Conlangs by Keiwynn | Blog

The Rickroll Test

2026-04-20T13:24:29.863066499+0300

2026-04-20

These days, when I encounter a linguistic feature of a small, non-Western language that is held up as an example of an exceptionally strange phenomenon, I apply what I have come to call the Rickroll Test.

The test itself is simple:

English, the most widely spoken language in the modern world and likely the most widely spoken language ever, has a two-syllable verb meaning "to deceive a person into watching the music video of Rick Astley's 1984 hit song I'm Never Gonna Give You Up": namely to rickroll. In light of that fact, is the "exotic" morpheme or lexical item in the (probably non-Western) language that you investigating actually stranger than the verb to rickroll?

If not — and it basically never is — you do not get to exotify that language.

Far too often, there is a tendency to notice and draw attention to "weird" features in languages far removed from the ones we speak, while missing the equally weird or weirder features of our native languages. In addition to being racist, this is just bad linguistics: if you never try to take the languages and cultures you study on their own terms instead of viewing them through your own (biased) sense of familiarity and strangeness, you will learn so much less about how language as a whole works, and what it can do.

In many ways, English is a very weird language. The majority of dialects include phonemes that are rare cross-linguistically, such as /θ/ and /ð/, the third person singular form of a present tense verb is the only one marked, and so on. If we take these features as normal, even subconsciously, we will find it that much harder to position English correctly among the space of possible and extant languages — or worse, we risk accidentally treating it as a universally assumed baseline and leaving it out of our analyses entirely.

In all of these cases, we are shoring up existing biases and prejudices against non-European languages and their speakers, and this is something that we all need to be doing our best to work against. I probably do not need to mention that in linguistics as a whole, there have been many cases where theories were precisely tailored to accommodate — and thus perpetuate — the prejudices of the day, and the entire discipline still has a tremendous amount of work to do to dismantle this legacy.

Greenlandic and Polysynthesis

2026-04-16T19:58:40.208581131+0300

2026-04-16

I've recently begun to study Kalaallisut (Greenlandic), a language frequently described as polysynthetic.

Among other things, I am struck by how little I have found Kalaallisut surprising or hard. If anything, it feels very Uralic; while there are elements that speakers of European languages will understandably find difficult (especially uvular consonants), the grammar feels incredibly straightforward — there are morphemes, with clearly defined meanings, and you string them together to form words.

Now, some of these morphemes have meanings that you will not find in European languages. There is, for instance, a bound morpheme meaning 'to eat or drink <noun to which it is added>', which is not something that Finnish, English, or any other natural language I have studied has an analogue to. However, there is really nothing particularly strange about this morpheme — you learn it, you learn the rules about how to use it, and you learn what it means, and that is that. And so far, the sentence and clause-level syntax of Kalaallisut also seems very familiar, although we have only seen so much of it.

I understand that I have a background in linguistics and have studied dozens of different languages, and should not compare my experience of learning a language to that of an absolute beginner. I nevertheless find myself wondering how useful the concept of a "polysynthetic" language even is, given how blurred the line can feel at times between an affix (or element of a compound) and an adposition or other independent word that triggers sandhi.

None of this should be taken to mean that "polysynthetic" should be abandoned as a category, or that languages classified as polysynthetic are not different in categorizable ways from languages like English. However, Westerners have an unfortunate tendency to exoticize languages that do not work like their own, and I worry that some of this has leaked into linguists' and especially conlangers' concept of what polysynthesis means. I also sometimes worry that people overestimate just how deep typology goes, and mistake certain language classifications for something more mystical than just "there are long words with lots of morphemes in them".

At some level, all languages are just collections of pieces and rules for how to put them together. It is important not to forget this.

Rambling Thoughts on Writing Systems

2026-03-26T11:19:31.750317949+0200

2026-03-26

One major difference between me as a conlanger now and me as a conlanger ten or fifteen years ago — beyond simple accrued experience — is my relationship to writing systems.

If I wanted to, I could oversimplify this to something like "well, now I actually know how to do them", but that would be missing the point in service of a mid-tier gag that is not even entirely true. I was neither exceptionally bad at writing systems then, nor am I particularly skilled at them today.

This is not to say that I never thought about scripts in high school or college, or tried to make them — I absolutely did, and even created some that were reasonably complete and usable (given my level of experience at the time). I also understood — as well as someone in my situation could — that concultures would not be using the Roman alphabet unless they were located on Earth within the last few thousand years (or in the non-distant future). If their languages were written, they would be written using something entirely different from the romanization I used to document them.

However, conscripting was also never a main focus of mine, and often I just waved my hand and assumed a script of some sort must exist, but did not try to create it.

What has changed is that, in 2026, I increasingly view my artlanging projects through the lens of their native writing systems and conventions, with romanization as the mere transcription scheme that it is. And furthermore, an artlang project without at least some sort of native writing system now feels woefully incomplete, like a naming language with no grammar beyond a handful of rules for combining onomastical elements.

Now, I still do not necessarily know what the writing system for a language will look like from the start (or near the start) of the project, although I have occasionally made efforts to start thinking about it as early as possible. But this does mean that I i.e. spend less time fretting about whether the romanization is exactly the way I like it, as opposed to just whether it can actually handle the task it is charged with. Outside of specific types of projects, artlang romanizations are just a more typable version of IPA, used to record the sounds of the language in a human-usable textual fashion, rather than part of the art side of the project like the rest of the language.

I have also started to move towards more naturalistic writing systems in many cases, although I would still say that I am less creative than I would like to be with writing systems in general. This echoes a trend throughout my conlanging "career", in which I went through an engelanging phase when I was still relatively new to the art, but then settled into a much more artlanging-focused mindset by the time I started to hit "real adulthood". Creating "perfect" systems once felt like a goal; now it feels like an interesting intellectual exercise that might teach me how a particular aspect of language works in the abstract, but would be of little use in the real world.

