Serain Languages

2026-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

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:

εi̯ʰty kylufa=la mi aʰ=tεi̯kɯpai̯ eʰ=k<iy̯>pa

we-PL wait=PST for FOR=event NE=<ADV>success

"We waited for the event unsuccessfully"

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.

Unnaturalistic phonology and morphology
Poorly defined syntax
No prosody
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.

hueʃe=iro-i nädnə-iroʃe ksäis=gäɸ-əs

no=fish-NOM.SG 3SG.PASS.PST.PFV-catch DEI.LOC.SG=day-LOC.SG

"No fish were caught that day"

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

Beauty in the sounds of a language. A central asepct of Tolken’s Elvish languages and a central aspect of my choice-making in all things phonology.

I choose to omit the translated text in the publicly available version of the document as I believe it is not representative of my writing. It is not up to the standards I hold now, nor those I held at the time of writing.

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.

Journal - linguistics