User:Hinotema

Like I suppose most people who post here I started trying to invent languages as a teenager. I remember reading the Franz Boas article about Indigenous Languages of North America and encountering noun classification, multiple very specific demonstratives, compulsory locative and evidential marking, fourth person, ditching tense in favour of aspect, and so on. This opened my mind to the fact that the structure of European languages was only one possibility among many. So my ideal was always to create an a priori language unlike any other; but for years I flitted from one exotic idea to another. In the mid-90s, at the height of the popularity of the Fantasy genre, I allowed myself to be persuaded to try writing something. The results weren't impressive, but it forced me to fix on one phonological, grammatical and syntactic system, to create a language from start to finish. The name Pkalho-Kölo comes from the ancient city of Pkalho (kölo means mouth/language,) at the heart of my complicated imaginary history. The name itself shows my intention to create consonants not found in any natural language: improbably, I seem to have succeeded in doing this. But though the grammar was fully worked out, I had only a tiny vocabulary, I think fewer than 100 words. I consigned the whole thing to a bottom drawer, but in 2007-2008 I had a period of illness that kept me at home, and I decided to create a lexicon. I quite seriously aimed at 20, 000 words, but ran out of steam after about 4, 500. I lost interest again till the idea of posting the language here occurred to me; I fine-tuned the grammar and created about 1, 000 new words. Pkalho-Kölo is a strictly regular agglutinative language, like the Turkic or Bantu languages, with the advantage of clarity and simplicity, but also the boring mechanical method of adding affix to affix. Still it seems that I have created a language unlike any other.