Creativity, however, is a muscle that will develop through exercise. A lot of work and many years or decades of experience go into the truly beautiful scripts that I see other conlangers creating; as with other aspects of our craft, there is no way forward other than practice.

I Tried Writing About the Weather and it Works

2026-03-16T14:44:59.039736172+0200

2026-03-16

Over the last few weeks, on the advice of William S. Annis, I have begun to approach my conlang journaling by writing a sentence or two about the weather every day, and (if it is something I can easily say) a bit more of whatever else pops into my head. Unsurprisingly, it works quite well.

In addition to mundane things like "warm" and "cold" and "it's raining", I have found myself inventing some truly creative words and expressions. For instance, one day I realized that Tala could have a verb meaning 'to cook or fry with light' — later defined to be raulo — which would cover all of frying something with a laser, burning wood with a magnifying glass, and getting a sunburn. And in the latter case, you can say something like that following:

Isi kon kene fe raulo.

Isi	kon	kene	fe	raulo
<expletive>	now	a.day.passes	while	cook.with.light

'It's sunburn weather out today.'

(The weather where I live has not actually been like that recently for me, but spring has almost sprung and we are starting to think about when we will need sunscreen.)

For an example that actually matches the weather in Finland right now, try:

Eryun si kemla seika mi usen ifli sente fele arki to.

Eryun	si	kemla	seika	mi	usen	ifli	sente	fele	arki	to
we	IND	building	outside	to	right.after	water	immediately	INCH	precipitate	PFV

'Right after we went outside, it immediately started raining.'

For the curious, I would describe Tala as 95% analytic. There is a tiny amount of internal complexity that I skip over in these interlinears, but it is all derivational and not relevant to the current topic.

Some clear Finnishisms have made it into the language, such as ifli arki 'rain (literally "precipitate water")', which is a clear calque of Finnish sataa vettä — down to the fact that you can use the verb arki 'to rain/precipitate' without a noun and liquid rain will be assumed. While there is nothing wrong with this pattern, I am also considering tweaks that would diverge from the Finnish pattern, such as creating a different verb for flakes or drops that arrive sideways.

So far, nothing in this language is as creative as the Finnish term pääkallokeli 'skull weather (i.e. icy enough that you might fall and break your skull)', but there is plenty of time. The ice will be back next year.

On top of the above, I have also started naming things in my actual environment more actively than before. Technological items that I use regularly, silverware, and (as my previous post indicates) rooms in a dwelling have come up so far; other things will probably surface in the near future. It will be a long time before I can actually write a full description of my day without creating words as I go along, but the metaphorical arrow is pointing in that direction now — and the blog post I linked in the first paragraph give the same warning about this not being a fast process.

The weather, though, is still a good place to start each day's journal entry, and also a good source of metaphors for daily life. In other conlanging projects, I have toyed with the idea of using expressions analogous to weather expressions to talk about e.g. the strength of a wifi or cellular signal, or downtime of a server; these ideas will probably make it into Tala in some form or other.

Naming Rooms

2026-04-16T10:34:53.304038006+0300

2026-03-11

I have recently been devoting time to a conlang that I hope to use — among other things — to write a journal in. In the last couple of days, I have been thinking about how to describe different rooms in a home. While I still have not finalized all of the words I will need in this language, I thought it might be useful to write a blog post detailing the most common strategies for naming rooms.

Please note that I have not done anything like a full literature review, or even much googling beyond simply perusing Wiktionary. There are probably a lot of options from less widely spoken languages that I have not seen. This is good enough for my purposes, and will probably be useful if you are looking for ideas for your own language, but it is likely not enough for some projects. Please do feel free to comment on things you think I have missed!

Kitchen

Terms for 'kitchen' tend to be straightforward references to cooking or a clear metaphorical stand-in for cooking (e.g. fire or a stove).

The terms common in Indo-European language are almost always in the first category, and the vast majority of them ultimately derive from the Latin noun coquus 'cook': English kitchen is in this category, as is German Küche, French cuisine, Spanish cocina, Russian кухня, etc. Many other languages follow a similar pattern with a different root, i.e. Finnish keittiö from keittää 'to boil, cook', Greenlandic igaffik from igavoq 'to cook, prepare food', or Arabic مَطْبَخ /matˤ.bax/ from طَبَخَ /tˤa.ba.xa/ 'to cook'.

For the most part, terms that buck this trend are still based on clear metaphorical references to cooking, e.g. Basque sukalde (literally 'fire zone') or Malay dapur (which also means 'stove'), or to the qualities of prepared food.

Thus, while a global survey would surely reveal fascinating exceptions, at the most general level there is one obvious way to say kitchen.

Living Room

Many languages refer to the living room with a term either equivalent to the English living room (German Wohnzimmer, Estonian elutupa, etc.) or something closely related: Finnish olohuone 'being room' and similar terms in other languages, sitting room in English and equivalent terms in other languages, Bulgarian дневна /ˈdnɛvnɐ/ 'day room' and similar terms, etc. The common theme is that the living room is the room where you do most of your daytime activities and/or sit around and just exist. Words like lounge in English also evoke this idea.

In other languages, you get a term that can also refer to (or once referred to) a hut or other small dwelling, e.g. Ingrian pertti or Icelandic stofa (which is ironically related to stove in English). This makes sense given how human dwellings have evolved over time as technological and social advances have raised the average person's standard of living — when your home has only one room, that is where you do your living, and then as you begin to have the resources to add more rooms, you start adding them for specific things that you want to move out of the main room.

Another common option is some take on "guest room" or "meeting room": Russian гостиная, Vietnamese phòng khách, etc. In English, the word parlour ultimately evokes this image as well, implying that the room is for talking.

