u/cuteElla

Hello, folks! I am building a new conlang for my silly little setting that is a bit stranger than what I usually do! I'm sure most of you won't find it that strange though, but as a new conlanger it's all new to me and so any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Background

I'll begin with a quick introduction to the setting. I take a lot of influence from the old, polytheistic religions of the ancient world. As such, the gods of my world are powerful but ultimately still limited and flawed beings and there are literally hundreds if not thousands of them and vary in power level. Literally anything can become a god or spirit if they are old and venerable enough, from celestial objects to mountains and rivers to individual trees.

The gods are capable of all manner of feats from influencing chance to future foresight to summoning natural disasters depending on their power level. As a general rule, the more powerful the being is, the less they tend to interact with reality with the most powerful gods existing in another plane entirely.

The relationship that people have with the gods is a mutually beneficial one. Worshiping a god makes that god stronger and being looked upon favourably by a god means that god may intervene to aid you (the opposite is also true). Those individuals that are really favoured by a certain god can even become a chosen champion of that god and wield some of that god's powers.

Tariluka is the language of the gods. Or, more accurately, it is the language that the lesser gods and spirits who still exist within and inhabit the mortal plane use to communicate with each other. (The great, extraplanar gods don't communicate verbally since they can probably just beam their thoughts at each other, or something. I don't know, I'm not an extraplanar entity. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) Being the language of the gods, it has all of the eccentricities of being not entirely human built into the structure of Tariluka itself. We'll try to start with the basics before getting into the stranger stuff that I'm experimenting with for the first time.

Phonology and Morphology

Both phonologically and morphologically, Tariluka is pretty simple as the primary use case for it is actually just to generate names for characters; spirits, servants of gods, et cetera and I wanted to make it easy to work with. The consonant inventory consists of:

C	Labial	Dental	Velar
Stop	p	t	k
Nasal	m	n
Lateral Approx.		l
Approx.		r

For vowels:

V	Front	Mid	Back
High	i (unround)		u (rounded)
Low		a (unround)

Phonotactically, we are talking about a simple (C)V syllable structure. Morphsyntactically, we are talking about a SVO sentence structure with adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they are modifying.

Noun Classes

Now with the stranger things I've been playing with. Firstly, nouns are classed based on a binary animacy hierarchy (animate vs inanimate) with the definition of animate being "has a soul". As mentioned previously, since literal features of the land can become a divine spirit given enough mortal veneration, this means that not only are plants and animals considered animate but so are stars, moons, mountains, rivers, oceans, forests, et cetera, et cetera.

This leaves only a fairly narrow set of things that can be classed as inanimate, mostly things like manmade objects and inconsequential things like sand grains, dirt particles, clouds (interestingly enough), and so forth. But even that's not an absolute given because, well, if you put a sword or a mirror in a shrine and worship that enough, even that becomes a lesser spirit.

Additionally, champions of gods can sometimes enchant otherwise ordinary objects and that process actually creates a new spirit. This is because the process of giving magic to a mortal involves the god transferring a fraction of their divine power to said mortal. So when that mortal then enchants a sword or a piece of armour, what they are doing is transferring some of their divine power into an inanimate object, thereby creating a lesser spirit that inhabits and embodies that object.

Tense, Aspect, and Mood

Secondly, the gods are not 100% linear entities. Not all of them anyway. Some of the more powerful gods exist continuously through time along past, present and future and can know everything about the past and present and predict the future with a fairly high degree of accuracy but not perfect accuracy. This is because both fate and free will exists and are in tension with one another. As such, the language's tense-aspect-mood system gets a bit interesting to accommodate nonlinearity.

Tariluka has two tenses: future and non-future. It also has two aspects: perfective and nonperfective. And it has two moods: certainty and uncertainty. Because the gods can know everything about the past and present with absolute certainty, all nonfuture tenses get bundled in with the certainty mood by default. The future tense, on the other hand, can be uncertain but is always perfective because when the gods look into the future, what they actually see are snapshots of all possible futures and they have to choose one(s) they think is most probable when making predictions.

This leads to this an interesting quirk where a lesser god might say, for example, that the Avatar will end(certain) the Hundred Year War by slaying(uncertain) Fire Lord. Which is to say that in all futures, Aang is destined to end the Hundred Year War, but the god does not know how Aang will do this because Aang has free will and can choose between killing Ozai and a different option.

And that's about what I have so far in terms of ideas! Curious what everyone thinks and if they have any feedback, questions, or suggestions how it can be improved and what strange and wondering things I can do with a language for nonlinear entities!

