Ghoster's Conlangerium

[Ghoster]

Ok, guys, what I've got for you today is a prayer in my conlang called Padmaran. I've been working on it for a hell lotta time now and I can finally say I'm satisfied with the effects.



And now let's break it down a little bit:


"1. Munti qudilei ĉei teaimani safanija, duni qatcei naŝmuri mea ĉei muhanurei,"
[mʊ̝nti qʊ̝diʎi ʕ̝ʲɪ θʲæjmani safaniʓa̝, dʊ̝ni qatkʲi naʆmʊ̝ri mʲæ ʕ̝ʲɪ mʊ̝hanʊ̝rʲi]
{creatorACC justACC and mercifulACC gloryERG, heACC allACC touchedACC for and beyondACC}
1. In the glory of just and merciful Creator of all touchable and the beyond!


"2. Agẑalein zi aŝqatuci najrubis dimma aŝrasnêa zi mun sagadeilu pul caraxeudean meutjiẑan tafein,"
[agzˤɑʎin zi aʆqatʊ̝ki naʓɾʊ̝bis dimːa aʆɾasʲnʲæ zi mʊ̝n sagaðʲilʊ̝ pʊ̝l caraħʲɵðʲæn mʲʉ̠tʓizˤʌ̟n tafʲin]
{endow1PL youACC consiousnessACC giftINS, in-order-to protectINF youACC fallingPRE from sinfulACC hellPL-ACC into}
2. We endow you with the gift of consiousness to protect you from falling into the sinfull hells,


"3. Antabin zi ĉaneamas arnan dimma aŝdamea camasagei qapba,"
[antabin zi ʕ̝anʲæmas aɾnan dimːa aʆdamʲa kamasaʝi qapba]
{bless1PL you2SG-ACC sightESS our in-order-to beholdINF dailinessACC miracleABS}
3. We bless you with our sight to behold the miracle of the dailiness,


"4. Atmalin zi rafei dei nalan, afvaŝniceun ma‘at ĉei murataĵa ameilli ĉei meilali Aseir̂i pul,"
[atmalin zi rafʲi ðʲi nalan, afvaʆnikʲʉ̠n maʔat ʕ̝ʲɪ mʊ̝rataʝˤʌ̟ amʲilːi ʕ̝ʲɪ mʲilali asʲiɽˤʲi pʊ̝l]
{conduct1PL youACC pathACC to thoseACC seeking3PL truthABS and forvivenessABS oneACC and onlyACC godACC from}
4. We conduct you to the path of those, who seek the truth and forgiveness from the one and only God,


"5. Asxêafin zi dimma cameama ĉei pealaẑa, dimma sacama Qura raqaŝa zi ĉei Ama cadeaha zi,"
[asʲħʲæfin zi dimːa camʲæma ʕ̝ʲɪ pʲælazˤʌ̟, dimːa sakama qʊ̝ra raqaʆa zi ʕ̝ʲɪ ama caðʲaha zi]
{bid1PL youACC in-order-to listenINF and askINF, in-order-to letINF fireERG cleanseINF youACC and waterERG reshapeINF youACC}
5. We bid you to listen and ask, to let the Fire cleanse you and the Water reshape you,


"6. Munti catla maraẑi ĉei catla daña‘ei safanija, duni qatcei naŝmuri mea ĉei muhanurei."
[mʊ̝nti katla marazˤɪ ʕ̝ʲɪ katla daɲaʔʲi safaniʓa̝, dʊ̝ni qatkʲi naʆmʊ̝ri mʲæ ʕ̝ʲɪ mʊ̝hanʊ̝rʲi]
{creatorACC always thriveINF and always evolveINF gloryERG, heACC allACC touchedACC for and beyondACC}
6. In the glory of always thriving and always evolving Creator of all touchable and the beyond!

[elemtilas]

Ok, guys, what I've got for you today is a prayer in my conlang called Padmaran. I've been working on it for a hell lotta time now and I can finally say I'm satisfied with the effects.

Spoiler:

And now let's break it down a little bit:


"1. Munti qudilei ĉei teaimani safanija, duni qatcei naŝmuri mea ĉei muhanurei,"
[mʊ̝nti qʊ̝diʎi ʕ̝ʲɪ θʲæjmani safaniʓa̝, dʊ̝ni qatkʲi naʆmʊ̝ri mʲæ ʕ̝ʲɪ mʊ̝hanʊ̝rʲi]
{creatorACC justACC and mercifulACC gloryERG, heACC allACC touchedACC for and beyondACC}
1. In the glory of just and merciful Creator of all touchable and the beyond!


