I thought it might be useful to write a few words on my currently principal conlang, High Eolic, given that the PDF in which all the information about it is currently gathered is a bit unwieldy.
Basically, High Eolic is a language placed in my conworld Burnath, which is a planet generally similar to Earth (but completely different in details such as plain tectonics, etc.). The timescale is roughly that of the early Renaissance in Europe (if looking at temporal distance from the development of metal manipulation, etc. – the historical details are of course completely different). Burnath is the setting for most of the conlangs I’m working on – spread over 10+ language families, each with their own unique flavor and features (although most of them still have to be elaborated in any detail). High Eolic is a language of the Eolic language family, which is relatively small for Burnathian standards, with 13 or so distinct languages (other neighboring families have 20 or more).
The development of Burnath harks back to 2001, when I was about twelve. As probably any kid obsessed with Tolkien’s opus, I started fiddling with my own created world, which has since gone through several incarnations. In my initial conception, High Eolic was a kind of fake-ish Latin spoken in a powerful mountain kingdom. Although the language has changed and developed considerably since then, the basic sociographic layout hasn’t: Eoleon, the place where High Eolic is spoken, is (still) a kingdom based in a mountain valley and made disproportionately powerful due to its mineral resources.
So what’s High Eolic actually like? It’s basically an agglutinative language, in some respects similar to Finnish or Turkish – it has 14 nominal cases, for instance, including spatial cases: that is, it doesn’t use prepositions (like English), but handles this sort of thing morphologically – so párund-ettár (párun ‘house’ with the illative suffix, -ettár; n > nd is a sandhi change) means ‘into a house’. It has quite a minimalist phonology – I wanted it to sound quite lofty, but at the same time with the potential to develop a whole range of different speech/pronunciation forms.
Some other nifty features include a honorific system based on discourse participant marking (so the use of ‘polite’ forms depends both on who you’re speaking about and who you’re speaking to!) and a verbal system where categories such as passives and reflexives don’t have dedicated constructions. Rather, the same affixes signal different voices for different types of verbs – so, for example, the suffix -ingá makes a monotransitive verb reflexive (rÃc-ingá ‘[he] killed himself’), but signals passivity on ditransitive verbs (yars-ingá ‘[he] was told [something]’ or ‘[it] was told [to him]’). Add in a plethora of different aspects, with varying forms for (arbitrarily assigned) verbal classes and varying affixes for different honorific configurations of discourse participants – and you get quite a complex verb system that’s probably the hardest thing for any potential learner of the language.
Of course, there’s much more to say about the language, and this blog is meant to introduce some of its nifty features in more manageable chunks. Expect more interesting posts in the future!
