Introduction¶
This is a small repository written using RST and Sphinx in order to show some of my conlanging work. I have been teaching myself the principles of historical and comparative linguistics as a hobbyistic project for about 2 years now, and naturally wanted to use the knowledge thusly acquired to develop my own conlangs along more naturalistic and scientifically grounded lines. I have always loved con langing, and although it is somewhat unfashionable nowadays among conlangers (I think), did not hesi tate to apply them to your typical post-Tolkienian fantasy setting, such as one for my D&D games. I wanted to develop at least one ‘canonical’ human, elven, and dwarven language, each with very different features and principles.
The human is inspired (among other things) by Austronesian and Polynesian languages; the elvish one by polysynthesis in native North America (albeit with a more traditionally ‘elvish’ phonology); the dwarvish one has a heavy nominal syntax and takes inspiration from Bantu and Australian languages. They are quite incomplete, some more so than others, and I tinker on them whenever I have the time. In due course I might make other ones also. Each is, of course, properly evolved from an ancestor, but as the conworld is my D&D setting, that information is so far implicit. The Dwarvish language is currently the best developed and has the best and most material, so far; the Human language is very incomplete, while the Elvish is very old and in that sense relatively ‘naive’, dating from when I was first beginning with conlanging. I nonetheless present the Dwarvish and the Elvish here and will update them as I work on them. The files for the Human language will follow when I have more material to present.
Of course, part of the exercise is also to teach myself the relevant markup and technical writing skills using these conlangs as a template. Since the originals are ODT files made in LibreOffice rather casually and laid out according to my own whims, and the grammar explanation is primarily aimed at people with some knowledge of linguistics and conlangs (such as myself…), I have had much to improve regarding the presentation, and that continues to be so. I used Pandoc to convert the files to a rough RST format and then manually edited them for further clarity, although I would like to find a better presentation for the vocabulary. On my Github repository for my conlangs you may also find other versions of the same files for practicing other writing tools, e.g. Markdown. The most up to date version will always be the one present here and published through Read the Docs, however. Over time, I will probably add more files, for example on the proto-languages, as I find time to do the editing. Any comments are welcome!
Grammar File Overview:
