Hello all! This is my blog for conlanging, linguistics, and the like. I'm an amateur linguist and I don't know everything but I like learning about languages and how they work, as well as how they operate. Here's where else you can find me:
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♡ @koishiarts - art blog
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LANGUAGES:
☆ Mewling Family
♡ MEWLING/ELDERMEWLING - Summary / Writing System / Tag
☆ Seraphic Family
♡ COLLECTIVE SERAPHIC - Summary / Writing System / Declensions / Tag
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This probably deserves a far longer response (it probably deserves a book), but I’ll take a stab at it.
This is going to be broken up because it’s so long. I’ll talk about my conlang Yuk-Tepat & its logographs (Tepatic glyphs) but also the real-world logographic writing systems. I’ll get into some specific advice later. Of course, if you (readers) have logographic scripts please add on whatever you can about how yours work & how you made it, in order to make this more comprehensive. Or if you just have something to add / correct.
This goes on. (TLDR Logographs =/= pictures, they don’t represent translinguistic ‘ideas,’ they have a phonetic component that reflects the spoken language, and use semantic signs to disambiguate words. To be continued.)
Logographic systems work quite a bit differently from most ‘phonetic’ writing systems. Your inventory of signs will be much larger than other systems. Think a couple of hundred. Tepatic glyphs ended up with about 200 distinct signs, which is appoximately the number of Chinese radicals.
However, it also works similarly to ‘phonetic’ systems, or more similarly than you might expect. Some of the stuff you need to do will be the same as for any writing system / conlang - for example, consider the writing medium (paper, stone etc.) and tools (brush, etc.) and how they affect your system. Also, know your conlang’s phonology and basic grammatical structure – logographic or not, this will be important (as you’ll see).
First, I would like to talk about what logographs are, and how they work. Since you, Anon, asked the question, I’m guessing you might already know what logographs are, hence you are asking, but in case you don’t, I want to go into what logographs are, because I think many people don’t quite get what they are, and unless they are Chinese (or Japanese), don’t know how they work, and this is going to cause problems in making the script work if they try to make logographs for a conlang. In case you already understand logographs well (or you’re Chinese) you can skip over what I’m writing. Or read it anyway, if you want to hear about how other systems work. I advise you reading up a lot about how other systems work.
Earth has at least four families of logographic writing systems: Egyptian hieroglyphs, Sumerian cuneiform, Chinese characters, and Maya glyphs. They’re all very different, but have some similar principles, and one of them is they have a phonetic component, just like any other script. Also, logographs (also called logograms) are not ideographs or pictographs (‘picture writing’).
Many people think that hieroglyphs or Chinese somehow represent thoughts directly through some kind of picture, bypassing “words” and spoken language, but they don’t. This is no doubt exacerbated by the fact most hieroglyphs undeniably LOOK like ‘things.’ So it’s natural to think that an obvious picture of an owl must represent the idea of an owl, but often it doesn’t. Confusion about this will make you not get how to make your system work especially when expressing something abstract that you can’t draw. Logographic systems are intimately tied to the languages they are used to write. Hence, yours will be tied to your conlang. You should already have a good idea of your conlang. It doesn’t need to be complete (when are they ever?) but you should know the phonology, and some other parts of the grammar may be helpful (is it very inflectional, word order, etc.)
Logographic systems contain signs that can represent whole words (or roots), which may or may not be recognizable ‘pictures.’ They also have phonetic elements (which may also look like pictures). The way the phonetic elements develop is usually by what we call the rebus principle, which means a sign is borrowed to write something else which sounds similar.
I’d like to illustrate this with an example. I wrote the following English sentence in pictures:
If you’re having trouble, try saying the name of each thing depicted. You should get:
eye can knot bear two leaf ewe.
Now try saying it faster and see if you get it.
What I’m trying to say is, “I can not bear to leave you.”
This is something I still didn’t quite get when I started working on Yuk Tepat.
You will note, that none of these little pictures are actually pictures of the concept referred to by the word they are used to spell. They are pictures of the thing whose word sounds like the word for the thing you want to represent, but can’t easily, so you get at it by using something that sounds similarly. (I know that sentence is hard to parse, please read it again.) This example only works because “I” and “eye” sound the same in English.
Now, imagine for a minute that English-speaking America is pretty much the same as in our world but English is written logographically. Nuclear war or something happens and the country gets buried under mounds of ash and dust and dug up hundreds of years later by archaeologists for some human civilization from elsewhere, unrelated to America, and their texts are deciphered. In this future civilization’s version of Youtube, people start making videos explaining their mysterious, cool writing system.
“The ancient American sages represented the word for oneself, I, as a picture of an eye. And if you think about it, the self is a perceiving self; without a subject able to look around and observe an outside, objective world, there is no self, no ‘I.’ The self begins with a perception of the world. This is the profound and mystical wisdom of the long-lost ancient civilization of The United States of America. Every letter hides a profound truth about the world.”
The simple, possibly boring explanation is just that ‘I’ and ‘eye’ sound the same in English, so they could be written the same way. But laugh as you might, there are tons of people online (invariably non-Chinese) making similar fluff about Chinese characters. Beware.
People may think to write ‘be’ logographically you have to think up some cool symbol of the concept of ‘being’ but the likely solution for an English logography would simply be to draw a bee (the insect that makes honey) and have it represents the copula.
I think what a lot of people don’t realize is that it is very common (even usual?) for the word the sign is borrowed for to completely take over that sign, and that a semantic indicator will be added to indicate the ORIGINAL meaning of that sign, or a new character created for it. The sign will completely shift over; it is no longer a picture-drawing of its meaning, even in a highly stylized way.
The typical development often goes:
- A picture is drawn to represent the word for the same thing that the picture represents. This is still pre-writing; you cannot draw a picture of everything you might want to talk about.
- The picture is borrowed to write another word or syllable in the language which cannot be depicted, but which sounds like the word. This is going to be different for each language because each language has different words and different words will be homonyms; hence you cannot separate a logographic script from the spoken language it was made for.
- Some of these signs develop into phonetic signs.
- The system reintroduces ‘pictures’ (or their relics) to clarify the meaning of words which might phonetically be spelled similarly.
This has happened many times in Chinese characters. It is probably the main way Chinese abstract, grammatical words get characters. The character 水 is ‘water,’ from an image of 3 parallel water flows. 永, representing probably a person floating on water, meant ‘swim’ (Old Chinese *ɢʷraŋs). This was then used to write the similar-sounding *ɢʷraŋʔ ‘forever,’ an idea which is hard to depict visually, don’t you think? ‘Forever’ completely took over 永. Then when they wanted to actually depict ‘swim,’ they added three water dots (itself ultimately a form of 水) to the left side to make a new character 泳. This is essentially ‘that ɢʷraŋ-ish sounding word that has to do with water.’
Signs like the three dots are called a radical in Chinese, and the remainder is called the phonetic. Some radicals are extremely common and form a great classificatory system, marking characters containing them as glyphs referring to words for people, animals, birds, plants, liquids, earth, etc. The vast majority of Chinese characters are of this type: composite characters made up of a part indicating roughly the sound, and a part assigning the meaning to some semantic domain.
Similar signs to radicals are found in hieroglyphs and cuneiform, the main difference being that they are called determinatives and they are still written as separate signs rather than being compressed into a single character like Chinese.
(I will note, radicals are basically a lexicographic tool for indexing characters, and not an etymological classification. But the radical usual corresponds to the semantic component of a character.)
If you understand this, you understand one of the key principles behind logographic writing and are ready to proceed.
So, logographic scripts generally have three components:
(1) Logograms (logographs) – signs that represent a word (or root) in the language
(2) Phonograms – signs that indicate sounds
(3) Semantograms / Determinatives – signs that mark
The way this works out in particular scripts varies. Not all of them will have all of the parts. I think Maya doesn’t really have a system of semantic determiners. And it may very well be that these may be functions and a language may use the same sign in each of these functions – but perhaps with a system for indicating when it is working as a logogram, a phonogram, or a taxogram. In Chinese and Maya, signs are generally compressed into a ‘block’ to indicate they are functioning together – as we saw in the Chinese example. In Egyptian, a particular sign may perform any of the functions, but when it is used as a logogram, a small vertical mark is added to it to indicate it is a logogram.
Systems can get vastly more complex: Old Persian or Japanese. Japanese is probably the most complicated writing system ever – certainly the most complicated in use now. But I will set that aside, and notably both of those systems are the result of existing logographic systems being repurposed to suit completely unrelated languages.
You can tweak this overall system a bit. In Yuk Tepat, I have incorporated a class of marks I have variously called ‘operators’ or ‘modifiers,’ which are attached to and modify the meanings of logograms. For example, adding various different marks to the sign ‘hand’ forms signs for finger, knuckle, thumb, palm, have, lack, etc. You see this sporadically in Chinese, for example the characters 刀 ‘knife’ and 刃 ‘blade,’ or 木 ‘tree,’ 末 ‘branch,’ and 本 ‘root.’ In Chinese though, this is a sporadic thing, while in Yuk Tepat this kind of marking is very systematized.
Since logographic systems are still at least partly phonetic, the phonetic / phonemic part can be classified by the different ways it works, same as phonemic writing systems. Hence, you can have logo-alphabets, logoabugidas, and logosyllabaries. Egyptian hieroglyphs are logoconsonantal (an abjad). The other systems are syllabic. While I don’t know any logoabugidas, you can always make one. Think about which one suits your language. Egyptian, e.g., is logoconsonantal probably because it’s Afroasiatic and abjads seem well-suited to their style of consonantal roots. The only difference between these and fully phonetic writing systems is that the phonetic part of logographic systems usually has much less phonetic precision, hence why semantic signs are needed to disambiguate similar-sounding words.
Your system doesn’t have to work just like any of these. You can figure out your own type, although it will likely mix logograms, phonograms, and taxograms in some form. I’ll grant that, of course, you don’t have to do even that. If you want something ideographic, you can try to make it. People constantly imagine fantasy languages that work completely differently from any real language, and that’s their prerogative. But if by ‘logographic,’ you meant a system like Egyptian/Sumerian/Chinese/Maya then it will be somewhat like I describe.
So to wrap up, logographs =/= pictures, they don’t represent translinguistic ‘ideas,’ they have a phonetic component that reflects the spoken language, and use semantic signs to disambiguate words. Once you know this, you basically understand the mechanics of logographs.
With that, I’m going to stop for a bit, then get back with Part II where I will get to some more particular points about making a script.
And of course, if you (readers) have a logographic script that you’ve made I’d like to know how you managed the overwhelming whole of it. Add a comment or reblog and add what you did.
This is a very good and comprehensive read that does pretty well summarizing how most naturalistic languages handle logographic systems! I want to show off what I did with my logographies
I have two conlangs that use logographic systems: Mewling and Ancestral. For Mewling, it was the first language I made through evolution. It wasn't my first logography, but since I didn't have a good grasp on how logographies develop the system ended up behaving differently than the usual approach for logographies. Since Mewling is highly oligosynthetic and agglutinative, there was comparatively little mutation between morphemes and their constituent derivations. A system of around 100 or so radicals were made from the basal morphemes, and those radicals were used to form the glyphs. The character for river 'serosam' was written with the radical for water 'ser' and path 'sam'. The more recent word for bridge 'sersam' used those same two radicals, but wrote them in a different arrangement to differentiate it from the glyph for river. In this way the Mewling logography is more what I'd describe as "morpho-phonetic", the radicals encode both their meaning *and* their pronunciation. You could gleam the rough pronunciation of a word based on what radicals were present, as the radical's pronunciation and its meaning was always one-to-one.
For Ancestral, I took a more naturalistic approach. At this point I had more experience with evolving a language so I had a better framework to make a more convincing logography. The two biggest influences on Ancestral writing were Mayan hieroglyphs (for aesthetic readability), Ancient Egyptian (for representing Ancestral's fusional grammar). Ancestral is incredibly fusional, with lots of different inflections and word endings, so a more analytical-suited system like how Chinese works would be incredibly difficult to make work. So I opted for the use of both phonetic glyphs (a syllabary) and separate grammatical logographs to help build words that couldn't be drawn. I utilized the cell structure of Ancestral writing to help flesh it out even more, having a specific space in the cell designated for pronunciation for the purpose of differentiating words using the same determinative, and a specific cell designated for pronunciation for the purpose hinting at the inflection of a word. I also had separate logograms standing for grammatical inflections as a layer of redundancy (especially because many inflections have similar/same spellings).
Even with the highly picturesque and non-abstract nature of the glyphs, certain glyphs weren't immune to being repurposed from their original representations. In fact, it helps reflect changes in the history of Ancestral's grammar. The glyph for "to die" became repurposed as a way to indicate the perfective aspect in verbs, and the modern word for "to die" is written with the glyph for "to die" and the syllable glyph "tė" to differentiate it from the glyph "to die" written by itself. Despite Ancestral's syntax not favoring a logography, the way in which it's written out, the way certain glyphs are used in certain contexts, and the addition of a phonetic syllabary helped make Ancestral's logography work for the language in a structured and consistent way. So much so, that the modern descendant language of Pushmari doesn't even have a writing system, as anyone who knows how to write would also know how to speak Ancestral, mirroring how integral the Ancestral writing system is to the Ancestral language.
I got a new recording setup so I recorded the Ancestral translation of the North Wind and the Sun. I realized that the only other Ancestral recording is a song, so it's not exactly the best representative of spoken Ancestral.
Transcript:
Niñřī Ñōw ė Nė mëilaw tlėñërėu ñāw āo rrīwijīñej ërarr, pīren përwañan cīrrelabao ořalwa rrīwirāoc.
"The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger, when a traveler came along wrapped in a warm cloak.
They agreed that the one who first succeeded in making the traveler take his cloak off should be considered stronger than the other.
Then the North Wind blew as hard as he could, but the more he blew the more closely did the traveler fold his cloak around him; and at last the North Wind gave up the attempt.
Then the Sun shined out warmly, and immediately the traveler took off his cloak.
And so the North Wind was obliged to confess that the Sun was the stronger of the two."
Got any tips for evolving a language without keeping one's sanity?
I got into conlanging through Biblaridion's videos, which talked about creating naturalistic languages, and I had fun doing that... for a whole hour before I started burning out on keeping track of every sound change and word I come up with. But I digress, lol.
Back to my question, how do you make such in depth languages with histories behind them without getting bored or burnt out?
Long answer: I don't. I get bored all the time. When that happens, I usually just work on another language for a bit. There's always something in other languages I'm working on that I need to do, whether it be fleshing out grammar or adding more words to the lexicon. But even then, if I'm not in the mood to work on any language at all, I just... don't work on them. If I want to do something else I do something else. I can't really force myself to do something I don't want to do without any repercussions, or else my body just straight freaks out. So I only work on languages when I'm in the mood to.
I will say, one thing that's really *really* streamlined the process for me is that I use Lexurgy to keep track and apply sound changes. Honestly it is a GODSEND especially with inflection-heavy languages. You can just pop in the proto-forms and it will give you the modern versions of it, so I can input all the proto-forms of noun declension or verb conjugations and it will give me the words that I need. EXTREMELY useful honestly for helping develop my lexicon. I will say there is a bit of a learning curve to it though. It's basically, like, coding, and sometimes you won't know how to express a rule without some hiccups, but once you get the hang of it it's PRETTY STABLE as far as managing sound changes. And really your first pass of sound changes might not be enough, you might wind up needing to add more rules or refine preexisting ones because they cause or ignore a sound change that you didn't quite anticipate. With the Mewling languages, I didn't use it, so I had to go through each word individually and evolve it myself from a list of sound changes I kept. With the Seraphic languages I started out with that process, but eventually transferred all the sound changes to Lexurgy and I basically use that when forming new words. With Ancestral (and Pushmari, still in development), I now write the sound changes in Lexurgy as I go, which cuts out the middle man. I'm sure there a better ways of doing it, but I need the repetitive stuff done in 0.2 seconds so I can actually *work* on the deep, important stuff in a language.
