I wanted to construct a language that allowed me to play to my strengths, and from which I could work on my weak points--I felt confident in creating and evolving a written script that would be aesthetically pleasing while also being feasible to write with authentic tools. However, With little formal linguistics training, creating a unique grammar without an Indo-European bias is a difficult process for me.
Tade Taadži is the representative conlang of an ongoing worldbuilding project, focusing on a culture that arises from dispossessed peoples transported to an isolated archipelago. This article will provide a brief historical context for the language, describe its grammar, and its logo-phonetic writing system.
[Setting history is briefly described to provide sociolinguistic context.]
An Earth-like planet with near-zero axial tilt. This creates more extreme temperature gradients, and stronger mid-ocean currents. To simplify the conlang creation process, this planet features two major humanoid species.
[atlas map, with colonizer and Taadži territory marked.]
Geographic isolation kept these species largely separated from each other. [[The smaller, gregarious species that occupied the larger territory gave rise to an imperialist culture which colonized large portions of the main continents.]] [[After learning of a navigable passage through the treacherous waters near the mountains,]] [[they came in contact with the ancestors of the Taadži.]] [[This species was larger (avg 2.3-2.4m), hairless, thicker-skinned and possessing high levels of billirubin in their blood as an anti-parasitic defense mechanism. While seemingly primitive to the [colonizers] due to their lack of metalworking technology, these peoples had well-developed literary traditions, [], and some possessed a far more advanced understanding of medical theory and technique. Many worshiped celestial bodies as their mythic ancestors, leading to their eventual name: Taadžipanu, or Children of the Sun and Moon.]]
[While initially welcoming to the newcomers and establishing trade, the Taadži cultures eventually began to push back against colonial projects within their homeland, and the kidnapping of their people. The [] responded with overwhelming force, with captured Taadži transported in slave ships to an isolated colonial project on a mid-oceanic archipelago.]
[Enslaved Taadži were not permitted to write, and deliberately divided into groups that limited same-culture contact. These measures were intended to limit their capability to organize and rebel, leading to the creation of a pidgin and the loss of writing technology.]
[When the colony proved to be singularly unprofitable, the [] left the archipelago, leaving the Taadži behind on the most isolated land mass on the planet.]
[[Map of the archipelago with glyphs to represent major language groups]]
[While the creole language of the Taadži peoples developed into multiple branches as they slowly radiated to new foraging and fishing grounds, this project currently focuses on one dialect, Tade Taadži.]
Basic word order is SOV, with OVS subordinate clauses. Nominative-Accusative alignment, posessee is marked rather than possessor. Adjectives and descriptive clauses precede the noun they modify. Postpositions are used. Base 6 number system.
(C){V,N,W}(C), with N = m, n and \textipa{N}, and W = j, \textltilde, and w.
Geminate consonants, long vowels, and nasal vowels are contrastive versus their basic counterparts.
plosives can't be next to each other.
ts/dž can't follow plosives or sibilants except t/d \textipa{N} can't follow plosives, sibilants or rhotics rhotics can't follow labial(ized) or glottal plosivesStress defaults to the first non-affix syllable.
If there are one or more long vowels in a non-final position, the stress falls on the first long vowel. (ex. ) If there are geminate consonants, the non-ultimate syllable following the long consonant or incorporating it as its onset takes the stress, unless it is an affricate or fricative.Grammatical cases are Nominative, Accusative, Possessed, Allative, Instrumental, and Vocative. Adjectives and adverbs agree with the case of the noun they modify.
Nominative marks the actor for both transitive and intransitive verbs.
Accusative marks the patient of transitive verbs.
Possessed marks an object possessed by something (his book, the person's word), an origin (people from the islands), and apposition (my sister, a healer). Possessed nouns come before the noun they modify, and can be compound-forming, though the case marker may be dropped depending on sound similarity. The word order of noun adjuncts also follows this pattern (ex. "face mask" would be literally rendered "mask (of the) face").
Allative marks motion toward (I went to the house), direction (I went north), and also marks indirect objects of most verbs (I gave the stone to her). The Allative comes after the Nominative and Accusative.
Instrumental acts as the agent of passive voice construction (I was hit by the stick), and to indicate location (I work in the field), time (I work today), participation in an action (she benefited from her mother's love), substance of composition (a wheel of cheese), source (a portion of food), and comitative statements (I went in the company of Steve). Instrumental nouns follow the noun they modify.
Vocative identifies an addressee, and is the default case for referring to the gods.
[no strong distinction between adjectives and adverbs.]
[gender system, how it overlaps with the noun class system by chance]
[Gender is somewhat of a misnomer for Taadži self-identification, as the gender system is not strongly correlated with secondary sex characteristics. It can be more broadly be conceived of as a set of self-identified social and religious roles, sometimes mapped onto a scale of most to least feminine. One's gender is declared by a given Taadži during their coming of age ceremony. Due to this tradition and local differences in how gender is marked in a person's dress or behavior, it is considered polite to refer to children and strangers by impersonal pronouns. Some groups may extend this to a general system of formality, with gendered pronouns only featuring in casual speech.]
[These difficulties in translation mean that the table below is a very rough approximation of how one might express these categories in English:]
[[table of pronouns]]
[verbs, describe tenses, moods, and person marking]
[number system and declension]
The Lanje Taadži writing system is logo-syllabic, with a present inventory of ~325 glyphs.
Within the fiction of the setting, this writing system arose relatively quickly after the loss of writing technology, but is completely isolated from previous scripts.
In formal texts, glyphs are square and have self-containing outlines. Handwritten text is often more rounded, and some scribal traditions are developing open glyphs.
Glyphs encode for multi-syllabic words, and compound words may sometimes rendered as a single glyph.
When a word features accompanying grammatical information, it is written in a reduced form and shares the glyph block with these grammatical elements. Nominative nouns are unmarked, as are stative and infinitive verbs.
Some grammatical elements have combining forms, especially pluralization.
Most Taadži cultures consider the ideal proportions of a text to be a block of 6x6 glyphs. Informal texts may be of variable line length, but a formal text will attempt to fill a full 6x6 block as naturally as possible.
Texts may include some amount of ligature between glyph blocks. These ligatures are read once for every block that they cross. Ligatures joining noun phrases may be commonly seen in informal texts.
Formal texts will commonly feature cross-row ligatures of repeated glyphs or grammatical elements. The value of the glyph is read every time the reader encounters it as they progress through the text.
Rotation of glyphs and use of decorative ligatures is occasionally used, usually to link thematically similar elements. These do not change the reading of the text. Rotation is usually not employed for verbs, and some rotations are not allowed for pronouns or person markers.
For foreign words and concepts that are difficult to visually express, phonograms are constructed from pre-existing glyphs. Due to the syllable structure of Tade Taadži, these phonograms are often not 1-to-1 matches. Phoneme length and consonant value are somewhat flexible in phonographic use. This syllable structure also precludes Tade Taadži from transitioning to a more phonetic system in the foreseeable future, unless an abjad or alphabet is adopted by the speakers of a Taadži language.
When transcribing a foreign word or phonogram, determinative glyphs may be included by the writer to provide context. This determinative is usually not pronounced.
The practice of marking foreign words is most common in [region with most accessible terrain,] as speakers in this region are more likely to use a standardized written dialect. Phonogram-marking is more common in [region with most inaccessible terrain,] due to more extreme sound changes which have arisen in this area.