Questions from Zompist’s Language Construction Kit

Also, it’s a worldbuilding exercise at the same time…

Is your language fusional, agglutinative, or isolating?

I think I’m going to go with fusional, in part to try something utterly different from Caleyen. It also gives me the option of moving one of the dialects to analytic or agglgglgluglug… *cough* Agglutinative.

How do you form inflections?

…Not sure yet!

I’m /thinking/ prefixes. It suits the way the sentences feel to me. But on the other hand, I’m fonder of suffixes for comprehension. That could be because English is my first language and I’ve only studied romance languages….

After a bit of research: Suffixes it is! Mostly.

Side note: Negation appears at the sentence’s beginning or end, depending on context. That really goes in the Sentence order post.

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yay!
Okay, this is probably how I will write these in the Roman alphabet.

Consonants:
b, t, d, ph (ɸ), f, th, ss*, sh, h, pf, ch(/x/), [still-not-sure-I-have-a-J], r, l, m, n

* I could totally do this as “s” but I like the visual susurration of the double s.
** This is a very fricative language. I felt like it.

That was easy.

Vowels

Alphabet…. I’m still considering style, much less actual letters. And numbers. Since it’s a real-world system, they may use arabic numbers.

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Sentence order for Whispers is
Verb Object (Object adjective) (adverb) Subject (subject adjective)
subject is the portion most likely to be dropped, as in Spanish, if it is clear from verb conjugation.

This appears to be the order – or close to it – that I like for magic-using languages.

Which leads to a note – unlike Old Tongue (The magic language in Fae Apoc/Addergoole), Whispers is not a Magic Language in and of itself. One CAN do magic in other languages (and some groups not mentioned here yet do). It’s just that the Institution and its subgroups primarily use Whispers in their often-highly-ceremonial magical practices.

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Conlang didn’t get picked in yesterday’s rotation, so I’ll start with yesterday’s post today: phonetics and feet.

Note: Everything in Language of Whispers is subject to lots and lots of change, as it’s a work in progress. For instance, I’ve already added two more consonants.

I’ve been playing with zompists’s generators. What I’ve decided is that the Language of Whispers is, ah…

(C(L))V(C)

With CV being the most common syllable construction.

Certain consonants do not start a word – r, l, ch.

I’m still working out consonants that just don’t go together; I’m sure there’s actually a rule there. jl in that order, pd, tp, ssr.

English leans towards iambic foot (In very rough generalizations, no need to pedant on this one ;-); Whispers leans towards trochee and dactyl feet.

The origins of the Language of Whispers are lost in the deep, dark annals of history. There are those, especially in the secretive reaches of the Institution, who believe that the language was first spoken to mankind by demons or by angels. Since most of the Institution doesn’t believe in demons, this is considered more of a fanciful belief than a real one.

Over the centuries, the language has shifted – three separate dialects, various loan-words, and so on – and has suffered heavily from disuse at times. Only in small, hidden enclaves is it spoken as a casual language, and thus it often ends up using loan words for everyday items.

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The Language of Whispers (Working Name) – Working Phoneme Set

The Language of Whispers has what we can call Liturgical Whispers, a working language used for texts and ceremonies, as well as at least three modern dialects: Heretical, Rebel, and Institutional, which include some phoneme shifts in each.

This may not be a complete list, as it only has 22 11 consonant sounds and 5 vowel sounds. But it’s a start.

I based the set off of a gibberish language I’ve used from time to time.

ssuhssuh nuhbahr nuhchuh nihbah nuh sseedush…

Added a couple when I made it a table; they’re in bold. Dialectical differences are in parentheses.

ss
n
m
ch/k
h
rr
sh
t
b/p
d
f/v

uh
oe/oo
ah/ae
eh
ee
ih

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