#skalian

as before, my guiding principles are that i want it to be simple, bc i am Not Ambitious, and also that i want it to sound sort of rough and harsh to match the warrior culture of the people that speak it.

for the alphabet, i'm sticking to the latin alphabet (english alphabet? *squints at google*) but dropping q, c, and x. c is being replaced by ch, which will be one letter (as in change or arch, not loch). h, tho, is staying, only to be a silent letter between vowels. it might end up not being silent if it starts a word, i'll decide later. finally, j is sort of a hard sound (jump, jog) at the beginning of a word, and softer in the middle/end (like french je, jardin). currently, i have no plans to include sh or th as letter combinations.

(pls forgive me, ipa hurts my brain but i'm trying to learn it, for now you get other things)

also, the h rule is necessary bc i'm making a rule that no two vowels can be next to each other, and all syllables have to be closed except the last one in a word. this is part of The Dyah Problem. i can either change it to being spelled dyha, and risk people unknowingly pronouncing the h, or i can throw an extra consonant in there instead, like dyja (or dyjah). will think on it.

there are going to be six vowels and eight vowel sounds: a -> short, as in father, law

e -> short, as in vet, bedding, OR long a, as in lame, wait*

i -> short, as in indigo, pin; OR long e, as in seen, peace

o -> long, as in over, so

u -> short, as in put, foot

y -> long i, as in lying, spire

*very rarely, e has a third sound, only when two e's at the end of a word are separated by one consonant, in which case it also takes a long e sound. this solves the problem of me pronouncing skalmere like the english "mere."

the different i and e sounds depend on whether it is at the beginning of a word or not. the first sound is if the vowel begins a word, the second is all other instances. this is because of how i pronounce "inari" and "skirasto" in my head.

(the story is Other Lost Things and i’m working on reworking it from novel to web serial rn, it’s about six runaway criminals with magic reluctantly working together to outrun various governments and pasts on the open ocean.)

so the language i want to create is Skalian, which is spoken in Skalmere, a very harsh, battle-oriented country. the only named Skalian characters i have right now are Inari and Dyah Deoreas and Vana Skirasto.

that actually gives me a fair amount to start with. i might ignore deoreas (which i’ve wanted to change for a while, it was just a smushed-together bunch of words i no longer remember). but anyway.

inari is a japanese name, which i did not know when i plucked it off a fantasy names list four years ago so she is not japanese (technically she’s not any real-world ethnicity….but i did see her as a flavor of southeast asian even before she was named, so). BUT. i can take some inspo from japanese for sure.

skalmere (skahl-meer) is arbitrary and mightve come from a name generator, but it informed me choosing vana’s name, so i’m thinking keeping possible consonant/vowel combinations small and using a lot of harsher sounds. i can also use russian or german or other languages like that for inspo. i’m tempted to make it so that two vowels cant be next to each other but im not sure how much that will limit me. but also limits are probably good.

in which case….what to do about dyah? does y count as a vowel? does skalian even have a y….hm. much to think about. this is what i get for making arbitrary decisions at 15 and getting too attached to change them.

the only other decision i’ve come to so far is that i want to use the latin alphabet with no diacritics, and i also want to cut some letters out of it. so far, q, and possibly x, and if dyah didn’t have a y it would also be gone so hmmm. maybe i need to attempt to rename her. basically i want to make this as simple as possible bc i am the silly goose who wants to make an Entire Language and i don’t need that to be unnecessarily hard.

(now, if i get around to making a language for ach rhean, THAT would get to be complicated, bc ofc it would. but that’s a project for later me, or more likely never. i think ach rhean is what theyre all speaking all the time anyway so it’s not really going to come up in-story)