I have been avoiding working on the story of Qom while / by organizing the lexicon (reorganizing, really) of Classical Swira … and not finishing that, either. While that goes on, it seems that it doesn’t matter that I prune every single protolanguage etymon that I no longer use, and that is a waste of time for now, at least. So I’m focusing on cleaning up particular semantic domains. This time, it’s the kinship terms.
(Of course, having done so, mewling central beat me to it & made a prettier chart.)
You may remember from a while ago, the kinship terms for the protolanguage.
Swira terms are mostly an update of this. This gives us:
In the traditional anthropological six-type typology of kinship systems, it seems to be somewhere between “Inuit” (because it doesn’t distinguish cousins much) and Sudanese (because it does distinguish different types of uncles). In addition, it distinguishes relative age within generations – both ego’s generation and the parents.
Many kinship systems will merge particular relationships in one term. I considered giving Swira a different set of kinship term mergers – all relatives of one’s own and one’s parent’s generation are referred to by the same term IF they are younger than the parent but older than you. Additionally, all people in ego’s generation, younger than ego, are ‘younger sibling’ regardless of whether they’re a biological sibling or cousin. (I don’t know if any earthly society does so, but why not? It does at least fit one rule of kinship which I do observe, which is that more distinctions are made in older ages / generations than younger ones. However, I did not do this for the chart.)
Many of these have multiple forms. I have shown one form, the “free” form, which is unbound, usually used in a direct address, sometimes in place of a name – and in some cases is found as a generic noun, for example, lara is also a typical word for just ‘old man.’ It is common to extend kinship terms to some people to whom one is not really related. For example, it is polite to address strange old men and women as “grandfather / grandmother,” and the terms without a personal prefix generally mean just “old man / old woman.”These words also have conjugated forms with a personal possessive prefix, which form may differ from the unbound form. For example, muku has the bound form just -mu as in kʷemu ‘my son.’
One thing I wanted to do is to have terms resemble each other in a “family-resemblance” way that is not entirely regular. Many of the words have broad regularities going back to the protolanguage, but altered by sound changes – visible in the o- on parternal relatives and the na- on maternal ones. That said, having all the words be etymologically / morphologically-derived / related isn’t super real. One thing I thing I’ve noticed while looking at kinship terms, is that (like names for sexes and ages of animals), when a language distinguishes numerous different words for different relationships, they’re often different roots, rather than transparently derived from some kind of ‘mother’s side’ / ‘father’s side’ / ‘in-law’ prefix as seen here. But I kind of like it, and don’t see any reason why it CAN’T be.
Another thing: cousins can be referred to as brothers or sisters, but also with the descriptor iksi. Iksi has not changed, but the etymology has. In the protolanguage kinship post, iksi simply is, it doesn't have any morphological complexity. However, I realized it could also be evolution of *isǝkǝg, and thus could be derived from *isa 'blood.' In that case it should refer to paternal (blood) cousins, but I figure it has extended to all cousins.
