Cadey is coffee
<Cadey> Hello! Thank you for visiting my website. You seem to be using an ad-blocker. I understand why you do this, but I'd really appreciate if it you would turn it off for my website. These ads help pay for running the website and are done by Ethical Ads. I do not receive detailed analytics on the ads and from what I understand neither does Ethical Ads. If you don't want to disable your ad blocker, please consider donating on Patreon or sending some extra cash to xeiaso.eth or 0xeA223Ca8968Ca59e0Bc79Ba331c2F6f636A3fB82. It helps fund the website's hosting bills and pay for the expensive technical editor that I use for my longer articles. Thanks and be well!

L'ewa development

Read time in minutes: 3

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.


This article was posted on M08 05 2020. Facts and circumstances may have changed since publication. Please contact me before jumping to conclusions if something seems wrong or unclear.

Series: flightJournal

This post was not WebMentioned yet. You could be the first!

The art for Mara was drawn by Selicre.

The art for Cadey was drawn by ArtZora Studios.

Some of the art for Aoi was drawn by @Sandra_Thomas01.