And finally, you have salon and similar terms which literally mean "big room". This likely needs no explanation — in most houses, the living room is the largest room, intended to be the primary living space and social center of the dwelling. Even though the etymologies of these terms often go back further than present-day architecture and living standards, the concept remains straightforward.

Bedroom

There is surprisingly little variation here. Most languages use "bed room" or "sleeping room" (possibly using a term that metaphorically evokes sleeping, e.g. Finnish makuuhuone 'lying down room'); the only common alternative seems to be a term that just means room, or possibly a small, private room).

This is born out in English as well: my room typically refers to the speaker's bedroom, and would be somewhat less typical in reference to e.g. one's office, even in one sleeps in a shared bedroom and has a private office tucked away somewhere in the house.

Bathroom

First off, since it might come in handy: in Europe, lightly phonologically adapted versions of toilet and WC are nearly universally understood, even if those terms are not what you would see on a construction blueprint or hear in a private home. But that is not what we are truly here to talk about.

Here, it is important to distinguish between a toilet in the European sense — a very small room used solely for excreting and disposing of waste and washing your hands afterwards — and a bathroom — a room where you might take a shower or bath, which may or may not also contain a toilet (the plumbing fixture) but has many other functions as well. American squeemishness has led to the latter term taking over both functions in American English, to the point where technical terms like "half bath" are needed to unambiguously describe the former concept.

There is basically only one way to say bathroom in the European sense: some form of "bath room" or "washing room", or another term derived via a slightly different strategy that still unambiguously relates to bathing or washing.

Words for toilet, on the other hand, cover a much wider swath of ground, due to the numerous euphemisms that people invvent to describe something that nobody wants to talk or think about any more than they have to. In addition to various forms of toilet, water closet, and (like in American English) bathroom or washroom, you also get terms like "little house" (evoking an outhouse), "little room", "place for necessities", "men's/women's room" (due to the common practice of gender-segregating toilets), etc. And that is before diving into slang, nautical terms like head, terms that are actually rude, etc. This is a place where a conlanger should feel free to get creative — a naturalistic language is almost guaranteed to have widely-used, culturally appropriate euphemisms for toilets.

Summary

Foyers, atria, garages, and other rooms are beyond the scope of this post, especially given that I started writing it after thinking about how to name spaces in my two-room apartment. They are not, however, beyond the scope of the question — your conlang may have (or need) a way to express them, and I encourage you to share it!

Conlanging Goal for 2026: Actually Use a Conlang of Mine

2026-03-16T14:44:59.039336374+0200

2026-02-27

Warning: this post is essentially a string of disjoionted, stream-of-consciousness thoughts that may or may not be interesting. Read at your own risk.

Over the last few days, I've started writing a few sentences of the occasional journal entry or other short personal document in a conlang. Again. For the millionth time, in full knowledge that I'm going to stop at some point and never actually use the language as much as I would have liked to.

At some level, this is just a natural consequence of how I conlang and how I go about trying to learn those of my conlangs that I actually try to learn. I have a bad habit of starting numerous projects and not taking the majority of them very far; among that many scattered projects, it is almost impossibly difficult to pick one to commit to for long enough to actually be able to use it.

This makes logical sense, but is also intensely frustrating.

I've tried a number of different strategies, such as writing a sentence or two in the language every day (as mentioned above) or otherwise trying to use it just a little bit, often enough to get used to it. While that should theoretically work — the only way you ever learn a language is by using it a little bit at a time — it usually falls apart within a few days or weeks, when I get lazy about it one day and then find that this has given me "permission" to stop caring about the project.

All of these strategies also suffer from that fact that, in addition to being a strategy for learning the conlang, I am typically also using them as a way of developing it. This is, hopefully, understandable, as languages don't just appear fully formed out of thin air, but it does add an additional dimension of difficulty not present when learning a natlang. Too often, I get bogged down in the details of how I should express a particular concept, and lose track of the sentence I originally wanted to write.

And this, on top of that, is only one half of a vicious cycle. When developing a language for real-world use, it's hard to enumerate all of the words you'll want without actually using the language. And when use of the language stalls due to lack of vocabulary, this begins to feed back on itself. As such, while waiting until the language is more fully developed might sound like a good idea in theory, in practice, it usually breaks down when my attention shifts to a new project before "more fully developed" ever actually happens.

Sometimes I wonder if I should be looking for a conlang learning "accountability buddy", or something like that. Or just try and commit to posting regular updates on my progress, as I'm currently trying to do with a software project.

I know several other people in various fora who have learned their own conlangs to an impressive degree of fluency. Is there some trick to it, or is it just the kind of hard problem that everyone has to solve for themselves?

Considerable Progress on the Katnae Syllabary

2025-12-04T13:45:10.093825076+0200

2025-03-20

I've been working on a syllabary for Katnae, my conlang spoken by space pirates that I have done Lexember in for several years running. It has progressed in fits and starts over the last few weeks, but has now reached a stage where I can call it a draft of a writing system at least, if not a complete one (not that any conlanging project can ever be complete). There is now an orthography page in the Katnae language documentation, although other aspects of the language remain unfinished.

More recently (a couple of days ago), I started putting chracters together to see whether the script looked the way I thought it would for actual text. While there are still a lot of unknowns — including the direction that the characters will ultimately go in on the page (the examples I have played with so far assume the same left to right, top to bottom scheme as the Latin alphabet) — I'm surprisingly happy with what I have so far. The glyphs themselves would probably be a pain to write by hand, but (as explained on the Katnae orthography page) Katnae writing has been 100% digital for generations, rendering that particular concern moot.

