Hi there. It's been a while since I last posted.
Well, to be precise, it's been a while project I'm proud enough of to post here, but lately I've been working on a little worldbuilding project, and with my worldbuilding comes conlangs! So I've been tinkering with concepts a lot. This is a world where succubi (or, well, humans have come to call them that) exist in a separate realm that humans cut contact with very long ago. Recently, there's been a sort of "first contact," with all the messiness that that involves.
This is the language that succubi speak.
For this project I want something alien and expressive. Something that couldn't have come out of humans, but with a kind of beauty a human can easily find. It's a pretty strange thing so far!
I'm calling it ʑârái. This isn't really a language name, but rather a word that means "communication". Succubi as a whole only ever developed one language (with many dialectal variations, some with features that may not be present in others, but still a fairly unified thing). Until recently, they didn't have a concept of a language, just a concept of transmitting thoughts from one person to another using a material medium.
The glyph you see above is the written name for spoken ʑârái. There is a different name for the written language, for reasons I'll explain in a post about the written language.
An Overview
ʑârái is tonal. It has four tones, a rising tone, a falling tone, a rising-falling tone and a flat tone. It also has a strong vs. weak syllable distinction, where weak syllables are considered toneless (when speaking slowly, they may inherit the tail end of the previous tone or copy the tone altogether).
The phonology itself is pretty undeveloped yet, I want to develop something very detailed, but I enjoy focusing more on the grammar, so I'm doing that instead. Here's what I have:
| Consonants | Labial | Alveolar | Palatal | Velar |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plosive | m | n | ɲ | ŋ |
| Nasal | p pʰ | t tʰ | k kʰ | |
| Fricative | ɸ v | s | ɕ ʑ | |
| Affricate | tsʰ | tɕʰ dʑ | ||
| Tapped | ɾ | |||
| Approximant | w | ɹ l | j |
| Vowels | Front | Center | Back |
|---|---|---|---|
| Closed | i y | u | |
| Middle | e | o | |
| Open | a |
One could say this language is SOV. However, when noun class is involved, the noun with higher animacy is considered to be the one doing something to the one with lower animacy.
The language's noun classes currently recognize six degrees of animacy, with the higher being associated with "can express and seek out a desire to be or not be in a situation" and the lowest being associated with "does not have desire". I haven't fully decided what I'll keep and what I won't keep, so the animacy system will get its own post when I'm happy with it.
The intermediate levels are pretty broad, allowing for things like an object's capacity to display invalid states (such as displays that show error messages) and objects whose capacity for "desire" is modifiable by other things (like components with configurable parameters, or "living crystals", the basis of succubus technology).
Deixis
This is the juice of the language's grammar so far. The language cares a lot about reference, that is, the ability to determine what real world objects (if any) does a word refer to.
I call it the "degree of deictic separation," because it encodes how separate from you the "point of reference" of the noun is. There are three degrees:
The first degree is your own, in the present time. What you directly know about the conversation, your memories, your point in time and your surroundings. ké sáerà (lit. the tomorrow) will always refer to the day after the day you say the sentence in.
If you say "yesterday, your friend said he'd go out tomorrow", and use the ké determiner, it means your friend will go out tomorrow, not today.
The second degree is used when the reference does not come directly through you, but you know enough about it to pinpoint what the word refers to. It's also best to use it when the referrent is not the same as it would be if it was in the first degree.
The same sentence as before, using the tsà determiner, heavily implies that the friend will leave today (which was his tomorrow when he said that).
The third degree is used when you can't actually use the word to pinpoint the thing in the real world.
Imagine a written letter. The date has been lost. The letter says "my friend said he'd go out tomorrow."
You can't possibly know when "tomorrow" actually is. You don't have enough connection to the author's context at the time of writing, but you can imagine a context that is relative to them and independent of yours, with a consistent logic for when each event happened.
By putting this system in the language's determiners, every noun is impacted by this logic. If you want to create a generic reference (e.g. I want water, where there isn't any specific water we can point to that you want, you just want water), you simply don't use a determiner before the noun.
I'm actually unsure how to gloss ké, because in some contexts it can also be a/an.
Future Plans
For the future, I want to play around with evidentiality, to create something similar to the deixis system I have here for verbs.
Writing System
That glyph I put at the beginning is written ʑârái.
Written ʑârái is a different language from spoken ʑârái. They don't follow the same grammar. Because succubi are largely a monoculture, this isn't particularly strange to them. Succubus language uses the entirety of 2D space for each sentence, which means it can get very lengthy.
A sentence in Succubus looks something like this:
"I know she sees you"
Written ʑârái looks complex at a glance, but is actually quite simple. The verbs end up acting as grid lines, where the nouns go in the diagonals between verbs. ʑârái has no correct writing or reading direction, this image could be upside down and it would still be perfectly readable without the need to look for a neat starting point.
This also means that no clause markers are needed. Every clause flows into its subclauses.
It may look like there's too much detail in a glyph, and that's true! This is an artefact of how the language is written: Through living crystals. Living crystals are at the center of all succubus technology, and I may go into more detail later, but the method is simple: You command the crystal to grow into the shapes. As it grows, the crystal looks and behaves like goo, but is solid to the touch. When the residual parts of the crystal flow back into you (which is called "drying out"), the message begins looking more like a solid.
Learning to write can be a little hard, so there are grid-shaped supports meant to teach you how to control the crystals to such fine degree.
By controlling how wildly the crystal grows into the shapes it's being given, you can create a distinction between wild lines and simple lines. A simple line has a very uniform density and structure, whereas a wild line looks like tendrils or vines. In fact, the transparency in these images represents the density gradient.
The shape of a wild line doesn't matter, unless some other shape grows from it. In that case, only the surrounding area. This is the glyph for spoken ʑârái:
In blue are branches growing from simple lines. In red are branches growing from wild lines.
These, alongside the shapes of simple lines and symmetry, are some of the main distinguishing features in glyphs.
Glyphs may also have punctuation. Notice the two heart-shaped marks in the glyph above. Those are name markers. They are a recent addition to this particular glyph in order to distinguish it from simply "written language", when used to refer to human languages, but can be on any glyph to distinguish it.
That's it for now, I think! It's still pretty underdeveloped, but I'm excited to do more for this language. I keep thinking of an Arrival-like first contact scenario, or maybe some SCP-style short stories to showcase the language.