Serain Languages

Preface

This article was written using linguistic terminology you are not expected to know. The reader is expected to be able to look up words related to the field. I particularly like SIL Global’s Glossary of Linguistic Terms and Wikipedia/Wikitonary.

One thing I will define here is the usage of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and of its square brackets, angled brackets and slashes in different contexts; please consult Wikipedia’s help page on the IPA brackets.

/θeɪ̯ŋks fɔɹ ɹi:dɪŋ ðɪs ɑɹtɪkəl/

Section I – Introduction to Conlanging

It was during my penultimate year in highschool that I started to conlang, to construct languages, although it was more similar to copying whatever information I would find from guides on the internet, misread wikipedia pages and blog articles on language construction into my Google Sheets and calling it a language more than the actual practice of researching linguistics to use as a basis for a fictional language. Conlanging is an art form long forgotten (perhaps never remembered), but an art form nevertheless deserving of respect, and esteem, I hide this is the least you will remember from this article.

When I first made my language, Asiuka, my only point of reference was my prior surface-level study of Ancient Greek morphology which made my goal of attaining the very specific phonoæsthetics¹ I wanted very difficult (after all, I had never studied phonetics or phonology). See this example sentence from the Conlang Syntax Test Cases website translated to this horrid language:

Yes, verb declension is done through postparticles: I took the phrase protolang literally… As a second note, I am using phonetic transcription because past self’s romanization is unusable (foreshadowing).

One of the first things that would jump to the mind of a more experienced conlanger straightaway is the usage of /h/ in postvocalic positions, although is much more common in prevocalic positions² (Davis & Cho 2003). Another one would be the vowel system containing /a/ and /ε/ yet no low or mid back vowel: not very symetric, which vowel inventories usually are, to a degree. It has /ɯ/ which is pretty a rare phoneme too. To resume, my first language was poorly created; the following flaws may be defined.

1. Unnaturalistic phonology and morphology
2. Poorly defined syntax
3. No prosody
4. No romanization

The biggest to my past self was the lack of naturalism which I sought to work on in my next conlang.

Around the time my first conlang reached a state of completion (although this concept barely exists), I started the long journey of language learning. Japanese, which I had chosen as an inspiration for my Asiuka, was the language which interested me the most, hence I started studying away in my free time. My study of languages (not of linguistics) will not be refered hereafter. Now having a new perspective on language, I worked for the next year on a family of language named Serain, the topic of this article.

Section II – Serain

I will not talk about Seraine too thoroughly as I wrote some thirty pages of explainations a while ago: here is the PDF to this document omitting the translated text². Here is a singular translated sentence one may find of interest.

Section III – Beyond Serain

After having completed the language, I went my way, continuing to work on my language studies and my linguistics learning by reading textbooks and scientific articles.

Footnotes

Bibliography

Davis, Stuart & Cho, Mi-Hui. (2003). The distribution of aspirated stops and /h/ in American English and Korean: An alignment approach with typological implications. Linguistics. 41. 607-652. 10.1515/ling.2003.020.