As an example of what the script looks like in actual use, this is the chorus from the Katnae "attack song", which they sing while closing in on ships they intend to raid:

In the ordinary romanization, that would be:

Osil maqate Katnae soura
Kot malloon asunnilai
Mila tarsute Katnae soura
Ima rausem qokkummai

There are a handful of words there that I don't want to commit myself to translations of yet, so I would rather hold off on doing a full translation, despite having a basic idea of what it means. However, soura is a noun meaning something like 'squadron', maqa is a verb meaning 'to surround' or 'to close in on' (with the continuous aspect marker -te), and osil is a transnumeral second person pronoun very similar to English you with a suffix marking it unambiguously as the object of the sentence.

Writing plain SVG code still feels like the most practical way to tweak Katnae syllables for now (especially now that basic forms exist for all of them), but it isn't very usable once I have images of the characters — I have to copy and paste the inner parts into a larger file if I want to write anything in the script (that, or position a bunch of letter images using CSS). At some point I'm going to have to write a script that converts a string of syllables in a file into an image of the text, but that is a task for another day. (People on BlueSky are encouraging me to make an actual font, but that's an even larger task for another day — but I still might at some point!)

This is the kind of project that advances in fits and starts, so I'm unlikely to keep making progress at a consistent rate. I would like to use the Katnae writing system in a conscript relay at some point, though!

Lexember 2024 Has Begun!

2025-12-04T13:45:10.092763046+0200

2024-12-01

Today is the first day of Lexember 2024! This year, I will be posting words in Katnae (spoken by space pirates) and Wharachei (a new project that is still hard to adequately describe).

I will be posting words on both my Fediverse and Bluesky accounts, as well as the CONLANG mailing list and a number of different chatrooms. This year, I will also be posting each day's words on my website and linking to them from a dedicated Lexember 2024 page.

I may post a summary of the entire event to this blog — or, if I find myself with more energy than I expected, summarize each week — but I am not going to create a new blog post for every day.

Hopefully by the start of the new year I will have my act together enough to post occasional Waldenese updates.

How I Conlang

2024-03-18T21:23:38.507906466+0200

2024-03-18

In a recent conversation with a number of other conlangers, the question came up of how different people approach conlanging, and how much diversity there is between different conlangers' preferred processes. Having heard that and thought about it a bit, I figured it might be worthwhile to write a brief overview of how I personally conlang, and touch on a few ideas and strategies that have influenced my work.

Given the limitations of time and endurance, I will not expound on how I create specific types of languages (although that would make for an interesting blog post series at some point) — only on the most general aspects of how I approach conlanging as an art. When reading this, please bear in mind that while I currently create mostly naturalistic or semi-naturalistic artlangs, I've gone through several serious engelanging phases, whose influence cannot be ignored even if engelangs are no longer my primary creative focus.

Existing Languages are Fodder for Inspiration

Many, many of my conlanging projects got their start when I first encountered a particular interesting natural language, and decided to build a conlang around a few features (be they phonological, grammatical, or other) of it. Some of these projects were, in hindsight, either laughable or boring — stealing the surface texture of a particular language without even attempting to replicate the underlying complexity that gave it that texture, and making up the rest of the language a priori and sometimes quite randomly — but a few have stuck around, and I come back to them from time to time when I feel like it.

What works best, it seems, is to choose a feature or two of an existing natural language — the vowel system, for instance, or some particular aspect of the verbal morphology — and graft that onto several other features taken from different language families, smoothing over any rough edges. Even so, however, this is simply a starting point, and as the language grows, it should (and must) eventually take on a life of its own. Furthermore, the more experience I gain conlanging, the more I find myself drawing only the smallest bits of inspiration from natural languages and instead building languages from the most basic of linguistic building blocks, without following any particular model (and only occasionally checking or particularly caring about ANADEWs).

Humor and Real-World References Have a Place, but can be Overdone

Just about every single one of my conlangs contains at least a handful of words that are or contain references to some real-world person, place, or thing. I won't spoil any of them here, but this is something that I definitely do — if you've seen a word that looks familiar, you may well be right about its origin. Bad puns and other linguistic jokes are something that I am a huge fan of in the real world, and thus it is unsurprising that this comes out in my conlanging as well.

That said, there is such a thing as overdoing it. I rarely create languages as saturated in jokes as e.g. Klingon is, and I often disguise the joke to the point where it can't really be called a joke anymore, and is at best inspiration for that particular word — and in many cases, I no longer remember what that inspiration was. I've thought about creating a language or two composed entirely of jokes, and have started projects to that effect on a handful of occasions, but as of the present none of them have gone particularly far. Maybe someday I will revive some of them, but at the moment this isn't a major priority — humor and references are much more useful as inspiration when I know I need to create a word but just can't think of one, regardless of the language.

I Don't Always Write Everything Down Right Away

While sometimes I have a conlanging idea that feels too good to risk forgetting, those are the edge cases. Most of the time, I will let the seeds of a new language germinate in my head for days or even weeks on end, and only start writing things down once they have begun to take shape in a more concrete way. In this particular manner, my approach to conlanging is very similar to my approach to music or to writing fiction: I often prefer to imagine a significant portion of the work before starting to "fix" it by recording it; once "fixed", the threshold for making changes can seem higher than at the imagination stage and thus I may feel stuck with what I have already written down, even if it no longer fits.

While doing this, I may iterate through the same set of patterns again and again, trying to find a way to make them all fit together, even long after my conscious mind might have concluded that the problem is intractable and I need to take a different approach. For example, I might spend hours or occasionally even days mentally listing all of the phonemes that I'm prepared to add to a particular language and trying to organize them into a neat grid covering the different values of one or more grammatical categories, while adding and discarding various clusters or secondary articulations. At times, this can feel almost compulsive, like I've been seized by a need to solve that particular problem with no option to set it down for the time being, although thankfully this is relatively rare these days.

