#dootlang

[impishdullahan]

I'm staying with a friend this weekend who plays the accordion. We agreed to see if we can speak some of the dootlang tomorrow after I infodumped how it works. This is very exciting.

Getchu friends with different skillsets who still match your freak

[impishdullahan]

My tunicate spec evo is wildly dimorphic: only one of the sexes achieved sapience! The females evolved from neotenic, free-swimming larval forms but the males still become sedantary filter feeders like normal basal tunicates. The females then collect males and keep them in a garden, almost, and use them to fertilise and incubate their eggs. They also don't really do gender given the effective monomorphism.

if you’re making a species sexually dimorphic u gotta lean into it. give the females massive colorful crests. give the males entirely different sizes and tooth shapes. make em wildly different sizes. hell, go for sexual trimorphism. tetramorphism. sex isnt real do what you want

[impishdullahan]

What can you tell us about this conworld that your conlangs are spoken in?

Where do I start? There's been a lot of iterations.

At present, it's a very hand-wavy spec-evo eocene Earth analog. There's the one major continent about the size of North America, I think, and it's populated by maybe 10 sapient species, all of which have been ascribed a conlang or have plans for one. In the west on islands and coastal plains, and in temperate rainforests, as well as further North in the tundra, there're derived oxyaenids which speak Tokétok. In the mountains that help form these temperate rainforests is a group of derived early ungulates which speak Varamm. East still in a massive river basin a group of derived testudines speak a sign language still in it's infancy. On the drier east coast there's both a group of derived neornithischians, for which I have a 9yo sketch I'll someday revisit, and a group of derived early carnivorans that speak my current speedlang project Viverraviss. In the south there's highlands with a group of derived scansoriopterygians, which I have 2 old sketches and plans to derive a daughter from N!odzäsä for. With a more global distribution, I have Agyharo for the derived azhdarchids that form insular communities across the continent, and in the surrounding seas ATxK0PT is spoken by derived tunicates. From across the sea comes Tsantuk for the token humanoids, and they have a robust coastal trade network across the continent, though their largest port of call is in the Southern Tokétok lands. There's also an island far to the Northwest where I might put some temnospondyl dragons or something; I have friend who wants to build such a language with me.

I'd share a map, but the only one I have thus far outside my head is in the margins of some old math homework and it's difficult to read.

Techwise the speakers of Tsantuk are somewhere in the age of exploration, and everyone else is very where the rest of the non-European world was at the time varying from loose fission-fusion hunter-gatherer societies to robust civilizations. There's also a touch of magic, but it's still very loose. The spark notes are that climatic events and other natural disasters, whether ephemeral or persistent, have at their core a rift in space. This rift leads to a sort of void filled with unformed energy, kinda like the stem cells of force and matter, that fuels these climatic events. If someone encounters such a rift, they may gain the power to open and close rifts themselves and use that formless energy to power magic that reflects the original rift they encountered. For instance, sailing into and surviving a hurricane might grant storm magic.

It's been a while since I've written anything set in this world, but it's all centred on a presumably Tsantuk speaking fire mage (I'll leave it to your imagine how she came about that) lost in Tokétok lands with no memory how she got there.

[impishdullahan]

what would you say is your weirdest conlang?

The heccin dootlang (ATxK0PT), bar none! Multiple friends have exclaimed at how unhinged I am to have made it. One even said I'm not even in the same house as the doorframe.

In short I developed a speculative waterstream speech mechanism for tunicate pharynges for a speedlang. I think I put it together in about 5 days? Yes it was a dream: I literally had and was recovering from a bad fever.

Grammatically it's actually not all that weird, but you can play it on Ocarina!

[impishdullahan]

What got you into conlanging? What inspired your "style" for lack of a better term? What do you hope to achieve with your hobby? What is your favorite project so far?

Ooh, these are some fun questions!

My brain's always been wired for languages: I started speaking at a really young age, always read well above my grade level, I can be a bit of sponge for picking up language and dialect, and I've my BA in linguistics now. This to say I feel like I sorts fell into conlanging; it was kinda just a matter of time? The oldest iteration of my conworld is from when I was 10, I think, and around that time I started playing with fonts and codes before graduating to ciphers and relexes a few years later. Eventually those turned into conlangs.