"2. Agẑalein zi aŝqatuci najrubis dimma aŝrasnêa zi mun sagadeilu pul caraxeudean meutjiẑan tafein,"
[agzˤɑʎin zi aʆqatʊ̝ki naʓɾʊ̝bis dimːa aʆɾasʲnʲæ zi mʊ̝n sagaðʲilʊ̝ pʊ̝l caraħʲɵðʲæn mʲʉ̠tʓizˤʌ̟n tafʲin]
{endow1PL youACC consiousnessACC giftINS, in-order-to protectINF youACC fallingPRE from sinfulACC hellPL-ACC into}
2. We endow you with the gift of consiousness to protect you from falling into the sinful hells,

Padmarańczycy mocno wierzą w to, że ludzka świadomość i możliwość jej pielęgnacji i rozwoju została im dana po to, by uchronić ich od popełniania zła w świecie.


"3. Antabin zi ĉaneamas arnan dimma aŝdamea camasagei qapba,"
[antabin zi ʕ̝anʲæmas aɾnan dimːa aʆdamʲa kamasaʝi qapba]
{bless1PL you2SG-ACC sightESS our in-order-to beholdINF dailinessACC miracleABS}
3. We bless you with our sight to behold the miracle of the dailiness,


"4. Atmalin zi rafei dei nalan, afvaŝniceun ma‘at ĉei murataĵa ameilli ĉei meilali Aseir̂i pul,"
[atmalin zi rafʲi ðʲi nalan, afvaʆnikʲʉ̠n maʔat ʕ̝ʲɪ mʊ̝rataʝˤʌ̟ amʲilːi ʕ̝ʲɪ mʲilali asʲiɽˤʲi pʊ̝l]
{conduct1PL youACC pathACC to thoseACC seeking3PL truthABS and forvivenessABS oneACC and onlyACC godACC from}
4. We conduct you to the path of those, who seek the truth and forgiveness from the one and only God,

Jedność stwórcy symbolizuje łączność jego poszczególnych elementów, a jedyność jego ostateczną naturę łączącą te wszystkie elementy we wspólną rzeczywistość.


"5. Asxêafin zi dimma cameama ĉei pealaẑa, dimma sacama Qura raqaŝa zi ĉei Ama cadeaha zi,"
[asʲħʲæfin zi dimːa camʲæma ʕ̝ʲɪ pʲælazˤʌ̟, dimːa sakama qʊ̝ra raqaʆa zi ʕ̝ʲɪ ama caðʲaha zi]
{bid1PL youACC in-order-to listenINF and askINF, in-order-to letINF fireERG cleanseINF youACC and waterERG reshapeINF youACC}
5. We bid you to listen and ask, to let the Fire cleanse you and the Water reshape you,

Tutaj zawarty jest koncept śmierci i odrodzenia, począwszy od reinkarnacji do kolejnych żywotów aż po wagę porzucenia starych obyczajów oraz przyzwyczajeń i pozwoleniu im umrzeć by mogły być zastąpione przez lepsze elementy charakteru.


"6. Munti catla maraẑi ĉei catla daña‘ei safanija, duni qatcei naŝmuri mea ĉei muhanurei."
[mʊ̝nti katla marazˤɪ ʕ̝ʲɪ katla daɲaʔʲi safaniʓa̝, dʊ̝ni qatkʲi naʆmʊ̝ri mʲæ ʕ̝ʲɪ mʊ̝hanʊ̝rʲi]
{creatorACC always thriveINF and always evolveINF gloryERG, heACC allACC touchedACC for and beyondACC}
6. In the glory of always thriving and always evolving Creator of all touchable and the beyond!

Nicenice script!

Please also tell us about the culture behind this and perhaps something about the religion and what significance this prayer has!

[Porphyrogenitos]

Wow, great work! I really like the decorative boxes to the side; they very much remind me of the kinds of symbols used in calligraphic representations of Quranic passages. What's the meaning of the symbols in the boxes?

[gestaltist]

I want to know more about this script and this world. Great work.

[qwed117]

Wow, great work! I really like the decorative boxes to the side; they very much remind me of the kinds of symbols used in calligraphic representations of Quranic passages. What's the meaning of the symbols in the boxes?

I think it's the line number of the passage; I could be wrong however

[Ghoster]

Well, the script was probably the most satisfying element to make about this conlang. Basically it's an absolute abjad, which means that vowels are not marked at all (or there's a marker of "a vowel" at the beginning of a word, but because this conlang has a phonemic glottal stop, it could be analysed as having just two different letters for it), but major words (which means verbs, nouns, names and such) have so called "tails", on which there are provided hieroglyphic information about the word to make it easier to read them. Tails convay information about the quantity of nouns, whether a word is a name (word "god" as well as all different names and words describing him have a different one, which is also never marked for quantity), verbs are marked by active and stative symbols based on the few conjugations that they use.