A Language Grows from a Tiny Seed

Many of my conlanging projects have started from the smallest of seeds: just a few words that I thought up one day, or a sentence, or the barest skeleton of a phonology that happens to inspire a particular aesthetic. For instance, Ruapai grew from the chorus of a lullaby, whereas Tolaviizh was ultimately built around the word for "face mask" (unsurprisingly during the first year of the pandemic). Although this is not a universal part of my conlanging by any means, it is common enough to bear mentioning in its own section.

As hinted at above, Ruapai — until recently aptly referred to as simply "The Lullaby Language" — first took shape as the first line of a lullaby, which I found myself singing to myself while I was having trouble falling asleep one bright Finnish summer night. The line kiraj tekturiu i required many hours of careful thought and examination to turn from a sequence of meaningless phonemes into an analyzable and meaningful sentence, but from it eventually developed the rest of the chorus of that lullaby, as well as some basic verbal morphology; more followed as I fleshed out the lullaby and eventually did my first Lexember in the language. However, despite its key role in the development of the language, I did not actually finish the lullaby until immediately before the LCC 2023 Relay, in which it served as a torch for one ring.

The situation with Tolaviizh may have been less poetic, but was ultimately similar. I had seen floating around on the internet a meme about people who didn't know how to wear their covid masks depicting a mask with the text "it goes over your nose!"; after seeing that, it occurred to me that "it goes over your nose" wouldn't be a bad way to translate 'face mask' in a verb-oriented, polysynthetic conlang with a syntax (and most importantly, nominalization strategy) partially inspired by Algonquian languages (and, in hindsight, also the verb-noun nominalization strategy in English that gave us terms like "cutthroat" and "pickpocket"). Again, this led to me fleshing out a phonology and morphology, and soon enough I had another conlanging project to think about.

The Hardest Part is Finishing Things

If I had to name one of my worst traits as a conlanger (and as a hobbiest in general), it would be my talent for abandoning projects before they are anywhere near finished. While a conlang, like any artistic endeaver, is never truly done, I do tend towards the "lots of sketches and half-fleshed out ideas" end of the spectrum, compared to other conlangers who might devote years to a single language and develop it to a point comparable with a conlang that people actively use, such as Klingon. I've been trying to change this in recent years, but it's still very easy to go off and chase the most recent shiny new thing, and forget about the projects I'd been working on before that.

There are probably a million other random things that I could mention here, but I want to both keep this post to a manageable length and actually get it up on the blog in less than several months' time. Perhaps, as time and energy allow, I may expound on this topic more in the future.

Spatial Orientation in Ruapai

2024-02-17T22:59:41.260287501+0200

2024-02-17

Note: until recently, this language was referred to simply as the "Lullaby Language", after the lullaby that gave it its start. You will still see it referred to by that name in other places.

Ruapai — spoken by the almost-human-but-not-exactly residents of a faraway planet that I have never tried to name — approaches spatial orientation and the relative locations of objects in a manner quite unlike the default egocentric and cartesian systems of non-technical English. The most neutral terms for spatial relationships are best described using a three-dimensional, radial coordinate system, and while an egocentric frame of reference is technicially possible, convention and cultural norms lead speakers to use a shared conceptual circle or sphere — either imaginary or reified as a room or other enclosed space — as their primary frame of reference in almost all situations.

A Radial Coordinate System

In the abstract, the Ruapai coordinate system defines locations in a space in terms of the center of a hypothetical circle — henceforth referred to simply as the middle — and a front, i.e. the point on the side of the circle with a radial position of 0° (or, if you would prefer, 12 o' clock). The details of how the middle and front are defined are quite complex, and we will dive into them in greater detail later on, but for now, let's just assume that these two points are well defined in our hypothetical speaker's mind — if you asked them to, they could go stand in the middle and face the front, allowing the coordinate system to temporarily match up with our egocentric assumptions.

First and foremost, it is important to remember that all spatial expressions are evaluated with regard to this single shared coordinate system. Individual objects or persons are almost never assigned their own hypothetical circle (barring certain circumstances that will be addressed further on), and the existence of separate terms for the left and right instances of most body parts that come in pairs means that there are relatively few circumstances when even a non-native speaker would feel the need to do so. Even so, thinking in an absolute coordinate system can be unintuitive for native speakers of most widely-spoken Earth languages, so it is worth always keeping this thought in the backs of our heads.

With that in mind, Ruapai spatial relations are expressed in terms of linear distance from the middle and radial distance (in one of two directions) from the front. Each dimension is typically expressed by a different set of terms, and in most cases, only one will be necessary — for instance, to express that furniture has been pulled away from the walls (for painting, say), one need only say that all of the chairs and tables have been moved closer to the middle, whereas a person standing around at a party might be located using only a radial expression (unless they were standing close to the center of the room).

Linear Distance from the Middle

Linear distance from the middle is relatively easy to conceptualize: an object can be in the middle, it can be close to it, far from it, or a middling (ha!) distance away. It can also be right at the conceptual boundary of the space, or beyond it (or perhaps even far beyond it). Note that, in a radial coordinate system, an object across the middle from another has a radial relationship to the second object, not a linear one — unless one object is so much further from the middle than the other that a comparison in terms of linear distance from the middle would be warranted too!

In Ruapai, we divide this semantic space into three basic terms: in (or near) the middle, further away from the middle (but still within the boundaries of the conceptual circle), and outside of the conceptual circle. These terms are intransitive by default, but their comparative forms (which are transitive, as the comparative adds an object of comparison) are used to decribe the relative positions of objects in a space.

