Big Mick Energy

The phrase "Sennevn Empire" in the standard Yevakadziha language and logosyllabic script. This is written with 5 signs, read here from left to right. Sign names are shown in blue in all-capitals, with their approximate phonemic values below¹. Finally, semantic values for logograms are shown at the bottom, where the signs represent individual words rather than syllables.

In general the script is principally syllabic, making use of roughly 60 main phonetic signs to represent syllable onset (and some separate symbols for codas), with a contingent of additional logograms representing specific words, such as SĒDU and KARĒ. Signs of this type can also be used to represent a single syllable, for example KARĒ might represent the phonemic sequence /ka/.

The syllabary in it's current form is about 900 years old, dating to the early days of the empire and the century-long reign of third emperor Neven Kalang, when the contemporary dialect of the capital Arva Teggu became the standard language of the imperial bureaucracy. Since then, some sound important sound changes have occurred, while others were already underway at the time of the language's formalization. See this post, which is now somewhat inaccurate a outdated, for some details. In short, old /p/ and /g/ never surface as such, having changed to [h] in many environments, with /g/ becoming [ʥ] before front vowels, which makes certain signs homophones. The language has also gone from five to four vowels qualities, with /oː/ merging with /u/, and /o/ merging with /a/. Consequently, there are a number of distinct signs which are now homophones.

1. The phonemic values are approximated because I have not attempted an analysis of the phonology of the language and am only making inferences as to what values are likely underlying, based on the sound changes from Middle Arva-Teggu to modern Standard Yevakadziha.

I spent long time developing a fairly powerful sound change applier program. It's written in Java. I've thought about designing it for Rust, but that will be a lot of work for reasons I will touch on.

The code is on Github

There are a few key capabilities that it supports:

• custom phonetic features model, but also you don't have to use it
• logical expressions in conditions (not and or keywords)
• regular expressions (i mean it, I built Thompson's construction NFA engine)
• commands to load and save data, and to load feature models and import or run other scripts

The feature model was designed to support binary, ternary, and integer models, but the latter two are conceptually and practically difficult (I probably went too far). They also support aliases for feature groups (like "vowel" and for places of articulation, as pictured above), and also constraints which can ensure that sound changes don't result in illegal combinations of feature values. The model also defines a separate set of "base" and "modifier" symbols. These both define how the program should read inputs (entries in a lexicon are decoded into sequences of feature vectors) as well as how to write outputs (feature vectors are encoded back to strings).

I'm really proud of this, but haven't really worked on it in a while. My last official release was 6 years ago, and the most recent public commit was 4 years ago. I've done a little bit of work since then, so if there's interest I could prepare another release.

Here's a very old manual, which includes a description of my ill-conceived numerical feature model. It's old enough it's still using the "Haedus" project name.

Oops I'm working on a conlang without trying to derive it from an ancient language of Earth, for probably the first time

Here's some notes I threw together from what I've been thinking about:

Common language of the Western Arc planet Yevakadzi, and the former Senneven Empire. You might ask why is the planet a mono-culture, I thought we were past that? This is really the consequence of settlement patterns, dictated by environmental factors. The planet is quite arid, but has several pockets of temperate forest and grassland where sea winds interacting with mountain ridges produce regions of high rainfall, mainly along the coastlines of the southern hemisphere. Consequently, most of the planet's 200 million people live around the capital at Arva Taggu, on the coast of the southern sea. Yevakadzi has been inhabited consistently since the civilization of the First People collapsed ten thousand years ago. Regional variations exist, but the Arva Taggu variety has long been the literary and bureaucratic standard.

The inventory of phonemes is small:

But produces a greater variety of surface forms through a series of important transformations:

• ng + C → CC_[+voice]
• n → m / _b
• n + k → ng
• b → v / V_V or (r, l)_
• C_[-voice] → C_[+voice] / σ_[+accent]_

Here are some assorted facts about what I'm thinking for the language:

• Written in a syllabary consisting of 60 characters.
• Largely synthetic and mostly suffixing
• SOV ordering in transitive clauses
• Family name precedes given name
• Two noun classes, common and neuter
• Verbs agree in class and number
• "Person" is not a good analytical category in Yevakadziha; rather, is a system based on speech-act participants, and proximity to the speech act:
  • ego (the speaker, analogous to 1st person singular)
  • sap ("speech act particpant", generally analogous to 2nd person)
  • prox proximal used for non-participants who are nearby to ego or sap
  • dist distal, used for non-participants who are far from ego and sap
• Verbs distinguish between perfective and imperfective as key forms, but may also incorporate distinctions on the basis of telicity (where verbs might fall into separate lexical classes on the basis of their producing changes of state)