Hello, folks! I am building a new conlang for my silly little setting that is a bit stranger than what I usually do! I'm sure most of you won't find it that strange though, but as a new conlanger it's all new to me and so any feedback would be greatly appreciated!

Background

I'll begin with a quick introduction to the setting. I take a lot of influence from the old, polytheistic religions of the ancient world. As such, the gods of my world are powerful but ultimately still limited and flawed beings and there are literally hundreds if not thousands of them and vary in power level. Literally anything can become a god or spirit if they are old and venerable enough, from celestial objects to mountains and rivers to individual trees.

The gods are capable of all manner of feats from influencing chance to future foresight to summoning natural disasters depending on their power level. As a general rule, the more powerful the being is, the less they tend to interact with reality with the most powerful gods existing in another plane entirely.

The relationship that people have with the gods is a mutually beneficial one. Worshiping a god makes that god stronger and being looked upon favourably by a god means that god may intervene to aid you (the opposite is also true). Those individuals that are really favoured by a certain god can even become a chosen champion of that god and wield some of that god's powers.

Tariluka is the language of the gods. Or, more accurately, it is the language that the lesser gods and spirits who still exist within and inhabit the mortal plane use to communicate with each other. (The great, extraplanar gods don't communicate verbally since they can probably just beam their thoughts at each other, or something. I don't know, I'm not an extraplanar entity. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) Being the language of the gods, it has all of the eccentricities of being not entirely human built into the structure of Tariluka itself. We'll try to start with the basics before getting into the stranger stuff that I'm experimenting with for the first time.

Phonology and Morphology

Both phonologically and morphologically, Tariluka is pretty simple as the primary use case for it is actually just to generate names for characters; spirits, servants of gods, et cetera and I wanted to make it easy to work with. The consonant inventory consists of:

C	Labial	Dental	Velar
Stop	p	t	k
Nasal	m	n
Lateral Approx.		l
Approx.		r

For vowels:

V	Front	Mid	Back
High	i (unround)		u (rounded)
Low		a (unround)

Phonotactically, we are talking about a simple (C)V syllable structure. Morphsyntactically, we are talking about a SVO sentence structure with adjectives and adverbs preceding the nouns and verbs they are modifying.

Noun Classes

Now with the stranger things I've been playing with. Firstly, nouns are classed based on a binary animacy hierarchy (animate vs inanimate) with the definition of animate being "has a soul". As mentioned previously, since literal features of the land can become a divine spirit given enough mortal veneration, this means that not only are plants and animals considered animate but so are stars, moons, mountains, rivers, oceans, forests, et cetera, et cetera.

This leaves only a fairly narrow set of things that can be classed as inanimate, mostly things like manmade objects and inconsequential things like sand grains, dirt particles, clouds (interestingly enough), and so forth. But even that's not an absolute given because, well, if you put a sword or a mirror in a shrine and worship that enough, even that becomes a lesser spirit.

Additionally, champions of gods can sometimes enchant otherwise ordinary objects and that process actually creates a new spirit. This is because the process of giving magic to a mortal involves the god transferring a fraction of their divine power to said mortal. So when that mortal then enchants a sword or a piece of armour, what they are doing is transferring some of their divine power into an inanimate object, thereby creating a lesser spirit that inhabits and embodies that object.

Tense, Aspect, and Mood

Secondly, the gods are not 100% linear entities. Not all of them anyway. Some of the more powerful gods exist continuously through time along past, present and future and can know everything about the past and present and predict the future with a fairly high degree of accuracy but not perfect accuracy. This is because both fate and free will exists and are in tension with one another. As such, the language's tense-aspect-mood system gets a bit interesting to accommodate nonlinearity.

Tariluka has two tenses: future and non-future. It also has two aspects: perfective and nonperfective. And it has two moods: certainty and uncertainty. Because the gods can know everything about the past and present with absolute certainty, all nonfuture tenses get bundled in with the certainty mood by default. The future tense, on the other hand, can be uncertain but is always perfective because when the gods look into the future, what they actually see are snapshots of all possible futures and they have to choose one(s) they think is most probable when making predictions.

This leads to this interesting quirk where a lesser god might say, for example, that the Avatar will end(certain) the Hundred Year War by slaying(uncertain) Fire Lord. Which is to say that in all futures, Aang is destined to end the Hundred Year War, but the god does not know how Aang will do this because Aang has free will and can choose between killing Ozai and a different option.

And that's about what I have so far in terms of ideas! Curious what everyone thinks and if they have any feedback, questions, or suggestions how it can be improved and what strange and wondering things I can do with a language for nonlinear entities!