Re: From The Ashes...

Well I had to leave in a rush a while back.  I just started to lose my mind
and post nonsense.  When things turned around, I was busy with the music
stuff.  Now I'm in a new band and that's taking up most of my time and
energy (I have lots of time but not much energy, thanks to these !@#$%^&*
meds).

I ended up back to conlanging through the back door so to speak.  I was
researching non-Western music theory and fell in love with the Turkish
53-tone gamut.  Now that I'm longing for the day I have the means to design
a 53-tone-per-octave keyboard (all I have is my fretless bass guitar), I can
do some of my weird music.

All this got me interested in the mix of cultures that make up the Islamic
world that gave Turkey that scale, and the languages thereof.  Arabic,
Persian, Ottoman Turkish.

I also got Windows XP, and of course that comes with support for all those
languages.  I found all sorts of Arabic fonts on the Three Dubyas.  I'm
trying to teach myself the language for real now.  And that of course leads
me back to Spanish, and I'd love to find some stuff on Medieval Spanish (as
in during Moorish rule, Al-Andalus etc.).

Oh yeah, I'm supposed to be talking about conlangs now.  I've put all of my
old projects on the shelf, maybe for good.  No more trying to invent the
language with a thousand phonemes or whatever it was.  In fact, I'm not
really creating a language nearly as much as I'm genetically engineering
several.  I'm crossbreeding Arabic, Persian, Turkish and Greek (to start
with), basically.  Taking the most notable and complex features of each and
creating a Super-Classical Language.

So far this is what I have for Language X (I need a name... or maybe
something like Lingua Ignota).  It will be fundamentally a Central Semitic
language, in the same league as Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic.  The foundation
will be the religious writings in each language found withing Judaism,
Christianity and Islam.  Later on, non-Semitic features will be added from
Persian, Turkish, Greek and possibly Latin.

The language is written in Arabic script, using all 28 letters we're
familiar with, with little change in pronunciation (I will probably voice
saad, taa' and qaaf and lateralize daad).  Five additional letters found in
Persian (p, ch, zh, v, g) are added, and some letters will have two possible
consonant values.  The three vowel diacritics will have to represent six
vowels (each can be short or long), though: a, ä, e, i, o, u; the second
vowel has a weak allophone of the neutral "schwa" vowel.

The grammatical complexities of all base languages will be maintained as
much as reasonably possible, with redundancies removed if impractical.  The
work on this monster will be slow, and I won't be posting much since
conlanging is way down on my list of priorities right now.

But I'm always up for ideas for microtonal progressive rock....

~DaW~


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