Astorí!

Welcome to the fourth no longer-weekly c/conlangs post!

As you might be able to tell, as the initial hype for the community has slowed down, we’ve also started getting behind on the weekly posts. Sorry for that. We’ll hope to be able to maintain a somewhat less ambitious bi-weekly schedule. But please keep posting your conlang things here - every post matters (to us)!

Conlangs of the Week

The conlangs of the week are the Ancient Language and Dwarvish from Christopher Paolini’s Inheritance Cycle (aka Eragon and the following books). Both these languages feature frequently in Paolini’s setting and are essential to the worldbuilding and story of the setting. On the other hand, they have often been criticised for their lack of originality and lack of real rules or vocabulary. Instead, there are just lists of translated words or phrases, not even with an explanation on how to pronounce them. (Though it seems that Paolini has actually done some more leg-work to establish the languages more broadly since the books were released.)

What do you think about this method of conlanging? Would you consider relexes of English (or other irl languages) “proper” conlangs? Are relexes okay as naming languages? Or do you think that the concept of relexes are just gatekeeping?

Linguistic feature of the week

Less of a linguistic feature and more of a conlang sub-category, our subject of discussion this week are naming languages. Naming languages are conlangs made with only limited grammar and a limited vocabulary, usually just about enough to fill in a map or generate some names - often for a literary setting.

Do you use naming languages? At what point do you consider a conlang having passed the stage of “naming language”?

Post of the week

No posts this week, so no post of the week ;p

Happy conlanging everyone and thank you for joining us on c/conlangs!

Esterní!