Eli automatically understands everyone the moment he comes through The Drop though, so ignoring the fact that this is a kid's show with surface-level (hah) worldbuilding, i like to think that during Will's visits he'd teach Eli the Terran language. Tad was probably in the same boat, with his mom probably teaching the language to him? maybe? given she was in some way affiliated with Dr. Blakk. somehow. although Tad's whole....situation....is a bit of a logistical nightmare.

anyway "floppers" as a canonical curse word is funny, and Will probably didn't teach that to Eli (although i love the idea of him probably accidentally letting it slip one time and had to pull the "you'll understand when you're older" card). so Eli being the first person in A While to say the English word "fuck" in the caverns with no one else knowing what it means until Tad comes along is peak comedy to me.

[velaraffricate]

I'm finally committing to watching biblaridion's conlanging case study series start to finish and i swear i can feel my brain leveling up in real time. to be honest ive always had a bit of a problem with artistic jealousy to the point where it can be difficult for me to engage in hobby communities cus it feels like everyone is doing it so much better than me. but you cant really improve like that! this is something i wanna work on and i think this series is gonna help a lot.

[silverfoxboy]

Heres the WIP doc for the therian language! if anyone has ideas for words or affixes they can comment them and I can add them if I think they fit :3 here you go :3

also look at my new amp :)

[hollownest-whore]

I feel like I'm being hit w abyss shriek watching people reblog my old art

[dramatic-dolphin]

hungarian words are so funny sometimes. calculator? that's the counting machine. airplane? you mean the flying machine. rain? the thing that falls. river? oh yeah, that's the thing that flows. deer? the animal with horns.

[serpentface]

Do you conlang? I was wondering if you had naming languages (or possibly even more developed ones) for pulling the words you use. I tried to search your blog but didn't find anything, wouldn't be surprised if the feature is just busted tho. Your worldbuilding is wonderful and I particularly enjoy the anthropological and linguistic elements.

Ok the thing is I had kind of decided I was not going to do any conlanging because I don't feel like I'm equipped to do a good job of it, like was fully like "I'm just going to do JUST enough that it doesn't fail an immediate sniff test and is more thoughtful than just keysmashing and putting in vowels". And then have kinda been conlanging anyway (though not to a very deep and serious extent. I maybe have like....an above average comprehension of how language construction works via willingness to research, but that's not saying much, also I can never remember the meanings of most linguistic terms like 'frictives' or etc off the top of my head. I'm just kinda raw dogging it with a vague conceptualization of what these things mean)

I do at least have a naming language for Wardi (and more basic rules for other established languages) but the rudimentary forms of it were devised with methods much shakier and less linguistically viable than even the most basic naming language schemes, and I only went back over it LONG after I had already made a bunch of words so there's some inconsistencies with consonant presence and usage. (This can at least be justified because it IS a language that would have a lot of loanwords and would be heavily influenced by other language groups- Burri being by far the most significant, Highland-Finnic and Yuroma-Lowlands also being large contributors)

The 'method' I used was:

-Skip basic construction elements and fully move into devising necessary name words, with at least a Vibe of what consonants are going to be common and how pronunciation works -Identify some roots out of the established words and their meanings. Establish an ongoing glossary of known roots/words. -Construct new words based in root words, or as obvious extensions/variants of established words. -Get really involved in how the literal meanings of some words might not translate properly to english, mostly use this to produce a glossary of in-universe slang. -Realize that I probably should have at least some very basic internal consistency at this point. -Google search tutorials on writing a naming language. -Reverse engineer a naming language out of established words, and ascribe all remaining inconsistencies to being loanwords or just the mysteries of life or whatever.

I do at least have some strongly established pronunciation rules and a sense of broad regional dialect/accents.

-'ai' words are almost always pronounced with a long 'aye' sound.

-There is no 'Z' or 'X' sound, a Wardi speaker pronouncing 'zebra' would go for 'tsee-brah', and would attempt 'xylophone' as 'ssye-lohp-hon'

-'V' sounds are nearly absent and occur only in loanwords, and tend to be pronounced with a 'W' sound. 'Virsum' is a Highland word (pronounced 'veer-soom') denoting ancestry, a Wardi speaker would go 'weer-sum'.

-'Ch' spellings almost always imply a soft 'chuh' sound when appearing after an E, I, or O (pelatoche= pel-ah-toh-chey), but a hard 'kh' sound after an A or U (odomache= oh-doh-mah-khe). When at the start of a word, it's usually a soft 'ch' unless followed by an 'i' sound (chin (dog) is pronounced with a hard K 'khiin', cholem (salt) is pronounced with a soft Ch 'cho-lehm')

-Western Wardin has strong Burri cultural and linguistic influence, and a distinct accent- one of the most pronounced differences is use of the ñ sound in 'nn' words. The western city of Ephennos is pronounced 'ey-fey-nyos' by most residents, the southeastern city of Erubinnos is pronounced 'eh-roo-been-nos' by most residents. Palo's surname 'Apolynnon' is pronounced 'A-puh-lee-nyon' in the Burri and western Wardi dialects (which is the 'proper' pronunciation, given that it's a Kos name), but will generally be spoken as 'Ah-poh-leen-non' in the south and east.

-R's are rolled in Highland-Finnic words. Rolling R's is common in far northern rural Wardi dialects but no others. Most urban Wardi speakers consider rolling R's sort of a hick thing, and often think it sounds stupid or at least uneducated. (Brakul's name should be pronounced with a brief rolled 'r', short 'ah' and long 'uul', but is generally being pronounced by his south-southeastern compatriots with a long unrolled 'Brah' sound).

Anyway not really a sturdy construction that will hold up to the scrutiny of someone well equipped for linguistics but not pure bullshit either.