Note that in the absense of an actual wall, the edge of the conceptual circle may be somewhat fuzzy, hence the lack of a term for "at the edge of the conceptual circle". In a room with a real wall, of course, there would be plenty of ways of expressing "against the wall" or "very close to the wall but not touching it"; these expressions are well beyond the scope of this post (although I would like to elaborate on them at some point in the future). In the absense of a real wall, a superlative form of the further away from the middle term or something along the lines of almost beyond the conceptual boundary would suffice.

Radial Distance from the Front

Radial distance from the front can be calculated in one of two directions: clockwise (i.e. turning to the right from the perspective of a person standing in the middle facing the front) or counterclockwise (turning to the left for the aforementioned hypothetical observer). In either direction, a person can either be within 90° or less of the front, or more than 90° from it (with a strong implicature that they are less than 180° away, although this implicature can be canceled). There are also terms meaning at the front (more or less) and opposite the front, which tend to refer to a more narrow range of locations around the circle than the clockwise and counterclockwise terms.

In practice, this means that the conceptual circle is divided up into four almost-quadrants, plus a smaller sliver at the front and "back". Expressing the prototypical meanings of "left" and "right" in English (in reference to a room) requires a composite expression — usually something along the lines of "almost more than 90° in the clockwise/counterclockwise direction". A useful, if slightly more complex, metaphor is the rough bearings used by sailors to indicate the position of other ships in relation to theirs, or the "clock face" system used for similar purposes by people who grew up with face clocks.

It is useful to note that, while comparative forms of all of the expressions mentioned here can be used to indicate relative position of two objects or persons in a room (i.e. "they are further clockwise than I am"), this usage breaks down if the entities in question are not in the same quadrant in the conceptual space. In that case, speakers almost universally fall back on absolute positions — "I'm here, the box is there". Saying that a person standing immediately to the "left" of the front is "more clockwise-and-greater-than-90°" than someone standing on the "right" side of the room sounds a bit like describing the last window on the left as the first window on the right: it is the kind of thing you might encounter in a riddle or a deliberately tricky math problem, but nobody would actually talk that way in real life. Crucially for English speakers to remember, there is no single direct translation for "across the room", "kitty corner", or similar common terms.

Defining the Middle and Front

For non-native speakers or learners of Ruapai, one of the hardest aspects of mastering the spatial orientation system is simply deterining which points are the middle and front of a particular situation. While there are a handful of easy scenarios — for instance, describing the locations of items on the deck of a ship, or in any other relatively small vehicle — others require a bit more thought or experience with Ruapai culture. Thankfully, though, the majority of situations fit one of a few relatively simple models, all of which make logical sense once their internal logic is explained. Do bear in mind, however, that language is always flexible, and even native speakers encounter differences of intuition regarding their reference points in a space.

Let's go over a number of common scenarios below. Each and every one of these deserves very thorough elaboration in the future (time and brainpower willing), but an attempt has been made to sketch out each one to some level of detail.

Rooms and Other Enclosed Spaces

In a room, or a comparable natural space (say, a cave), there is almost always an obvious "middle of the room" that speakers will have no trouble agreeing on. In a hallway or a very long room, especially one with a pronounced curve, the perceived middle may shift depending on which part of the space is most contextually salient (compare walking on a road below), but most rooms that English speakers would call rooms have a clear middle.

Defining the front can require a little bit more work, but remains fairly simple: most rooms have a natural "business end", be it a stage, a hearth, a display of some sort, or merely a large window. Broadly speaking, the front of a room is the direction that a person's attention is most likely to be focused (or is expected to be focused, at least) when they are in the room — and in addition to physical features of the structure, other cues, such as the direction in which chairs are facing, are often taken into account. Under certain circumstances, the front can shift — say, if it gets dark and people move from watching birds out the picture window to huddling around the fireplace — although most people (and especially people who live in the structure of which the room is a part!) will assign each room a "default" front.

One of the greatest sources of ambiguity when orienting oneself in an enclosed space occurs in rooms with no defining features other than the main entrance: some speakers will interpret the entrance as the front, whereas others will define the front to be the wall opposite the entrance. Furthermore, the choice between those two options is heavily influenced by context, and may depend on what the speaker expects to do in the room and whether they expect the entrance to be a focal point of their attention (say, if they are waiting for somebody) or merely the way they got into the room (or the way they see into the room or space, despite not intending to go in, as would be the case with, say, a small closet): in the former case, the front might be assigned to the entrance, but in the latter it would almost universally be the opposite wall.

As an asside, most rooms in Ruapai society are round or oblong, and the square corners common in modern Earth architecture are extremely rare. The more time you spend in Ruapai buildings, the more sense the radial coordinate system makes.

Walking on a Road or Path

When traveling along a path, the front is, by default, the point at which the direction of travel intersects the conceptual boundary of the space. This is true even if a group of people are traveling together and not everybody is looking or even (at the moment) walking in the same direction — the front is defined by the direction that the group has "voted" for with their feet and faces, even if some members of the group voted for something else. Note that the direction of travel takes precendence over the direction of attention: even if the entire group is walking backwards, speakers assign the front to the direction of travel only slightly less consistently than when they are facing forward.

Even so, however, some ambiguity is possible. For instance, if a person or group of people go off the path temporarily, they may sometimes be described using either the frame of reference defined by the primary journey taken by the whole group or the frame of reference defined by the detour. A wide range of factors influence which option will be used, including the contextual salience of the detour versus the main journey, the length of the detour, and whether the route of the detour follows a well defined path (either built or natural). Similarly, backtracking a short distance can also lead to an analogous ambiguous or context-dependent scenario.

