Random question, what are these people based on? They heavily remind me of mongols.
They’re based on nomadic cultures here and there.
Mongols and Huns were definitely inspirations, but so were Fulani and Hadza people.
I actually didn’t give them horses because I didn’t want them to look too much like Mongol and Hun copies. Also because that felt iffy with the imagery I had for them in my head.
I’d say I’m just about done with the important pieces of their lore, though as I continue I’ll definitely add some ideas here and there, like their interaction with magic and other cultures.
Now all I need to do is write a cohesive document on everything I did here, as well as scribble all over that Magius map from the wiki and hopefully add the pictures. A seemingly baffling task, but pretty important for future reference. It’s a lot better to have a single, lengthy document than to have to scramble through posts after posts just to find something simple.
Oh yeah, and I just had an idea while I was in the mall for a linguistic feature that I’ll definitely be adding to the language. Probably one of my most satisfying ideas yet.
Basically, it’s a form of tense that states that a present situation holds because of something that happened in the past, or a state in the present that is a result of the past.
The reason why it’s cool is for two reasons:
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Verbs can have active and stative meanings distinguished only by these two tenses, and
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To the English translation, this tense will sometimes translate as the present and others as the past (or perfect, depending on who’s doing the translating). Ambiguity in translation is pretty cool.
EXAMPLE TIME
Fake Glossary (Not representative of final product)
| Verb | Meaning |
|---|---|
| -(u)npe | unnamed tense for now, will give it a language specific name. |
| ba | to have, to own, to possess; to acquire, to get, to obtain. |
| tay | to know, to be aware, to recognize to learn, to become acquainted with, to become aware. |
| kos | to be great, to be large; to increase, to get bigger, to become more ___ |
| kwun | to eat, to devour |
| Ina | a name. |
| Pekas | a name |
| angwol | a dog, a wolf (cf. hound) |
| oboy | a house, a home |
Example Sentences
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Ina ba oboy.
Ina gets/is getting a house. -
Ina banpe oboy.
Ina (has/is having acquired) a house. -
Pekas tay Ina.
Pekas is getting acquainted with Ina. -
Pekas tayunpe Ina.
Pekas (knows/is having gotten acquainted with) Ina. -
Angwol kos.
The dog is (getting bigger/growing). -
Angwol kosunpe.
The dog (is big/is having grown). -
Pekas kwun angwol.
Pekas is eating dog meat. -
Pekas kwunpe angwol.
Pekas (is having eaten/ate) dog meat.
Note that #8 does not have a separate meaning for the most part. It just translates like a perfect tense with emphasis on the present result. This probably has something to do with lexical aspect that I’m not seeing clearly right now.
Yes, I know English kind of does this specifically with the verb get/got/gotten, but this language has it as an active process and not a specific example.
Almost done the document, though the last two I plan to tackle last so they aren’t going to be updated for a good and long while.
Here’s the google docs link for those who might be interested:
I regret that I can not put a lot of graphics in it, but they aren’t a necessity.
If I were desperate for graphics, I would commission for some.
Now working on the language.
I don’t want to flod this page with jargon, so I’ll just post the google sheets page that I use for working on it here, although whenever I’m finished any stage in the process I’ll say so here as well.
Already started, but I have to halt.
Seems to me that, in the case of tonal languages, the less tones it has, the more likely it is to have grammatical tone. Mine has two flat tones (so no contours like Mandarin), so it almost definitely has it.
So now, as a personal project, I’ll read this entire document front and back:
It’s almost 300 pages, but it seems informative so far. I’m already taking notes.
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Just so I don’t give the illusion of not making any progress, here’s a vocabulary for the old version of the language that I worked on yesterday. I’ll still continue doing it of course, but after I finish reading the document in the post above this one.
Is the phonetic inventory too small? Do I need to add more consonants?
I could always do that. The sky is the limit here.
This language should have been spoken a good 2000 ~ 2500 years before current era, so about 1000 years before their arrival at Magius. I’m being this meticulous because I imagine that’s what it takes.
The part on tonogenesis is pretty easy, actually. Research on the Sinitic and Athabaskan languages is enough so that I can easily think of a way to make tone appear in the language. I’ll probably copy Navajo to a tee with the glottal distinction thing.
Maybe I’ll have it be a more complex system like Mandarin’s and then simplify it with time. These things are known to happen, though that’d be more work on my part. Depends on my mood, I guess. I plan to at the very most have a full fledged product at the end of summer.
Fuck this is taking a while.
Luckily the author was kind enough to add definitions to most foreign words in the paper, I know it could be much, much worse.
my file wiped so i guess I’m going to go 100% now.
fuck it actually stings though
Oh. Huh.
Thinking about it, it makes sense that this would be the case, but I probably would’ve fucked up in this regard.
Finally done with the relevant portions of the book, fucking Christ.
That’s how many days this took me.
Was this due to some procrastination on my part? Probably. It’s whatever though, better late than never.
In any case, the critical points I got from the book are these:
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Four types: Subtractive Dominant, Replacing Dominant, Recessive non-dominant, and Neutral non Dominant.
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The dominant ones can be interpreted as tone deletion, due to a construction of some kind.
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Most grammatical tone can be represented with floating tone.
So, I’ll steal from Navajo and Bantu languages a bit for Ngrwééy
So I know this is still true, but:
LMFAO
That’s the Iau language, by the way. It’s a Lakes Plain language located in Indonesian New Guinea. It’s not Austroasiatic or Sino-Tibetan, by the way.
Not going to dip my fingers in that pot however delicious a prospect it seems at a distance. I’m already pretty good on Ngrweey at this point.