sound-change – Shivallon's Conlanging Space

Case Study: From Proto-Uralic to Hungarian

November 12, 2023 Shivallon Comments 0 Comment

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

October 28, 2023 Shivallon Comments 0 Comment

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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A New Family Tree (Part 2): Deriving Ryka

June 30, 2023 Shivallon Comments 0 Comment

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

April 1, 2023 Shivallon Comments 0 Comment

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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