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Category: Ryka

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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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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Defining the characteristics of the Rykaic languages

Defining the characteristics of the Rykaic languages

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Now that I’m entertaining the idea to integrate Quriil into the Rykaic language family, I decided to write down the most characteristic linguistic features of the family and its members. These are mostly grammatical features, because I want Ryka and Quriil to look and sound totally unrelated on first sight, only revealing their strange similarities in rather exotic features on closer inspection. Features of the Rykaic family Some key features should apply to all members of the Rykaic family, even…

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Designing a font for Ryka, an abugida script with heavy use of ligatures

Designing a font for Ryka, an abugida script with heavy use of ligatures

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When I had fleshed out the writing system of my Ryka language, like probably any other conlanger out there, I wanted to create a font for it so that I could actually type texts in my language’s script. While designing the glyphs themselves was an artistic challenge on its own (and the result is far from perfect), the real hassle began when I was trying to install and use my font. So here’s the story of how I managed to…

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