Okay, so I am riffing off of a few things – Inspector Caracal mentioning changing an extant conlang to a syllabary, part of the Extra Credits History on the written language, a few ideas that popped into my head while in a meeting.
This is a new language and doesn’t have a world yet, oops.
The idea is: There are a list of words which are “base” words, one sound, one syllable, and THOSE words make up the base characters.
And from there, other words use those characters and those syllables.
Me/I – yi
(this i is an ih sound as in it)
You – fi
Them – Ji
Food – ni
Fire – ri
Shelter – vil
Fuel – wil
Baby – zi
Child – ziz
Mother – li
Sire – fij
Sex/intercourse – jij
OAts – – rin
Wheat – win
Corn – zin
Seed crop – vin
Root food – fiff
===
Verbs
Want lof
Need fo
Death no
Hunt ro
Cook won (woah-n)
Pick/Gather – lon
Carry – von
Eat – non
Nurse – thon
Have sex – joj
-oa To do the verb (nonoa – She ate the food)
-oo – to have done to (nonoo – She was eaten by the tiger)
-en to do as a collaborate (nonen – they ate dinner)
-ya – verb with no actor (nonya – eating )
This doesn’t allow for tense or plurals or conjugation yet! One slow step at a time.
Plus, I have a handful of nouns and verbs but no descriptors yet, and I really want at least 50 syllables.
But it’s a start.
Also, I’m starting this set of syllables from as simple as a I can – just beyond hunter-gatherer.
I know I’m probably missing words – I wrote that list in the middle of a meeting.
Thoughts?
re: vil, ziz etc.
Well now I’m curious/intrigued. My only experience with real-world syllabaries is Japanese, so I don’t know if this is a specific-to-Japanese thing or a syllabary thing in general, but none of the Japanese syllables have two consonants in them like that so it never occurred to me as a thing. I need to do more research!
Neat! I didn’t know ANYTHING about them, so I didn’t even call it a syllabary… but I was thinking of those one-vowel Dr. Who aliens
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It’s not clear whether you’re calling the language or the writing system a syllabary.
A syllabary is a type of writing system, in which each character represents a syllable rather than a word, a phoneme, or a concept.
None of your base syllables have call consonants in a row. That’s a perfectly reasonable constraint in a human language.
Is “oo” pronounced as in “fool”?
I am calling the writing system a syllabary but I am basing the language around wanting to write it as a syllabary.
I did know the definition of the word before I used it, yes.
“oo” as in “food.”