Seeing as this blog began very in medias res, what follows is a brief description of my conlangs and their current states, both in external and internal history.
Despite the fact that my first few posts here are in Calintese, it is actually only the latest of my languages to be fleshed out (despite its syntax slumbering in my head for a number of years). My main conlang is Keševan, on which I’ve worked for over a decade. And though it might seem disappointingly unexotic to other conlangers–very few of the language’s features are particularly un-European–I hold Keševan very close to my heart. It is by far the most developed of my languages, with a vocabulary of over 1700 entries, complete with etymologies and morphological breakdowns.
A taste of Keševan, a translation of the opening lines of Nerval’s Sylvie:
Na arlatsa le karze, eče, amma lumma, na lušissa se ša le kóšgalma katma, sevulta zarme vúlneže burle santákuže. Šangam or čat ota, šangam vag.
(Stress on the penult unless marked, nasalize vowels before nasal consonants, unround unstressed back vowels, and you should be pretty good to go.)
Keševan has a couple sisters sketched out in light detail. They would be spoken in fictional countries adjacent to Keševa. One of the sisters is called Bolnese, the other is still searching for a name and needs to grow into herself.
Keševan and her sisters are descended from an ancient tongue called variously either Old Keševan or Old Kešefan or Rasal (the lattermost is what I’ve come to stick with). In the real world, it grew up simultaneously with its daughter Keševan, perhaps even earlier, but I’ve left it fallow for a very long time. I keep a running tally of words, features, etc. to revamp that I constantly promise I’ll get around to adding to the master document. Rasal and its daughters are all members of a language family sprawling across the northern edge of their continent.
My next major family lies far to the south in more tropical climes. Gapašan is a conscious attempt to break out of standard European linguistic models: Gapašan’s daughters stand out with thorough animacy-based split ergativity and some quite un-English phonologies. It is also a very recent attempt, dating back only a year. Gapašan’s daughters lie in three groups: Northwest Gapašic, which consists only of Irpan, of which I have only a few paragraphs of information; Central Gapašic, which contains Curonese, Agwenese, and Mejaguese; and South-East Gapašic, consisting of Yoronese, Kavan, and one or two other languages. Of this family Mejaguese is the most developed, with a couple hundred words of vocabulary and a grammar sketch. Out of the other Gapašic languages, only Yoronese approaches Mejaguese in its level of development.
A sample of Mejaguese: Ga si-oj ma qagbe čiyag siřu römorre. “The man loves the scholar whose father sits on the council.” q is /q/, j is /ʤ/, and ř /ʀ/.
In addition to these I have some very brief sketches of other non-Gapašic languages of the island of Gapaša. These little languages are effectively my sandboxes to play with whatever linguistic features I’ve recently read about.
Lastly and lately, Calintese, which I envision as belonging to an expansive “Proto-Southern” family growing in parallel with–and often at the expense of–Keševan’s Northern family. Calintese is an ancient language, a contemporary of Rasal, and in-world has a status not unlike Greek or Hebrew. I also imagine a close sister of Calintese under the working title of Meritic, which right now consists of some sound-change laws and a handful of words. Calintese’s modern descendant will be highly Keševized in vocabulary.
That’s how things stand at the moment. Regions to develop include the regions to the west of Keševa, about whose languages I have vague inklings of genetic affiliation but not much else.
Bibliotheca Yalenskaya 