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Here's the kinship terminology for the Ancestral language! Ancestral kinship is a modified version of Iroquois kinship, where the same gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents share the same term, while separate gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents have differing terms. Diluvians as a species are pretty sexually monomorphic, and biological sex isn't immediately apparent until a diluvian reaches sexual maturity. And in once you do, whether you have male or female sexual organs is largely irrelevant. Your sex is defined as being either homoecious (having both male and female organs), or monoecious (having either male OR female sexual organs, but able to switch when necessary). In Ancestral culture then, your gender isn't dictated by your sex , but by your parenting role; for Ancestral diluvians, the distinction is "mother" vs. "father" instead of "female" vs. "male". Since both homoecious and monoecious diluvians are capable of both gestation and fertilization, the roles are defined as which diluvian gestates (the mother) and which fertilizes (the father).
In Ancestral society, adults are expected to reproduce at least once in their lifetime, and so it is likely that one's parents' siblings have reproduced as well and knowing which term to refer them as will be based on that fact (e.g. if one's mother has a sibling who gestated a child, they would share the same gender of "mother" regardless of biological sex and, as far as kinship is concerned, would be referred to by the same term). Since these terms only are regularly applicable to adults whom have reproduced, you only see these distinctions in generations prior to the ego. In concurrent and future generations, the distinction doesn't matter. This is a remnant of the Proto-Ancestral kinship system, which was a Hawaiian kinship system. For in-laws, the term you'd refer to them as should reflect the term for your blood relatives. Your mother's sister is called "mother", so her spouse would be "father". Your mother's brother is called "uncle", so his spouse would be "aunt". And so on and so forth.
@yuk-tepat GREAT QUESTION LEGIT and to answer your question, yes! It's actually a pretty common occurrence. An individual can gestate one child and fertilize for another. For the child whom they gestated, they'd be called "mother", and for the child they fertilized, they'd be called "father". So there are cases of parents whom are called mother by one kid and father by another. Ancestral and eventually Pushmari culture are matrilineal, though. Everything passes down through the maternal line, although as Ancestral culture evolves into Pushmari it becomes less matriarchal (but echoes of it are still there). And since Pushmari society has a very rigid caste system, you would inherit your caste through your mother. There could be cases of siblings who share a parent but are of different castes because the parent acted as a mother for one and a father for another (though intercaste marriage wasn't allowed in the empire so recorded cases are few and far in between).
I don't know anything about Classical or Pushmari culture, or its stratification, but I can imagine this making things interesting for court politics. Like aristocratic marriage negotiations. There would be a lot of incentive for everyone to gestate and make the other partner fertilize. "Your clan is already big and powerful enough because you keep insisting your offspring gestate, so everyone belongs to YOUR clan, but we agreed that if we arranged our offspring to be married, that it was only on condition that YOUR child fertilizes, and OURS gets to gestate this time." (Assuming they have that kind of politics.)
Oh you have NO idea. Upper class Pushmari society is, similar to our world, rife with deceit and backstabbing and political mind games for the sake of gaining power and prestige. Something like this is DEFINITELY par for the course. And every imperial house is striving for one thing: to marry into the ruling imperial family.
Here's the kinship terminology for the Ancestral language! Ancestral kinship is a modified version of Iroquois kinship, where the same gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents share the same term, while separate gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents have differing terms. Diluvians as a species are pretty sexually monomorphic, and biological sex isn't immediately apparent until a diluvian reaches sexual maturity. And in once you do, whether you have male or female sexual organs is largely irrelevant. Your sex is defined as being either homoecious (having both male and female organs), or monoecious (having either male OR female sexual organs, but able to switch when necessary). In Ancestral culture then, your gender isn't dictated by your sex , but by your parenting role; for Ancestral diluvians, the distinction is "mother" vs. "father" instead of "female" vs. "male". Since both homoecious and monoecious diluvians are capable of both gestation and fertilization, the roles are defined as which diluvian gestates (the mother) and which fertilizes (the father).
