Let’s start this off with a friendly note: For those of you who don’t know conlanging (or at least some basic linguistics), this will probably be completely incomprehensible. I could explain about phonology, morphosyntactic alignment, word order, etc., but it’d take a long time, I wouldn’t do it very well, and there are many people on the internet who have already done a great job. If you are new to conlanging (or linguistics in general), but want to learn more, I highly recommend:

• The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder
• The Art of Language Invention by David J Peterson (also his book with the same title)
• Biblaridion’s How To Make A Language series
• And of course, my old friend wikipedia.org

If you don’t know about/want to research conlanging, that’s great, and there will still be some stuff in here that might be of interest. I’ll be translating some important texts for the constructed cultures that speak these languages and making a writing system which hopefully at least looks pretty. Right now, I’m firmly in the charts & jargon phase of the process. 

Context

If you’ve been following my worldbuilding project, you may be thinking: “Why on earth are you doing a conlang now? You’ve barely even got a map!” This is reasonable, but I’m impatient, and I got to work on this conlang family before I forgot all my ideas for it.

Because of this, some of the historical elements won’t be coming into play yet. For now, I won’t be dealing with creoles or imported words, and my lexicon will be mostly pretty fundamental. That being said, I have a rough idea of the people who are going to speak these languages, which will influence some decisions I make. Importantly, this language family originated among humans, and the language family was primarily spoken by humans until present day. This is important because it means that I won’t be dealing with nonhuman mouth shapes, and thus my phonology needs to be naturalistic for a human language.

The Origins of this Project

This language family is loosely based off of my first completed conlang, Yiksighe, which I started in early 2021. For a first full language, it was honestly not bad, but there were definitely some things that could have been done better. I felt that some of the ideas in it were good enough that I wanted to give them a second chance, applying some of the lessons I learned while creating it to make a better final product. 

I will also be posting some stuff about Yiksighe itself, because it’s probably the most polished of my conlangs right now. However, the posts will be much less polished and detailed than the ones about the languages currently under construction; I’ve reached the point with that project where it pains me to look at it, and I just want it out of my hair.

The Plan & Terminology

I’m not yet at the point in this process where I can give these languages endonyms, and I don’t have enough worldbuilding around them to give them exonyms either. As such, I’ll be referring to them like this:

I’ll be starting off by examining the Lang 1 branch of the family tree, going back and doing some reconstruction of Lang 0 as necessary. Later on I’ll also look at the Lang 2 branch.

Another quick note: As with most of the worldbuilding things on this blog, subsequent posts on this will be backdated significantly. This is to make the timeline consistent with when I first finalized the topic in my notes. Part of my goal here is to show the process, and I believe the time frame is an important part of that. I’m not always able to get stuff up on the blog as soon as I add it to my notes; in fact, I already had the complete phonology (and a fair bit of the morphology) for two of the languages drafted out several months ago, far before I even got around to making the blog. 

Hopefully that’s all the introduction you need to this part of the project. Next time, I’ll actually get into the conlanging.

So you may have noticed that there was a gap of over two months between the last actual conlanging post and this one. I wish that was an error. But schoolwork, personal projects, and the sheer time and energy that I used in this step of the process combined to make this take forever.See, the personal affixes in protolang 1 had to accomplish these things:

• Hit the phonaesthetic of language 1a
• Sound somewhat euphonous in language 1b
• Not get boring in either language even when used multiple times in every sentence
• Feel vaguely naturalistic

This, unsurprisingly, turned out to be very hard. It didn’t help that my primary reference, Ojibwe, has an incredibly confusing verb conjugation system, where it looks like each combination of focus, non-focus and direct/inverse affix is fused together into its own circumfix with only a tangential relationship to its component parts. However, after three failed drafts and much hair-pulling, I somehow stumbled upon this draft, which I ended up liking:

	Singular	Plural
1st	si-, -s	si-…-k, -sik
2nd	ɕu-, -ɕ	ɕu-…-k, -ɕuk
3rd prox	∅-, -∅	xi-, -x
3rd obv	da-, -d	diː-, -di
3rd inan	dʑu-, -dʑ
indefinite	na-, -n

Some notable features:

• The first and second person plural prefixes are actually circumfixes. This was based off what I could understand from the Ojibwe system for intransitive verbs.
• In the third person prefixes, you can kind of see a potential -i plural affix that might have been in play.
• The suffixes don’t have vowels on them (except for the suffix whose corresponding prefix is long). Perhaps some word-final vowel deletion happened after protolanguage 0.

The relativiser prefixes are also done:

Relative singular	va-
Relative plural	vax-
Relative inanimate	vadʑ-

These forms came fairly transparently from a relative pronoun, va-,  + the original prefixes. 

So, those are the affixes. This was shorter than usual, because this was the last logical breaking point before I get into a bunch of detail which would have made this far too long. To make up for that, the next installment will be part 8.5 – a continuation of this one where I’ll show what these will look like in the descendant languages, as well as laying out how I’ll write the phonemes for vowel harmony.

This is an ongoing repository of the various creative things I’m doing. This will include posts about composition, including some sketches that are too short/incomplete to go on the main page of my website. However, it’ll also include other stuff, primarily various aspects of my ongoing worldbuilding project, including conlanging, mapmaking, speculative biology, mythopoeia, and other elements of the worldbuilding process. 

I will be reposting my original worldbuilding posts from my Instagram, and they’ll be backdated to when they were originally posted. Some of the new worldbuilding and conlanging things I post will be backdated as well, to match the time that the details were first entered into my notes. This is because I really want to show the process I’m going through creating this world, and I think that the time frame is an important element of the process.

 

This time, we’re getting into the morphology. Well, kind of – no affixes will be made today. However, I want to get a rough sketch of the fundamental ideas behind this language. In other words, I’ll be making charts, but won’t be filling them out yet. 

Let’s start with perhaps the most important feature of protolang 1: verb agreement. Like Yiksighe, I want protolang 1 to be highly head-marking, and specifically, I want it to feature polypersonal agreement using a direct-inverse system. I won’t go into the full details of what that entails, but here’s the basic idea:

• Core arguments are always ordered based on animacy, relevance, or some other ordering, regardless of which one is agent and which is patient. 
  • Proto-lang 1 uses this common order: 2nd person > 1st person > 3rd person proximate > 3rd person obviate > 3rd person inanimate (the so-called “animacy hierarchy”)
• If the agent comes after the patient, a special inverse marker is applied to the verb to tell you that.

In Yiksighe, I had both the focus (the higher-animacy argument) and the non-focus (the lower-animacy argument) marked as prefixes. In protolang 1, however, I want the non-focus to be marked as a suffix on the verb. This will lead to some prefixes and suffixes taking alternative forms, as I discussed in the last two posts. 

You’ll notice that I mentioned an obviative 3rd person above. Obviation cooccurs very commonly with direct-inverse systems. I’ll use a 3-part 3rd person distinction, with proximate animates, obviative animates, and inanimates (which aren’t marked for obviation). Inanimates also will be unmarked for plurality. This yields the following table:

	Singular	Plural
1st
2nd
3rd proximate
3rd obviative
3rd inanimate

In addition, there are some forms that act like person markers, but won’t have the function of person markers. The most important of these is the indefinite marker. In the protolanguage, transitive verbs always need to take two affixes. This can be a problem for constructions where only one argument is important – for example, “I’m eating”, or “It is being eaten.” In this case, one uses a special indefinite person marker. While it carries the basic meaning of “someone/somthing”, it can be used as a passive, antipassive, or even impersonal. It’s lower on the animacy hierarchy than any of the personal affixes.

The reflexive and reciprocal voices also function like personal affixes – replacing the non-focus argument. You can’t use the inverse with a reflexive or reciprocal, though, just like you can’t say “myself sees me” in English.

Another feature I’m keeping from Yiksighe is the relativiser prefix (or, as I called it in Yiksighe, the “attributive person.”) This basically is a relative pronoun attached in place of the focus, making the verb usable in relative clauses. It’s also how adjectives are formed in this language. There’s no distinction in proto-lang 1 between adjectives and verbs (e.g. the word for “red” actually means “to be red”). The relativiser prefix can thus be used to form proper adjectives out of adjective-y stative verbs. 

The relative pronoun that got agglutinated inflected for number and animacy, and it kept this inflection when it was affixed. That means that relativised verbs, and therefore adjectives, agree with the noun they’re modifying, a pretty unusual trait in verb-like adjectives.

Prepositions in protolang 1 are also verb-like. They inflect in the same way as intransitive verbs. They can take the reflexive and reciprocal affixes (as in the english “to themselves” or “to each other”), or the relative affix (as in the english “to whose”). 

Although this isn’t agreement, per se, I think it’s important to talk about the noun system. The nouns are much more simple than the verbs: animate nouns are marked both for obviation and plurality, inanimate nouns are marked for neither. (However, when it must be specified that they’re singular, they take a singulative particle to clarify.)

The only other marking nouns take is the construct state. As protolang 1 is so head-marking, I thought that it would be fun to use the construct state, as I rarely see it in conlangs. If you aren’t familiar, a construct state is kind of like a reverse genitive – a special marking on a possessed noun to specify that it’s possessed. If the possessor is already known (or is in the 1st or 2nd person), a personal prefix can be applied to the noun to indicate it. For the sake of simplicity (and not having to come up with more affixes), I’ll say that these prefixes are the same as the focus prefixes for verbs. The construct state also overlaps interestingly with obviation. As possessees are often obviative, we can say that the construct state automatically makes a noun obviative. This means that construct state marking and obviation marking can’t both be present on the noun. (Inanimate nouns can still take the construct state, but it doesn’t make them obviative – they’re still inanimate.)

Obviously, this is a very rough starting point. We haven’t even considered tense, aspect or mood, let alone some of the other features I want to add to this language. But I hope that this should give a feel of my goals for protolanguage 1, and for the language family as a whole.