Culturally it is opening revealed by god, practiced always before morning prayer and evening meditation. Its purpose is to remind Padmarans about being immersed in the presence of the one and only god (which isn't absolutely transcendent being, as it is defined as everything that exists, which is also undistonectable from the man, so he dwells in everything surrounding him as well).

And yes, the boxes show passages of the prayer.

[lsd]

nice writing... very homogeneous... totally believable...
Congratulation !

[CMunk]

Beautiful script!

[...] major words (which means verbs, nouns, names and such) have so called "tails", on which there are provided hieroglyphic information about the word to make it more easy to read them. Tails convay information about the quantity of nouns, whether a word is a name (word "god" as well as all different names and words describing him have a different one, which is also never marked for quantity), verbs are marked by active and stative symbols based on the few conjugations that they use.

Some of the hieroglyphs above and below the tails look a bit like your numerals. Are they related? Are some declensions associated with a number?

[Ghoster]

Very nicely spotted! The thing is a little bit more complicated than that. Basically the glyph under the tail tells how much of the noun there is and in case of singular and dual if it's masculine or feminine. There's also plural, singulative and nullar number (used in expressing things like "I have no dogs", literally "I have dogs(nl.)").
It's not exactly that some of the glyphs on the tails come from the numbers, as much as some of the numbers as well as glyphs come from the letters themselves. For example number "5" is expressed by a small letter "s" (coming from "Sur" 'five'), but the same glyph placed upon the tails indicates static verbs (from padmaran "Saliĉan" 'words of calmness'), so the whole script is tightly correlated with the first notion of recognizing letters for different consonants to reuse them thereafter to indicate numbers and additional information about the words. System is, I would say, quite naturalistic (as much as a conlang can be), because it certainly has flaws and doesn't distinguish some features in the written form, but they can pretty much always be extracted from the context, that is if (hypothetical) one knows the language itself. And answering your question about declensions - they're the weakest part of the script, because this language has nine different cases from which in all numbers except nullar five of them are spelled the same way, so there's no telling which case they should be read in, because these are vowel-only differences. Kind of the same rules apply to the personal pronouns, but with those, as they're not marked by the tails, it's even worse as they cannot be marked for gender (but, on the other hand, their forms merged into just three distinguishable case-forms).

Also thank you all by kind words. Maybe I'll turn this thread into an overall-conlang thread as all of the conlangs I'm making are kind of in the same world with three (about to be four) major conlangs interacting with each other. All of them have totally different scripts and different belief-systems as well, so they might interest some of you as well. Basically two other scripts are ready. One is completed, with the other one I'm still doing little tweaks on the style and font, and the last script is still under construction. Actually I might want to share those with you.

Shangri:

This, on the other hand, is an abugida marking all vowels except the default "a" as letters and absent thereof by a circle. Long vowels and stress is marked as diacritics above letters. The Shangri society is probably more polytheistic or even animalistic in terms of their religion, which could also be seen as purely a philosophy rather than faith-based system.

Imfursa:

This, on the other hand, is a fully alphabetical script and all the letters and how it functions is basically finished, but I'm still trying to make it into some recognizable style that I would enjoy to work on. Letters are also highly ligaturical (is it even a word?), their connections spread across vowels (this is the main visual difference between vowels and consonants - the latter ones go beyond the middle line of the script) and make sometimes insane ligatures. From practical reasons only some of them are respectively used in written form (unless someone is very well trained in the art of writing or can predict the latter letters in the words) and calligraphy is highly based on those ligatures. I might even plan to make a poem consisting of long lines of words with a continuous ligature running through all of them, but for that you'll have to wait quite a time, I guess. As for the culture they're also believing in one god and their religion is loosely correlated with that of Padmarans.

Toraia:

And the last script which, along with the language and culture, is highly pre-alpha and certainly there'll be a lot of work done to make it look better. Script is, of course, logographic and probably will be written some different direction (most likely bottom-down, but I'm kind of leaning towards right-left).

To be honest the last one is a great excuse to make a mixed script, kind of japanese-inspired, in which the logographic symbols will represent words and a different script (most likely Padmaran) will be used phonetically for providing agglutinative pre- and sufixes. So, yes, a mixture of ideographic script (because, in comparison to Chinese, there are no phonetical elements in the basic script) with an absolute abjad (talking about a script hard to learn). As a test I've made such mixture of Chinese and Arabic to see if the idea would be interesting and I think it actually would.