In Ancestral society, adults are expected to reproduce at least once in their lifetime, and so it is likely that one's parents' siblings have reproduced as well and knowing which term to refer them as will be based on that fact (e.g. if one's mother has a sibling who gestated a child, they would share the same gender of "mother" regardless of biological sex and, as far as kinship is concerned, would be referred to by the same term). Since these terms only are regularly applicable to adults whom have reproduced, you only see these distinctions in generations prior to the ego. In concurrent and future generations, the distinction doesn't matter. This is a remnant of the Proto-Ancestral kinship system, which was a Hawaiian kinship system. For in-laws, the term you'd refer to them as should reflect the term for your blood relatives. Your mother's sister is called "mother", so her spouse would be "father". Your mother's brother is called "uncle", so his spouse would be "aunt". And so on and so forth.
@yuk-tepat GREAT QUESTION LEGIT and to answer your question, yes! It's actually a pretty common occurrence. An individual can gestate one child and fertilize for another. For the child whom they gestated, they'd be called "mother", and for the child they fertilized, they'd be called "father". So there are cases of parents whom are called mother by one kid and father by another. Ancestral and eventually Pushmari culture are matrilineal, though. Everything passes down through the maternal line, although as Ancestral culture evolves into Pushmari it becomes less matriarchal (but echoes of it are still there). And since Pushmari society has a very rigid caste system, you would inherit your caste through your mother. There could be cases of siblings who share a parent but are of different castes because the parent acted as a mother for one and a father for another (though intercaste marriage wasn't allowed in the empire so recorded cases are few and far in between).
Here's the kinship terminology for the Ancestral language! Ancestral kinship is a modified version of Iroquois kinship, where the same gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents share the same term, while separate gendered siblings of your parents/grandparents have differing terms. Diluvians as a species are pretty sexually monomorphic, and biological sex isn't immediately apparent until a diluvian reaches sexual maturity. And in once you do, whether you have male or female sexual organs is largely irrelevant. Your sex is defined as being either homoecious (having both male and female organs), or monoecious (having either male OR female sexual organs, but able to switch when necessary). In Ancestral culture then, your gender isn't dictated by your sex , but by your parenting role; for Ancestral diluvians, the distinction is "mother" vs. "father" instead of "female" vs. "male". Since both homoecious and monoecious diluvians are capable of both gestation and fertilization, the roles are defined as which diluvian gestates (the mother) and which fertilizes (the father).
In Ancestral society, adults are expected to reproduce at least once in their lifetime, and so it is likely that one's parents' siblings have reproduced as well and knowing which term to refer them as will be based on that fact (e.g. if one's mother has a sibling who gestated a child, they would share the same gender of "mother" regardless of biological sex and, as far as kinship is concerned, would be referred to by the same term). Since these terms only are regularly applicable to adults whom have reproduced, you only see these distinctions in generations prior to the ego. In concurrent and future generations, the distinction doesn't matter. This is a remnant of the Proto-Ancestral kinship system, which was a Hawaiian kinship system. For in-laws, the term you'd refer to them as should reflect the term for your blood relatives. Your mother's sister is called "mother", so her spouse would be "father". Your mother's brother is called "uncle", so his spouse would be "aunt". And so on and so forth.
Here's another piece I wrote in Proto-Seraphic! I've fired it and it came out on one piece so now this is here forever! It's the first paragraph and a half of Ea-Nasir's complaint tablet translated into Proto-Seraphic
Clitics fully affix onto words. The Proto-Ancestral singular personal pronouns become the person agreement prefixes on verbs, so the plural person pronouns take their place, becoming singular in meaning.
Ergative loses its comitative meaning, and the imperfective patient voice participle form of the verb "to make" is used adverbially for the meaning of "with/using". The clitic "tomorrow" affixes onto the verb, forming the crastinal tense. The verb "to need" changes to mean "to have/hold". The auxiliary verb for the perfective aspect affixes onto the verb, forming a true perfective aspect. The subjunctive modal verb inflects into this perfective aspect, carrying the meaning of "to need, to have to, must", replacing the former verb "to need". Symmetrical voice begins being used.