The middle, on the other hand, is (broadly speaking) defined as the middle of the space that the group of travelers occupies at any given moment. If the group is relatively large, this is usually fairly obvious, but when there are only one or two travelers, it can occasionally be unintuitive, since the "space the travelers occupy" remains constant even if a sole traveler takes a very short detour to, say, throw something into a trash can at the side of the road. Additionally, if the path has well-defined boundaries (say, a sidewalk or paved road), the conceptual boundary of the space will coincide with those and the middle will be more or less equidistant between them; however, in the absense of such boundaries, both the exact location of the middle and the conceptual boundary around the space may be somewhat fuzzier. In a situation with two or more well-defined boundaries (i.e. a street with a sidewalk), contextual cues may be necessary to determine which set is most salient.

It should be noted that the "travelers" in this scenario need not be people — animals, cars, or floatsam drifting down a river would be treated similarly. It also makes no difference whether the speaker is a part of the group of travelers or simply an observer — given similar knowledge of the situation, the same relational terms would be used.

Vehicles

The front of a vehicle, unsurprising, is more or less unambiguously assigned the same way an English speaker would assign it — to the nose, bow, or other part of the vehicle that points forward when the vehicle is moving in its most prototypical fashion. On an ocean-going ship, the radial coordinate system corresponds well to a simplified version of the traditional system of "bearings" — the front and the point oppposite the front correspond to ahead and behind/aft, and <90° and >90° clockwise and counterclockwise terms define fore and aft quadrants on the starboard and port sides (respectively). Similarly to a room, the conceptual boundary of the space is well defined by the sides of the vehicle.

It's important to remember that the "vehicle" rules only apply when the vehicle itself is treated as the frame of reference: i.e. many speakers, especially those without a lot of sailing experience, will treat the cabin of even a small boat as a room rather than simply a part of the boat; an interior stateroom on an ocean liner would almost universally be treated as such. Just about every vehicle, no matter how small, contains compartments or parts that would provide sufficient context to pull a speaker out of the "vehicle" frame and into the "room" or "random object" frames.

Furthermore, the "vehicle" frame of reference only comes into play for people or objects that are truly inside the vehicle, or at least fully contained within it when projected onto a two-dimensional plane parallel to the ground. A human riding a bicycle or skateboard would not, to a Ruapai speaker, be in the bicycle or skateboard's frame of reference, but rather that of the road. However, in contrast, an insect that landed on a bicycle seat would be conceptualized within the bicycle's frame of reference.

Other Natural and Artificial Environments

Broadly speaking, natural clearings function similarly to rooms, although in relatively radially symmetrical environments speakers may be more likely to disagree on the location of the front. Small bodies of water often fall into the same category as well, although the same caveat applies (and when in a boat, the vehicle frame of reference usually takes precedence). Similarly, valleys, rivers, and very long lakes can be treated like the paths mentioned above.

In a wide open space without clear landmarks or travelers to trigger any of the existing frames, the direction of the front more or less corresponds to the direction from which the sun rises (which I will not call East, because this is not Earth). This is the assumption made when reading a Ruapai map or discussing the positions of objects in a reference frame comparable to a conceptual version of a map. The exception — because of course there has to be an exception — is villages, towns, and other settlements, which almost always have a clear front defined by some natural feature that the settlement grew up around (often a river or body of water).

There are probably many intricacies and details to this that may never be fully explored.

The Human Body as a Frame of Reference

For cultural (and arguably also biological/psychological) reasons, Ruapai speakers express locations in reference to themselves extremely rarely. It is, however, possible, and does come up in real life (e.g. in medical contexts), although separate, frozen expressions for the left and right versions of many limbs and organs render this unnecessary more often than an English speaker might suppose.

By default, if the human body is to be used a frame of reference, the plane on which the middle, front, and conceptual boundary are located passes through the person from left to right and head to toe — imagine the Vesuvian Man, or alternatively a person lying on their back on the floor. In this scenario, the middle is situated near the person's belly button, and the front is their forehead. What English speakers might describe as the person's "front" and "back" are considered to be above and below the plane, with very little variation regardless of how the person orients their body. Body cavities, on the other hand, are more or less treated equivalently to closets or rooms. At that scale, furthermore, the speaker is no longer treating the person as the frame of reference, and the cultural reluctance to use a person as a reference frame does not apply.

Animals are treated similarly to humans, except that up corresponds to the animal's back, and down to their stomach. This particular difference in spatial language — even given how rarely the human body is treated as a frame of reference — is one of the core linguistic differences in how people versus animals are discussed in Ruapai: using the "animal" frame for a person would be actively dehumanizing, whereas the "human" frame would merely put the person on the metaphorical spot.

Random Objects

All household appliances with an easily identifiable "business end" are treated as metaphorical extensions of animals, although speakers may exhibit slight disagreement on exactly where the "business end" is in the case of, say, something equivalent to a Roomba, where the "head" is hidden underneath and the external shell is largely featureless. Appliances that you put things inside, however, are treated as rooms, usually with the front at what English speakers would call the back of the appliance's interior cavity.

Objects that lack a natural "head" or other clear front are usually conceived of as having their front at that point that would make the line from front to middle parallel to that between the front and middle of the frame of reference that the object is currently within. In practice, this is relatively rare, and speakers will usually default to using the room as a reference frame instead of an object without an obvious front. Rare does not, however, mean impossible, especially if no other means of communicating a particular spatial relationship is available.

Sources of Confusion and General Tips

The presence of (conceptual) concentric circles or parallel lines can make it difficult to identify the front, middle, or conceptual boundary of a space. While this may seem daunting at first, recognize that even fluent native speakers would have trouble with this — English speakers constantly find themselves having to clarify their egocentric reference frames ("no, your left, not mine!"), and this is no different. Ruapai speakers would have somewhat of an intuitive sense for when to include this clarification, but even that would often be faulty.

When discussing the locations of objects beyond the conceptual boundary of the space around the middle, first ask yourself whether switching to a larger reference frame would be immediately practical. Although this is often not practical, it is often the most neutral solution, especially when an object is close to a smallish household item or a pet. This is more true when the entity to be located is larger than the entity it is being located in comparision to, or when they are the same size — if the entity to be located is significantly smaller, this rule does not necessarily hold.

