L'ewa development
Published on , 530 words, 2 minutes to read
In May I created a draft of L'ewa, a draft for a conlang that I was going to use personally/in my diary. This ended up not happening like I would have liked, but I have actually found a good use for this language. I want to use it to help build out a fantasy world for a novel I want to write. As such, I'm going to treat L'ewa as a protolanguage and then start evolving it into a more ornate and detailed language.
=> https://lewa.within.website L'ewa: A Personal Language
One of the main things I want to write about in the novel is how hierarchies corrupt meaning from the pure into a distilled form of its former self. I would like to have L'ewa be a part of this. I built L'ewa to be a more freeform magicky language, but I would like to try and bake a few things into it:
- A formality system that inflects nouns into formalized forms (with some irregular forms to spice things up)
- Moving some things from an analytic system of particles to a case system that works on agglutination (like Esperanto or Russian)
- Make kirta (Creator) and other spirituality terms into swear words
- Maybe introduce a gendered grammar system
- Use a Latin-inspired script instead of the more witchy pictoral one
Case Marking
Right now, sentence role marking is done with the ka, ke and ku marking the subject, verb and object of the sentences. I'd like to change it to something else like:
- -ka -> marks a nominative argument (all parts of the noun phrase get marked like this)
- -ku -> marks an accusative argument
I need to rejigger the pronoun system for this. I may also reintroduce binary gender as a concept and make part of the core conflict of the novel be related to the gender (or lack thereof) of the main character Divae (name still WIP).
Tense Marking
By default, every verb is seen as either past, present, future or perfective with the actual meaning either specified explicitly or inferred via context. Consider this sentence:
mi madsa spaloku
This could be "I ate an apple (in the past)", "I am eating an apple", "I will eat an apple" or "I ate an apple", but which one it is would be inferred from context.
The old tense markers are qu (past), qa (present), qo (future) and qe (perfective). Perfective doesn't really make sense to me as a tense anymore, so I'm going to drop it. This should end up with a system like this:
- -qa -> present tense
- -qu -> past tense
- -qo -> future tense
So the following sentences would be something like "I am eating an apple", "I ate an apple (in the past)" and "I will eat an apple":
- mi madsaqa spaloku
- mi madsaqu spaloku
- mi madsaqo spaloku
This is still all a work in progress, and I will probably change this a lot to make it a bit less bad in the future. Right now this is a set of ideas I've been thinking out, and I'm going to work at making this better for the future. I need to do some reading up on languages with case systems.
Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.
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