Classical Ancestral
1S.ABS.[TOP] 2S.GEN with CRAS.1-play-PV | 1S.ABS.[TOP] home-LAT go-INF NPST.1.NEC.PV
Symmetrical voice is lost. The proximal determinative "this" starts to be used as a definite article to help encode topics. Crastinal tense becomes the future tense, and the phrase "tomorrow (lit. into the morning)" is used to denote "tomorrow". The patient voice form of the verb "to play" is also lost, and is replaced with the locative voice form. Most noun cases are lost, the ablative and perlative replacing the genitive and all locative cases respectively. Former postpositions in Ancestral become clitics, attaching to the end of either the ablative or perlative form of the nouns they modify. Definite article is also precedes the infinitive form of verbs. Half of all languages in the Pushmari family stem from this stage, due to spread of Pushmari culture during Araucana's conquest.
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Messed around with a recent translation in CSP to try and make it look like it was carved in stone. This is written in the hieroglyphic new style. Here's the text and translation:
"Whenever sentient beings are in trouble, afflicted by calamity or suffering, and call upon me, I will respond and help them. If they call me, even with a single thought, I will appear to them in countless forms to relieve their suffering. Those who see me, hear me, or think of me with devotion, I will guide them to safety and happiness. If there are beings who are distressed by fire, water, poison, or demons, I will manifest to protect them. I appear in many forms to heal, teach and save all those who suffer, according to their needs."
"Avalokiteshvara"
"Sutra on the White Lotus of the True Dharma"
know-IPFV.AV.PTCP being-ABS.[TOP] destroy-PFV.AV.PTCP with or hurt-IPFV.PV.PTCP with hunt-INF MIR.INF NPST.3.COND.PV | and.CLS 1S.ABS NPST.3-call-IPFV.AV | all-ABS 3S.ABS NPST.1-respond-PFV.AV and.CLS NPST.1-help-PFV.AV || one.thing.MW.ATTR thought-DAT even call-INF NPST.1.COND.PV | all-GEN 3S-GEN pain-ABS NPST.1-heal-IPFV.AV so.that | all-LAT 3S.LAT number-GEN without form-GEN as NPST.1-appear-PFV.PV || 1S.ABS see-IPFV.AV.REL | or hear-IPFV.AV.REL | or devotion-DAT think-IPFV.AV.REL all-ABS 3S.ABS.[TOP] 1S.ERG safety-LAT and happiness-LAT NPST.3-guide-PFV.PV || fire-DAT or water-DAT or poison-DAT or demon-DAT hurt-IPFV.PV.REL being-ABS exist-INF NPST.3.COND.PV | 1S.LAT.[TOP] all-ABS 3S.ABS protect-INF NPST.1-display-PFV.LOCV || need-DAT according.to | suffer-IPFV.PV.REL all-ABS 3S.ABS many-GEN form-GEN as heal-INF | and.CLS teach-INF | and.CLS save-INF NPST.1-appear–IPFV.AV ||
I uploaded an old work stream from 2019 when I was creating the Chakobsa font for Dune. It had no audio, so I never did anything with it. Today Jessie and I watched it and recorded commentary seven years on. It was fun. :)
Man I wish there was a way to my a typeface for logographic systems like Mayan, so I can make one for Ancestral. Sure it'd be like the most work ever, but that's just part of the fun
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I've been learning to harvest clay and I used my very first batch to write something in Proto-Seraphic! It was a writing system originally meant to be written in clay so I'm very glad it came out so clear. On the left is the unfired tablet and the write is the fired tablet. It ended up cracking and breaking (first time firing greenware whoops) but I don't mind because it gives it an archaeological feel to it!
Ndeytğĺ pr-afwék ju-Tawawí, qe pr-vim ju-Kirawí, qe pr-jahwúvim ju-Tlad.
PFV.FUT.RES=that.[DIST] by (o).HEAT.[SG] of tëwėlwī and by (t).light.[SG] of cīralwī and by (m).crop-PL of tlāod
"By the warmth of Tëwėlwī (the Nurturer; Sun deity), by the light of Cīralwī (the Protector; moon god), by the gifts of Tlāod (the Firmament; earth goddess), it shall be."