Expressing Up and Down

Unsurprisingly, vertical spatial relationships — corresponding to up and down in English — are also expressed using a radial coordinate system in Ruapai. Thankfully, this system is much simpler than that used for coordinates in the horizontal plane, since it only has to describe locations along a semicircle stretching from the top of the conceptual dome to the bottom of the conceptual "bowl" beneath the speaker's feet.

As hinted at in the last paragraph, vertical locations are conceptualized on (or in relation to) a notional dome, forming a half sphere with its rim at the conceptual boundary surrounding the horizontal frame of reference, and its top directly above the middle. In addition to this dome, there is also a conceptual "bowl" beneath the plane, again with its rim at the conceptual boundary and its bottom directly beneath the middle. The sphere formed by this bowl and dome can be thought of as an extension of the conceptual boundary into three dimensions, and when reckoning in three dimensions, distances from the middle are treated as absolute distances, rather than being projected onto the horizontal plane.

Given that conceptual model, the semantic space of vertical locations is carved up into three terms: at (or very close to) the horizontal plane, some distance up the side of the dome radially (but no more than 90° from horizontal), and some distance down the side of the bowl radially (but no more than 90° from horizontal). To indicate a precise location, these terms are combined with expressions indicating radial distance from the front in the horizontal plane (specifying the location along the horizontal conceptual boundary from which the listener should track upwards onto the dome or downwards onto the bowl) and expressions indicating linear distance from the middle.

Note that items no higher off the floor than a typical person is tall are often described colloquially as if they were in the horizontal plane, unless there is a specific need to position them in vertical space as well. This does not negate anything else in this section, but in a very small space, it can occasionally lead to surprises if the listener is thinking in terms of a literal 3D radial coordinate system.

Another caveat to be aware of is the fact that the floor of a room typically forms a hard conceptual boundary to the room's reference frame, even if the conceptual bowl should dip well below it. An object located beneath the floor, if located in the reference frame of the room, would be described with the "beyond the conceptual boundary" term in almost all cases. Exceptions to this would be rooms with a glass or otherwise see-through floor, or rooms that are otherwise arranged so that the space beneath the floor is still inside of the conceptual boundary.

Finally, in a spherical room, with a distinctly bowl-shaped floor, the middle might end up being assigned to a point above most speakers' heads, in the true middle of the space (vertically as well as horizontally). Rooms like this are not particularly common, and even native speakers might be tripped up at first were they to suddenly find themselves in one. Note that this particular scenario would only be triggered if the lower walls of the room sloped very strongly and noticeably outward; even then, some speakers would still locate the horizontal plane along the floor if a portion of it were flat.

Vocabulary

Here's a list of the actual terms defined above. Note that all of these spatial terms are intransitive verbs — if a noun referring to the frame of reference is included, it will take the form of an adjunct suffixed with the Adverbial marker -at.

akta 'to be outside of the conceptual boundary'

apir 'to be counterclockwise of the front radially (more than 90° away)'

hivim 'to be below the horizontal plane radially (no more than 90°)'

imas 'to be clockwise of the front radially (but less than 90° away)'

jaka 'to be counterclockwise of the front radially (but less than 90° away)'

kurrat 'to be opposite the front'

kuvar 'to be in the middle'

paun 'to be at or near the horizontal plane'

timi 'to be at the front'

uata 'to be some distance from the middle (but still inside the conceptual boundary)'

ussap 'to be above the horizontal plane radially (no more than 90°)'

vukur 'to be clockwise of the front radially (more than 90° away)'

Bear in mind, of course, that these are all basic terms, despite their long and sometimes unwieldy translations in English. Although spatial terms can pose problems in any language, Ruapai children can be assumed to master these terms no later (or not significantly later) than Anglophone children master "right" and "left".

One thing not discussed in this post at all, and certainly not listed in the vocabulary section, is the directionals — short particles indicating a direction (most of the time), which are usually placed immediately after a verb. Besides their explicit meaning, a directional can often indicate (or reinforce) the fact that a verb describes a state change, rather than just a static fact. While directionals are entirely relevant to a discussion of spatial language in Ruapai, this post can function without them, as the directional concepts they indicate are already well defined here. Directionals will likely be covered in a later post, however.

Conclusion

Although this has been a very long post, we have still only scratched the surface of how spatial terms work in Ruapai. Many of the topics covered have been marked as requiring more thought and development, and many of those will never be developed as fully as they could be — there are only so many hours in a day, and only so many days in a year. Nevertheless, this short glimpse of Ruapai spatial terminology should (hopefully) be useful, both as documentation of the language for my own reference, and as reference material for (among others) future conlang relay participants.

A secondary purpose of this post is to demonstrate just how deep the conlanging (and linguistics!) rabbit hole can go. Simply writing down a few words and grammatical rules doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the level of complexity embedded in any language, and even most "relatively complete" lexica and grammars provide only a superficial view of what an actual speaker of said language would need to know to use it competently. While this may sound at first like a challenge to less experiences conlangers, I would encourage everyone to view this depth of complexity not as a hurdle to clear, but as an opportunity to explore — what can your language do when you truly dig into it?

Returning to Ruapai, it is worth mentioning a cultural aspect that may prove interesting in light of this post: Ruapai speakers assign middles in general a great deal of cultural significance, in the same way that many Earth cultures assign great significance to beginnings and finales. While it may be naive to assume that this cultural aspect is directly related to the significance of the middle in Ruapai spatial orientation, it serves at very least as a good mnemonic, and is probably a relationship worth developing in greater depth in the future.

Expect more on this topic in the future, both for Ruapai and for other conlangs!