#fae language

Tell me about how you started making conlang! 💜

oh gosh it started, like many things do for me, with lord of the rings. by the time i was nine or so i was copying down the elvish and dwarvish script along the top and bottom of the front pages of our copies of the trilogy, and poring over the maps in the back for hours. at some point i found a website that taught the tengwar alphabet and then boy oh boy i was so very normal about it 😂 i wrote my school notes in tengwar, i wrote little stories in notebooks in tengwar, i took a sharpie to my bunkbed and transcribed portions of the Lay of Lethian on my bedframe.

when i was 12-13ish i started creating an alphabet for one of my own stories. i might even have some of it somewhere still, even though i've long since moved on from that story. i drifted away from writing systems and into mapmaking through late highschool and college, and i didn't really start working on a conlang proper until i started iesin and talvos' story here on tumblr.

for iesin's language, i've loved thinking about how the fae would think about things and how it would shape their language. for instance, they have two words for death: edhaer, the death that is a return to the stars, and crych, stardeath, which is also their word for iron and for the concept of the final utter end of something. another concept they tie together is mountain and bridge through the syllable eul: catheul, mountain (literally, earth-bridge, from cathyr/earth and eul/bridge), and llyeul, a rope bridge, are two words that make use of it.

i also like thinking about the sound of their language and how their anatomy shapes it. they use a lot of vowels and soft/gliding consonants such as l, y, th, s, and r for the world around them. hard consonants such as c, ch, and d are more often seen in words associated with death, pain, loss, lack, grief, etc.

ni bau means "it's dark" !

when I was looking into fae lore, I ended up looking mostly at Irish mythologies and folklore, and as i've come to each instance of needing fae names and words I've kept coming back to the Irish language. Iesin is a slight exception, as it comes from part of a Welsh name meaning shining. I'm... not entirely comfortable just picking a language and pointing to it and saying "this is the language my made-up creatures speak!" but the first time I wanted one word for starlight, there was a phrase that caught my eye in Irish that I distilled realtsolais from, and it's kind of snowballed from there. I'd love to have the time to create a real structure and dictionary for the fae language that stands on its own without being just direct lifting of words from another language though!