If by style you mean process, and think it's just a by-product of how I taught myself linguistics: I used to read the wiki pages for different languages for funsies, googling all the words I didn't know, and that's still how I start any project, only now I make notes for what features I want to research to inform my conlanging decisions. This to say most of my conlangs are all rooted in a set of a half dozen or so natlangs. I've found the most joy in marrying together disparate features from unrelated languages to create something unique.

I've been meaning to look into conlanging professionally, now that my process is becoming more practiced and I can slap together a strong foundation in a matter of days rather than months or years. I'd also like to someday publish some of the fiction I write set in my conworld. I go way harder than naming languages, but it pleases me to know the cultural names and idioms all have a root in a robust conlang of my own design.

My favourite project is probably Tokétok, but that's mostly because it has seniority pver all the rest by a few years, at least the one dialect and because I have a small degree of fluency in it. Varamm is also fun, and ATxK0PT will always a special place in my heart, too. Honestly I think most of my projects are to enrich the world to which Tokétok belongs.

[impishdullahan]

I usually give myself creative limitations based on the non-human speakers and then make an otherwise human capable language. Agyharo, for instance, my azhdarchid conlang, only has peripheral consonants and no coronals or high front vowels and lacks any sort of labialisation.

I did go a few steps further for ATxK0PT, my tunicate conlang, which does fall into the mostly written language category, but I do have a few ways to approximate for humans, none of which are at all like the actual speech mechanisms for the non-humans with them nkt even being vertebrates and all.

One of the things I struggle most with my conlanging hobby is wanting to create weird languages for non-human species but then wondering how to approach depicting its "phonology" if the above is true.

I could make up a situation in which certain parts of the language's weird non-human sounds are mapped onto human-pronounceable constructs. Or, and this is easier yet harder for me, I could just have the language be written only and accept that it can't be human-pronounceable.

The former is tricky but fun to work with while the latter feels like it should be the logical path to take. I don't know.

If you're a conlanger who is reading this, have you had this crisis like what I described above. If so, what was your own conclusion?

[impishdullahan]

So... how many conlangs have you made and/or partook in making?

How do I quantify this? Em...

I have a family of 3, Tokétok, one of which is my primary and most developed conlang, and the other 2 are quite young. Then there's Varamm and Agyharo, both a couple years in the making now, and more than usable. Then I have ATxK0PT, which is a usable speedlang from a year ago I still add words to. At present I have another speedlang in the foreground, but it remains to be seen if I'll continue working on it. Then, of course, Ŋ!odzäsä, the speedlang I co-created a few years ago but haven't touched since. I've also got a couple defunct projects like Naŧoš and Tongue of the Cactus, and then a bunch of sketches, I think 2-4 of which I still have plans to flesh out.

So I guess that's 10-14+ depending how you wanna count? Is that a lot? That feels like too many.

[impishdullahan]

Success!

Went for a poem I wrote last summer. Breakdown below the cut.

The clip is an interpretation of the following:

ATx0P0 ATxK0T0 UTx0T ATx0K UTx0T0 AKx0PT OKxT0T0 AKx0T UKx0K UKx0TT

This glosses as:

1d tell story as community play child joy before egg-raider

And this translates as:

“We’ll tell stories together. “Children playing, happiness despite hardship.”

The theme of building a family with one's partner is reinforced by the the drones in each word: the first line only contains words with a Tx or mid-register drone, and the last line only words with a Kx or low-register drone. Together, the poem spells a xTK melody. This xTK melody can represent the following words:

OTxTK, the continuous auxiliary 'to stay'

UPxTK, a form of the 1st person dual pronoun.

UPxTK, the classifier for nests and courtship displays.

I'm staying with a friend this weekend who plays the accordion. We agreed to see if we can speak some of the dootlang tomorrow after I infodumped how it works. This is very exciting.

Getchu friends with different skillsets who still match your freak