fahngow conlang

[JessMahler]

Starting a new conlang for a story my partner and I are working on.

To keep things easy, I started with the English language phonology and removed sounds, rather than coming up with a phonology from scratch. My final phonology had 19 sounds, which is a bit on the small side but not ridiculously so:

b
f
h
k
m
p
s
v
z
tʃ
θ
ŋ
æ
i:
ɒ
ʌ
aʊ
ɑ:
ɪəʳ

And set up rules for word building (can never have two vowels next to each other, words always start with a consonant, ɪəʳ only shows up at the end of a word).

And I decided I wanted an isolating language with some fusional elements. Because why not?

Next up:

Building the grammar!
(Hope this is a good spot for this post, didn't see anywhere else it seemed to fit)

[The Seamstress]

Oh, that looks interesting! I made up a language too, starting when I was about 14 I think? And it developed into its final form over the course of a decade or so. (It was intended for a fictional world of mine, but I never wrote that story, actually.) So I'm curious to see what you will share here

[Jubal]

This has reminded me of my long-standing ambition to get round to learning the phonetic alphabet... I also learned what an isolating language is from searching the concepts in this post, that wasn't a concept I had the actual word for before!

The last time I did much conlanging was for the S'ruba, one of the main alien species in my Cepheida setting: that was more focused on working out unusual ways of structuring data in a language that could be logical but with pathways that we don't really use as humans.

[JessMahler]

Oh, that looks interesting! I made up a language too, starting when I was about 14 I think? And it developed into its final form over the course of a decade or so. (It was intended for a fictional world of mine, but I never wrote that story, actually.) So I'm curious to see what you will share here

Thanks! I got deep into conlanging about 8 years ago for another project. This was meant to be 'just' a naming language, but it's turning into a full conlang bc I can't stop myself (and don't really want to).

This has reminded me of my long-standing ambition to get round to learning the phonetic alphabet... I also learned what an isolating language is from searching the concepts in this post, that wasn't a concept I had the actual word for before!

The last time I did much conlanging was for the S'ruba, one of the main alien species in my Cepheida setting: that was more focused on working out unusual ways of structuring data in a language that could be logical but with pathways that we don't really use as humans.

Alien languages open up so many fascinating possibilities!

[JessMahler]

Nouns are the exception to the general isolating nature of the language, being fusional.

Fusional means that a single change in the base word conveys multiple pieces of information. Spanish verbs are fusional -- estar -> estoy, oy indicating person (first), plurality (singlular), and time (present).

For nouns in fahngow, there are three pieces of information that need to be conveyed:

*Gender/noun class -- fahngow doesn't have 'gender' in the sense of 'male or female', but all nouns are associated with either mountain or river.

*Plurality -- where english has singluar or plural, fahngow has singular, dual, or plural

*case -- I'm not sure how to explain case w/o writing an essay. It mostly doesn't exist in English, except for pronouns. I vs me and She vs her are examples of case. fahngow uses ergative/absolutive case, where English uses (I think) indicative/objective case.

Nouns are declined by adding a prefix to the root word.

So bau is river, abau is a singular river in the ergative case and a river-class noun, howbbau is two rivers in the absolutive case and a river-class noun.

   River   
   erg.   absolutive
plural   a   sa
dual   u   howb
single   ah   zee
      
      
   Mountain   
   erg.   absolutive
plural   ee   sow
dual   ha   hah
single   ow   zau

[JessMahler]

*sigh* yeah, I didn't think the charts would com through right...

[The Seamstress]

Thanks! I got deep into conlanging about 8 years ago for another project. This was meant to be 'just' a naming language, but it's turning into a full conlang bc I can't stop myself (and don't really want to).

It always starts as "just"... Mine started as some kind of secret script, I had the letters of an alphabet and then came the grammar, which was heavily influenced by German (my native language) at first but I later abandoned that because German grammar is unnecessarily complicated, lol. So now it has simpler grammar rules and consists of about 600 words. I still hope I can use it for something in the future, but we'll see. I don't have much talent for epic novel writing, everything ends up as a short story at best (or I get stuck in the plot phase)...