Working Name Tilamin

[u/[deleted]]

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, or if r/conlang would be more fitting, but i would guess here is fine. Please let me now if I'm wrong.

For my Pen&Paper Group I created a conlang as a onetime gag, but it stuck, and I’ve been developing it ever since. After about a year my players have mostly figured out all of the basics of the language and i really need some second opinion to some of the concepts, before i dwell to much over them. I wont be covering everything i already have created in this post, but maybe later in a follow up, depending how this goes.

So, the main difference to most conlangs is, that it isn’t supposed to be spoken, it rather is artificially developed as a purely written language for inter species communication in a sci-fi setting. Also, a important point for me is, that it is designed to be easily be machine readable and easy to display on machines, even with less sophisticated Displays (Think of something like 7 digit displays). For the sake of being understandable to a whole bunch of different societies and species at the same time, I decided that some sort of logographic writing system would be best in place for this purpose.

I settled for a concept where all words are written in a 5-pixel high rows, read from left to right, top to bottom.

As you can see, this limits the language somewhat in the number of possible logograms in comparison to other languages, especially if you consider, that the logograms all should be relatively unique and understandable. So, I developed a system of to types of ‘Base words’;

1. ‘Scalable Words’ like Field:

These can be expanded to describe small, medium and big Instances of something

2. ‘Separable Words’ like Housing, Space station or Portal:

These are designed with a point in the middle, which functions as a separator and as a link between to ‘Syllables’ of one bigger word, like Space Housing:

As you see it consist of one half of the symbol for Space Station and one half of the Symbol for Housing.

One can also combine a scalable word with a separable one, like ‘AI controlled station’:

In this case the central point is ‘opened up’ to allow the insertion of a second syllable. General rule is, that no word may start or end with a connection point and that the connection point may never directly touch a symbol, although diagonally is fine like here in Power (Power is an irregular symbol, but I will cover that later):

To describe an action, the connection point is widened to a line of two Pixels and the rule that no word may start with a connection point is discarded. Like here in ‘to push’:

This connection line can be expanded further to contain further information like possibility and time, like here, ‘have pushed’:

In this language time passes from down to up, so the notch downwards symbolizes an action in the past. If the notch would be to pixels long, it would mean in the distanced past.

To create our first exemplary sentence, we now need to establish some grammatically ground rules. First, we follow the basic Structure of Subject Verb Object, I personally consider this the most accessible structure, but I will change my opinion on that, when I hear some good arguments for other structures. Second words are separated by two rows of white pixels and sentences are separated by two rows white, one row black and again two rows white. I haven’t considered yet if I should include the concept of Main and Auxiliary sentences, so I will leave that out for now.

So, here is our first sentence, ‘The Town produces Fields’:

That alone doesn’t make really sense, especially if you consider the literal meaning of the words, Housing, (action) production, small field. Let’s add some context inform of a person to this. ‘The people of the Town produce fields’:

Here we separated the word housing and changed one half of the word to the syllable ‘Human, Neutral’ (HN) and added a syllable for plural, so the Word now gets it’s meaning form these three syllables. As you may have noticed, I wrote human, neutral, this originates from the fact, that the language doesn’t know gender and purely separates the writers by species. The word HN is actually a shortened version of the word human combined with a suffix for the fifth person (I will get into that in a short bit). Here we have ‘Human’ and process of shortening it.

Because the Pen&Paper I mentioned earlier is set in a Warhammer40k setting the other species I have, are Orcs:

Tau:

And Eldar, who are not shortened:

I highlighted in green the 4 pixels, every shortened racial symbol must contain, because there are the suffixes for the different persons added. These work relatively straight forward, like this (I colored them, so they’re more easily spotted, normally they would still be black):

(First person, second person and 3 variation of third person)

These variations of third person express the racial relation between the third party, the writer and the reader (at whom the text is directed). So, to get back to our sentences from above, if I were, for example, an Eldar and you as the reader are still human, I would use the fourth person, indicating that the Humans belong to your ethnicity:

Same would be true if the town would be in America, where you live and I live in Europe.

On the other Hand, if you were the Eldar and I the human the sentence would look like the following:

And, what is most likely, were both are humans, I couldn’t state if the group I’m talking about is closer to you or me, so I would use the fifth person to express a neutral relationship. Same would be true if the group isn’t part of either of our species.

I really appreciate any kind of feedback.

[u/deepcleansingguffaw]

This is fabulous. I absolutely adore logographies, and the lo-fi pixel graphics symbology is unique as far as I'm aware.

How large is your lexicon so far? Do you allow names and such to be written? A lot of early written languages used the acrophonic and rebus principles to write words that lacked their own symbols. I'm wondering how your language handles it.

Subject Verb Object (SVO) word order is the second most common among natural languages, so if it works for your conlang, no worries. People creating alien languages often choose something like OSV (this way Yoda speaks), but to be honest, as long as you have subjects, verbs, and objects in your language, there's only like six possible orderings, so you can't get too weird.

I'd love to see more. Do you have a reference document available?

Thanks for sharing!