Okay, so I'm going to fully nerd out in this one, and no-one can stop me.
For the uninitiated, this is a "conlang", a constructed language,
specifically an "artlang", which is a language created for artistic purposes.
This conlang is one of many I've made for a fantasy world called Dycratus,
but it was my first, so it's...
I mean, I worked on this for years, in-universe this language has over a thousand
years of history, its own literature, poetry, linguistic debates, sociolects and dialects...
This is Meyhendgar (the "h" is silent), and we are not going to go into all that in this video...
It's like Tolkien's elven languages in Lord of the Rings,
made up to exist in-universe, so still supposed to be naturalistic.
Naturalistic conlangs are supposed to seem like real languages,
with features that could feasibly appear in the natural development of a human language,
whilst the more non-naturalistic a conlang gets, the less emphasis is put on this, until you get
languages like Ithkuil, which could never - and isn't meant to - have evolved as a human language.
It's arguably not even possible to be fluent in it as a human!
For the rest of the video, I'll be talking about Meyhendgar in-universe
as much as possible, as if it were a real language, to give an overview.
So if you're as big a nerd as me, sit back and enjoy!
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And now let's get back to it!
Meyhendgar is the official language of the Great Republic of Meyhend,
a USA-inspired federal republic on the continent of Meyhend in the centre of Dycratus.
It is also called "the Midlands", but I generally use the Meyhendgar
name now to avoid confusion with the most hated part of England.
I'm going to be talking here about Classical Meyhendgar, spoken in the 7- and 800s Second Age.
This is a largely constructed language - in-universe, I mean - because at the time,
the GRM was split up between hundreds of different local languages,
and a common tongue was deemed necessary.
Enter Asoro Undu, who created the first version of Meyhendgar,
essentially a heavily simplified version of his own native Mekeyar language.
Mekeyar was one of the major languages in the union, and I've designed this one as
well - it has nine cases and five grammatical genders and it's certainly believable...
in the same way, I don't know, Hungarian or Mongolian are believable...
but it's very complicated. It was the de facto official language of
the country because it was spoken in one of the most powerful states,
Mjukar, and was the lingua franca of the capital city, where a lingua franca is a
language used for communication between people with different native languages.
A faction of academics and politicians viewed this highly difficult language as a further barrier to
poorer states in the union, and to those without the wealth and/or luck to be educated in it.
Undu was one of these, which is why he, and later his students, created Meyhendgar.
It has only four cases, which might seem complicated,
but is a massive improvement, remember...
it had completely regular derivation systems for adjectives,
nouns and verbs... and it had no grammatical gender.
In fact, Meyhendgar has no gendered vocabulary whatsoever,
apart from "mother" and "father". If you want to specify that your sibling is female,
you have to say just that - "sibling female", "bolhan doya".
This is again due to its semi-constructed nature in-universe.
Since it was being championed by a band of progressives, such as Undu himself,
the language was actively created to de-emphasise gender roles.
The gender system in the Renral Desert has men (gaya), women (doya),
and a third gender, which originally grew out of a priest class, teya.
For the philosophical fun of it, I decided to go for a confining and
highly discriminatory gender trinary instead of binary.
Meyhendgar was successfully introduced in various stages, and became the common language of the GRM.
Because of the multilinguistic nature of the city of Särnukno,
it actually became the language of instruction there, until it completely replaced Mekeyar.
Because of the influence of the city in the surrounding areas, much of Mjukar became
Meyhendgar-speaking, and by the 8th century, we have native speakers of the language.
A lot of Mekeyar irregularity has at this point been reintroduced into the language,
because of the close contact between the two,
and a lot of new vocabulary has been generated from derivation
and from loanwords, making it look much more like a natural language.
It is at this point the language of government at the federal level of the Republic.
It continues to develop, throughout the next millennium, becoming more naturalistic as it moves
away from its constructed roots, going through several sound shifts and changes in morphology,
one of its cases disappears - but this version here in the 8th and 9th centuries
is what I want to focus on, because it's the most fleshed out form of the language.
Meyhendgar's phonology is relatively simple,
as Undu defined the phonemes very loosely and used few of them (at least compared
to Mekeyar) to allow for variation for the different first-language speakers in the GRM.
The Mjukarian Standard, which is what we're considering in this video here, has 15 consonants.
This velar fricative here only occurs at the beginning of words,
and /z/ and /l/ become devoiced - /s/ and /l̥/ - when in a cluster with voiceless plosives.
It has seven or eight vowels, depending on sociolect.
The closed vowels /i/ and /u/ are pronounced a little longer than other vowels. The vowel
/ɛ/ is the only vowel with a long and short version, from where /e/ has become long /ɛː/.
Meyhendgar also has phonemic stress, with the emphasis usually falling on the first syllable
of a word, but being shifted with the addition of a haka on the vowel of a subsequent syllable.
This looks like a simple underlining. Put this haka on the first vowel of a word,
and you get that velar fricative from earlier.
Talking of the orthography, this is the Elemgrek alphabet used to write Meyhendgar.
Originally, it was written top-to-bottom or left-to-right, but the left-to-right version
became more prominent due to the influence of the left-to-right Archipelagan script.
Some other letters aren't always included in the alphabet, but are still used in the scripture.
Then there's the system of "riyag", shortened script, where pronouns,
grammatical particles, and other commonly used words and morphemes have their own
logographic characters, usually descended from the corresponding character in Mekeyar.
Grammatically, Meyhendgar is again... fairly simple, but it's still, you know, a language.
Verbs are conjugated in four forms from the stem -
two of these are imperatives,
with the regular imperative adding "-a" to the stem as in "tenepa", "do!",
and the imperative ending "-ene" as in "tenepene", "please do".
The other conjugations are the forwards and backwards forms, as Meyhendian linguists call
them in-world, which relate to the order of the agent and patient of the sentence.
The word order is completely free, but if the agent appears in the sentence
before the patient does, the forwards form is employed, ending in "-tu",
like in the sentence "chaka kumtu nyewat" - "they like the town".
If the agent appears after the patient, the backwards form is used,
with a "-rar" ending in writing, which is generally shortened to "-ra" in speech,
like in "nyewat chaka kumra", which could be translated as "the town is liked by them",
but is perhaps more accurately "the town is what they like",
or, "you know that town? They like it."
Meyhendgar may have free word order, but it prefers topic-prominent clauses,
which means sentences and clauses tend to start with the thing or
information which is being talked about, followed by a comment on that thing.
You can also see some other word order preferences in these sentences,
such as the fact that pronouns tend to go before the verb.
For a negative, the prefix "-ru" is added to the front of the verb.
There's also no prepositions in Meyhendgar,
you just have words like "dam" instead, which is the verb "to be under".
Nouns have four or five forms, depending on who's counting.
We can take the base form of a noun, like "get" ("stone", or "stones", or "a stone",
or "the stone" - you get the idea, there's no articles or definiteness or number declension)
and "dalchet", person.
So there's the genitive, with ending "-ia" for nouns,
or just "-t" for pronouns, which shows that something possesses something else,
like in "get dalchetia", "the stone of the person" or "the person's stone".
Again, the word order is free here,
so you can say "dalchetia get" if the person is the topic of the clause.
Then there's the secondary genitive, with ending "-itia" for nouns, or "-tia" for pronouns,
and this is the genitive of a genitive, like in "get bolhania wätia", "my sibling's stone",
whereas "get bolhania wät" would be "the sibling's and my stone".
By the way, in theory, the genitive of a genitive
of a genitive would loop back round to the primary genitive, and so on.
Then there's the subordinate form, which is formed by adding the last vowel of the noun onto the end.
So "get" becomes "gete", "ayk" becomes "ayka"... or by adding
"-n" plus the last vowel onto a pronoun, so "wä" becomes "wänä".
This is triggered by certain verbs, conjunctions, and is used to avoid super complex nouns. It
essentially makes words get grouped together into a single argument within the sentence
and it even allows certain subordinate "clauses" to be split. "Dalchet achan wä atipra yegan".
"That person there, I think they're nice."
Finally, there's a compound form, which is used to string nouns together German-style,
like "get" becoming "getas" to make words like "getaspyal", "stone tool".
Adjectives are declined according to the noun they refer to,
with these endings. They can also be turned into adverbs by adding "-r".
Then there's four types of conjunctions, and there's also verbs which take what would
correspond to indirect objects - these are added in their compound form to the front of the verb...
There are affixes which specify the intensity of a verb or amount of a noun...
There's temporal particles to show when an action takes place, like "lak", to show an action
is finished, "pik", to show an action hasn't started yet, "her", where an action is ongoing...
And then there's the weird particle "le" that I don't even know how to define,
and which we're not going into in this video...
so if you want to know about that, uh, like and comment and subscribe or something I don't kn-