[eldin raigmore]

.... (other highly interesting things snup) ....
To be honest the last one is a great excuse to make a mixed script, kind of japanese-inspired, in which the logographic symbols will represent words and a different script (most likely Padmaran) will be used phonetically for providing agglutinative pre- and sufixes. So, yes, a mixture of ideographic script (because, in comparison to Chinese, there are no phonetical elements in the basic script) with an absolute abjad (talking about a script hard to learn). As a test I've made such mixture of Chinese and Arabic to see if the idea would be interesting and I think it actually would.

I find this fascinating!

[Ghoster]

So I've been kind of working on the last concept lately. It's all ideographic. I'm finding it very hard to connect the style of this script (with all its boxy nature) with the abjad above (being written in a horizontal line). I guess I'll have to goof around with their written form and work it out from the brush perspective in order to unify the scripts' styles.


Also I've managed to (almost) finish the Imfursa script. What do you guys think about it?

[WeepingElf]

Your scripts are GORGEOUS!!!! Imfursa looks like a bastard of Voynich Manuscript and Burmese. The Arabo-Chinese mix has grown to a unified whole. I like those scripts very much. My own Old Albic alphabet is nothing compared to yours.

[Vlürch]

Wow. I don't think I've ever seen conscripts that look this cool and professional! They look like real writing systems used to write actual languages.

Is Shangri intentionally meant to look like a mixture of Hebrew and Tibetan? Because if I'll be entirely honest, to me as someone who can't read either script it simply looks like Hebrew with Tibetan diacritics; even if that was exactly what it is, though, it's still really cool-looking and guaranteed to be realistic even if its origin may be difficult to explain unless your conpeople are Jews living in Tibet or something. Then again, it's not like there has to be a reason for why a people would use a certain writing system other than that they like it and as such started using it, so don't take that as criticism.

Toraia look like an interesting combination of Chinese, Tangut, Vai and Linear A.

I agree with WeepingElf on Imfursa, but have to add that there's something Tamilesque about it.

[Ghoster]

Imfursa looks like a bastard of Voynich Manuscript and Burmese.

To be honest I never had any contact with Burmese (I could see it somewhere looking for other scripts), but Imfursa has indeed elements inspired by the Voynich's most recognizable ligature. It's a couple of letters that make ligatures that are somewhat alike to those found in the manuscript, namely and their mutual combinations (although it's much more advanced than in Voynich. If I recall, there aren't that many of those, while in Imfursa there are seven letters that are beginning and ending the ligature and nine other ones, which can be put inside of those).

They look like real writing systems used to write actual languages.

Well, I really want to make as naturalistic linguistic background to my universe as possible, therefore the languages spoken there try to mimic some patterns from the existing languages, but I'm always striving to not make them rip-offs, so in all of those scripts there's probably not more than two, three letters actually looking like those of the scripts that they were inspired by (preferably none, but in most cases there's at least 1, because style of the script sometimes just demands some shapes that would be, let's say, "obvious to come up with with a given customization").

Is Shangri intentionally meant to look like a mixture of Hebrew and Tibetan? Because if I'll be entirely honest, to me as someone who can't read either script it simply looks like Hebrew with Tibetan diacritics

Well, in the beginning it wasn't exactly a part of my plan, as I began just by creating a script being able to be squished into two horizontal lines with occasional lines dipping below those basic constrains (which, by the way, is also a characteristic of both Hebrew and Tibetan). But as the Shangri language got more complicated with phonetics (meaning: acquired long vowels, variable stress and mixing it with all with proper liaison), I needed to expand the abugida with diacritics, which, well, turned to be very Tibetan-like (although this part was kind of genuinely inspired by Tibetan, I still struggle with making in little less obvious, but the script looks already quite naturalistic and I wouldn't like to loose that feeling). Present Shangri looks more like this:

Because if I'll be entirely honest, to me as someone who can't read either script it simply looks like Hebrew with Tibetan diacritics; even if that was exactly what it is, though, it's still really cool-looking and guaranteed to be realistic even if its origin may be difficult to explain unless your conpeople are Jews living in Tibet or something.

Well, the conworld in which they exist is mostly a priori (not explaining anything about the similarities with the real world, but also not expanding on those more than necessary).

I agree with WeepingElf on Imfursa, but have to add that there's something Tamilesque about it.

That I wouldn't expect, although it's nice to hear. Also thank you for kind words. There'll be more updates.

Actually if any of you have any more questions, I would gladly respond. Most of those scripts are still in the process of creation (except Padmaran, which is pretty fixed now, even though lately I've played a little bit with the placement of the letters making them much more smooth. The effect I've got really satisfied me when I found out, that the name of one of the dialects "Saŝmaran Attêisbi" is written as , the last letter of the name connects pretty well with the tail of the word.

[Thrice Xandvii]

Beautiful stuff!

I'd like to see some samples in slightly larger size so that I can peep some of the details in the various scripts.