Yes, I am a conlanger!

Sort of.

For those who don’t know what a conlanger is, it’s someone who works on a constructed language. (AKA conlang for short.) You know, like Esparanto or Klingon!

I started working on a constructed language when I created an alien race for some Star Trek fan fiction I was fiddling with. (NOT nerdy at all!) The first words I created for this language were the proper names of characters, starships, and planets.

I then decided I wanted to make up a language for this race. I already knew the story of Esperanto and Klingon, the two most famous artificial languages out there, but I didn’t really get into the idea until I read a book by Arika Orkent called In the Land of invented Languages, which is a history of constructed languages, a subject that’s much more complex, rich, and interesting than most people would assume.

There is a fairly active conlanger community out there, and many of them would sniff at my methods and my one conlang. I know a decent amount about linguistics for a muggle, but I don’t have the International Phonetic Alphabet memorized, and I haven’t really used it either. When I did find out how some conlangers go about constructing their languages, I found out that I had already done a lot of things they suggested, such as deciding which sounds I wanted to use, and how to organize the grammar.

The International Phonetic
Alphabet. (Part of the chart…)

When I first started my language called Sahet, I wanted it to sound alien and cool. And I got carried away. I created really long and hard to pronounce words with lots of syllables and it had really weird and complex grammar. I quickly realized that it was too complex and too esoteric, so I started to simplify the grammar and shorten the words.

The history of this language is that it’s an amalgamation of three major world languages when the planet unified, and I decided that the hard to pronounce and crazy grammar version of this language is the old, ancient form of Sahet, and that the current version is the more modern one. In other words, as it evolved it got simpler. They started ignoring some of the more complex grammar rules and simplified the words over time.

Just a few words in my language:

Jajnii – Child
Tochen – Parent, adult
Klaviat – Soldier, officer
Dras – Ship

Most of my inspiration comes from languages such as Russian, Arabic, the one language I speak other than my native tongue of English which is German, and good ol’ Klingon! I was also inspired by approximations of ancient languages such as Egyptian and Aztec. A professional linguist, such as Marc Orkand who created the Klingon language, chose more obscure languages for his inspiration in creating Klingon. (At least obscure to Westerners!)

WARNING: HIGHLY DETAILED NERDERY:

How to pluralize a noun in Sahet: I use either a ul- prefix, or and l suffix, or there is no modification for a plural form. For example:

Dras: Ship – Drasl: Ships
Viem: Bird. – Ulviem: Birds
Klaviat: Soldier or soldiers

I’m still working on conjugations, including using imperative roots for things like adverbs and past tense, something that might(?) make some conlangers blanch:

Habran – To attack
Habract – Attack! (Imperative)
Hebract -attacked

There’s also contractions. “I am” is “A el”, which can be shortened to “Al”. (Pronounced “Awl”, not “Al”.) There’s also a disappearing article with the contraction:

A el en Klaviat – I am a soldier.

Al Klaviat – I’m a soldier

– Technically it is not grammatically incorrect to say “Al en Klaviat”, but it sounds weird, so native speakers never do that.

“Besh anj…” means “That is…” “Besh anj aika Jajnii.” – “That is my child.” It can also be contracted with a disappearing ‘j’: “Behsan aika Jajnii.”

I also mix around words. The original word for “my” was “Aia.” “Aia Dras” – “My ship”. But I thought it sounded too wimply. So I changed it to “Aika”: “Aika Dras”. Then I thought it sounded too Klingony, like I was trying to hard to be Dothraki. So I decided to use both. “Aia”, pronounced “Eye-ah”, is the standard, but if you wanted to put some emphasis on it, you would say “Aika”. And then for very informal speech you can just prefix a noun with “Ai-” just to make things quick and easy:

Aia Jajnii. – My child.
Aika Jajnii. – MY child!
Aijajnii – My child

Sahet started to get more interesting and complex as I worked on it. For example, I have a prefix for possessives: “Te”.

Dras means ship. So if you want to say Seva’s ship, you prefix her name with “Te” and then use the noun:

Te Seva Dras – Seva’s ship.

“Te” is also used as a diminutive. For examnple, “Vachovey” means complicated. “Te Vachovey” means a little complicated.

I know a lot of conlangers would not use the same word or root to mean two different things in their languages, but there’s so much of that in other languages that I went for it. I mean, think of the word “Row”. It can mean to row a boat, or a row of chairs, or to have a row in the pub. (Britishly, natch!)

So far I have a vocabulary of about maybe 400 words. I haven’t worked on it as much as I’d like. Who knows. Maybe I’ll take some time to really flesh it out someday. I have a good grounding and the basics for it, and I think it could be a really fun language to develop.

Even if some hardcore conlangers might sniff at it!

Some handy dandy Sahet phrases:

El anj ahm ge’ahnt – She/He is very violent

Ya oska – That’s stupid

Chya – Ridiculous!

Havek! – Get lost! Shove off!

En braj Dras anj shova els en hasl Dras – A big ship is better than a tiny one

Vos besh en Htesk? – Was that a threat?

A sii’en sah hakamae – I will kill you

Al na’iivesh anj haprvahk – I am unhappy and weird

Son hajii mazh Trabetl! – We need more weapons!

This is the best video I have found for anyone curious about conlanging:

Definitely a fun book, even if you’re not specifically into the idea of constructed languages. A much more rich and diverse topic than you would believe:

By the man who invented the languages for the Game of Thrones series:

Just for kicks: The entire International Phonetic Alphabet chart: