The Eastlands are a year old...

I just realized that it's been a year since I began this conworld project of
mine, the Eastlands, and it's rather interesting to look back on.

In the past year...

...41 languages have been created.
...26 languages have been kept as "official".
...15 languages have been thrown out because I didn't like them.
...almost 2400 years of history have been charted, reaching from the
earliest known times to the beginning of the Iron Age.
...over a gigabyte of files have been made for this world.
...a variant of Diplomacy set in the Twelve Kingdoms period of Celesír was
made and played.

Most of the work done so far has been linguistic or cartographic.  But the
original (at least, the stated) goal of the world was to make a setting for
a story I've wanted to write for some time.  The story is still in the
"basic notes" form...  I guess if you're like me, and you enjoy reading
history books, this project could be pretty interesting.  But if you ever
want to read the story I'm working on...wait another year or so, and I might
have something actually written.

From what I hear on the list, I bet most of you have similar experiences
with your projects - plenty of linguistic information (and plenty in
whatever other field you enjoy), yet nothing in other areas.

Some interesting linguistic trivia from the Eastlands:
- A noun in Oldvak can take up to 11 different affixes at the same time.
- Eihdan has 11 noun classes and 7 numbers.
- Morgenón has ~28 cases and 4 verb voices.
- Fully two-thirds of the languages of the Eastlands are agglutinative, some
extremely so.
- Almost half of the languages are VSO, almost another half being SOV or
SVO, one OSV, and two weird ones.
- Eihdan has no stop consonants.
- Of all the languages in use, only Stumbrin is tonal.
- Silven Ilef was originally "written" with knots in ropes, which evolved
directly into their actual writing.


A few languages are patterned on real ones to some degree:

- Chovur is meant to sound like Mongolian.
   "Tetukil Takhas, jeng se ögh angqarang a senor kazhil arat galai."

- Thungwaz is meant to sound like Proto-Germanic.
   "Unsara Faðaz, þa neis eða hafna, náhlaðau þin nima."

- Vallacene is meant to sound like Italian, but using a more straightforward
orthography.
   "Obra a kollina, i kapra galla’re tiyo pelle jye alya senya pwelle."

- Zhdava is meant to sound Slavic.
   "Žlača elba žanor ladnorn gedmora, tura stanasn šlidječan obrana,
jer ača čila višanan na dvanapn - za ž brekuč nŭžda."

- Torantine is meant to be somewhat Greek-like.
   "Halis za meloun, idon nixil ar dete melóäta."

Some unusual characters have been used in the transcription of these
languages.  The most bizarre combination would be an a-e ligature with acute
accent and underdot (Razdiat), representing an /a/, shifted by e-umlaut to
/&/, stressed and velarized.

One of my favorite names to come from these languages would be "Ruthenia",
the Torantine name of a country in Celesír.  I never meant to use such a
well-known name from the real world, but it came up entirely by accident.
The original word for "lake-country" was "vrutšnaja", and with the regular
sound changes, it became "ruthenia".


Whether any of that is interesting or not is a different matter...

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