The Dailies. August 11, 2025
Did you work on your language today? Create any new rules of grammar or syntax? New progress on a script? New words in your lexicon?
On the other hand, do any excavating or reading or enjoying stuff you’ve already created? Do you have any favorites to share?
How did you conlang today?
4 thoughts on “The Dailies. August 11, 2025”
So idk what came over me, but I decided to jump back into conlanging by working on, naturally… Jafren, the ‘musical’ loglang of the mountain-folk. I could have just coined a couple words for Firen, the perfectly normal, human language, or even Sajem Tan, Xanz, or Dab Vi Suxi Kidap, but no, I had to choose my hardest language. On a day when I have a migraine. Well, anyway, here goes.
I decided to select chords for the remaining grammatical elements, in particular, cases, so that I could start actually making sentences with some level of confidence, only to discover that I just never wrote down how exactly these 19+1 noun cases were meant to be used. When I described them on here before, I just said “There are about 20 cases for everything else, but there are no cases for morphosyntactic alignment”, and all I wrote in my notes were one or two words each for just 13 of the 19 marked cases (I translated the notation in my notes to standard abc notation note names, read up here to learn more about it):
And sure, I can probably figure out how the vocative is used, but how am I supposed to use the semblative or aversive cases in a sentence? What exactly is the semantic distinction between locative, inessive, and intrative? Ablative and elative? I guess I just have to reconstruct all that now. (Also, I renamed the perfect to the retrospective for some reason, which was confusing. And changed temporal from D to [c’A] in only one of the two spots it was listed in my glossary. At least, I think that’s the direction that change went.)
Also, since this language is meant to be grammatically unambiguous, it really makes more sense for cases to be prefixes rather than suffixes, since every lexical word starts with a 3 (or 4?) -note chord, and the cases are 1- and 2-note chords. Also, there’s no need for rests between any of the sentence-initial particles or before the verb, as they are also all 1- and 2-note chords.
Anyway, back to my original task, I’ve coined the remaining cases. They do loosely keep to themes, where related cases have similar notes. In particular, all the locational cases start with a d, which then goes up or down and is joined by another voice for the cases which describe motion, and that other voice is in the low hexad (octave) for leaving, and the high hexad for going. (The italicized ones are old, and included for convenience).
The other themes I used are that E means “no”, hence the dissemblative case being the semblative case plus E, and I grouped instrumental, comitative, benefactive, and aversive together as relating to objects which acted on the agents or were acted upon by the agents, all using E, and benefactive and causal together as both relating to the reason an action is done, both using A. I also decided that I liked temporal being the same as locative, but one hexad lower, and changed that back to what it was. Vocative is still just off on its own. In fact I’m not sure I even like it being a case at all. Maybe it should be changed to a different kind of particle.
Still need to reconstruct the semantics of all of these cases, today I’m just doing the words. I think this is already a pretty good amount of work, tbh. Oh, and I also fixed up one or two random things in the WordGen datafile I use for Jafren.
How lovely! Sometimes it’s nice to revisit things. I have a few conlangs I’d love to should it ever be well-timed for me to do so, but I’m writing fiction again, so am trending heavily towards that which is helpful to my writing process rather than for its own sake. We’ll see how long that lasts.
I absolutely remember seeing Sajem Tan on the conlang list!
Jafren is fun. I don’t have a good ear for musical notes, so alas, I’ll never be fluent, but I do love the whole concept of the language and all your cases.
I mean, I’ll definitely never be fluent in it either lol, I not only have no perfect pitch, I even have pretty bad relative pitch tbqh. But music-theoretic concerns are a relatively small part of my design process for the language, as I’m not actually trying to make a musical language, I’m trying to make a music where the phonemes are musical notes, which is a very different thing. Since linguistic representations are fundamentally arbitrary symbols, I can really just go with whatever; choosing the major pentatonic scale over only two octaves (plus the root in a third) and restricting it so that each note can only have up to one voicing (no two As in the same chord f.ex.), and limiting chords to triads, has already made it so that there’s not going to be any real issues no matter what chords I choose. In fact, that’s kind of why major pentatonic isn’t really used much in contemporary western music; it’s so consistently consonant that it lacks intrigue.
I don’t think I ever actually wrote down exactly what all of my design requirements were when I chose 12EDO major pentatonic, but I remember (vaguely; this is like 8 years ago now) I did some theoretical analysis of the specific properties I wanted it to have, definitely including at least wanting the intervals to be consistent sizes and avoid any ambiguities when stacking intervals, and after a while of thinking about it, realized that actually 12EDO was the only tuning system which fulfilled the requirements I had set, because I’d accidentally baked something unique to it into the system. I was actually kind of trying to avoid using 12EDO initially, because it just felt too boring for what is meant to be a very alien language, compared to like 19EDO, but I thought about the constraints in the wrong order for that to work out and didn’t consider it important enough to give up the nice things about it. I might’ve been able to work out a workable tuning system that wasn’t EDO at all, but I don’t think I considered anything but Pythagorean tuning, which had problems (though I don’t recall specifics now). I didn’t, and still don’t for that matter, know enough about tuning theory to construct my own novel system.
Well, at least in-setting, the humans probably haven’t invented equal temperament themselves so for them it won’t feel so familiar, so there’s that.
It sounds wonderful! You are also waaaay more conversant with musical theory than I am. But I feel like even what I can grasp of it sounds ideal from a conlanging perspective.