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Year: 2023

A New Family Tree (Part 4): Branching and Time Depth

A New Family Tree (Part 4): Branching and Time Depth

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In the previous post, we had a look at some real world sound changes, namely those from Proto-Uralic to Hungarian. We now want to put this knowledge to use to derive Nyirvón, a conlang with Hungarian-like phonology, from Proto-Rykaic! But first, we have to think a bit about Nyirvón’s siblings… Aligning the birth of Asiul and the death of Old Ryka In the present state of my conlanging universe, where we still have two language families and one isolate (Quriil),…

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Case Study: From Proto-Uralic to Hungarian

Case Study: From Proto-Uralic to Hungarian

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When conlanging, I sometimes make up new features for my languages from scratch, but more often than not, some phenomenon in a natural language served as inspiration for it. Natural languages are often astonishingly beautiful and elegant in the way they express things, and when I encounter a particularly beautiful specimen, I feel like paying tribute to it by incorporating some of its features into one of my conlangs. Hungarian is such a case: Phonetically, is one of the most,…

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A New Family Tree (Part 3): Deriving Quriil

A New Family Tree (Part 3): Deriving Quriil

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I have been watching a lot of Q’s Greenland recently and hearing her speak Kalaallisut has inspired me to finally sit down and work on my Quriil sound changes. (Also, I was sick for more than a week, and while that sucked, it gave me a lot of time to think about my conlangs again.) I’ve also decided to deviate a little bit from my original plans for the phoneme inventory. In particular, I will throw out the aspirate consonants,…

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An attempt at stylizing Ryka: The “Curvy Ryka” script

An attempt at stylizing Ryka: The “Curvy Ryka” script

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While I really love the general structure of my Ryka script and how it works, the characters look unpolished and still quite “proto-like”. There is no common aesthetic to most of the consonant glyphs, and many still closely resemble the pictograms they are based on. When writing a sentence, the result often looks a little messy, and some combinations of characters and diacritics are really hard to write due to the diverse shapes. Most natural scripts have evolved into a…

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A New Family Tree (Part 2): Deriving Ryka

A New Family Tree (Part 2): Deriving Ryka

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It’s time to apply some sound changes to our new proto language and see if we can derive Ryka! For Ryka, I already have a lot of vocabulary in place and it’s important that most of it can be derived from the proto language via plausible sound changes. We will first introduce some sound changes to arrive at Proto-Ryka-Quriil, the basis that we will also use in the next part when having a look at Quriil. From this intermediate language,…

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A New Family Tree (Part 1): Reconstructing Proto-Rykaic

A New Family Tree (Part 1): Reconstructing Proto-Rykaic

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During the past three months, I’ve been struggling to devise a common ancestor for Ryka and Quriil. Reverse-engineering a plausible proto language for two conlangs that already exist is always a difficult task, although fortunately, Quriil is not much more than a draft yet, so it is still flexible enough to receive minor changes to its phonology in the process, and it does not yet have any vocabulary except for a few character names. Let’s first have a look at…

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