User:CatDoom



Hey all! I'm new here, obviously; don't know my way around well enough to say what my favorite pages are, but there's some really neat stuff on here!

I'm more-or-less done uploading the work I've done on my first-ever conlang, Riktas, except for a bunch of vocabulary. Obviously that will be subject to revision for a long time yet; I'm still working on some sample texts, and once I've happy with one I'll be sure to post it up on the page.

I've been interested in linguistics and conlangs for a while now, and I got inspired to put together Riktas while brainstorming a setting for a tabletop role playing game. I'd developed a lot of different ideas to one degree or another but I wasn't very satisfied with any of them, so I decided to take a break from maps and timelines and the like and come at the problem from a different angle. I'm not on any kind of deadline, so my plan has been to start by fiddling around with a language and eventually work my way out to a culture, and develop politics and the like from there. I started with a fair number of assumptions about the history of the people who speak the language and the kind of place they live in, but for now I'm keeping that stuff on the back burner.

As far as real-world inspiration, I've liberally pillaged ideas I like from languages I've been reading about recently, but I've cribbed the most by far from Marc Okrand's very readable 1977 reference grammar for Mutsun, a native Californian language once spoken not too far from where I live. Other than that the phonology was mostly inspired by various Austronesian languages, though with a highly reduced vowel system similar to that of the southernmost Ryukyuan languages, and a set of evidential inflections roughly mirroring those of Kashaya Pomo.

Speaking of which, the Pomo languages are really neat, and together with bits of the tragically poorly-attested Esselen language I'm using them as a rough model for a conlang I'm developing in parallel with Riktas, ʔulili. I figured that, since I've been working some historic sound changes into Riktas that mirror those in Malagasy (which was historically influenced by various nearby Bantu languages), and since the Utian languages (of which Mutsun is one) seem to have been influenced early on by interaction with languages probably related (or ancestral) to Esselen, Riktas would really make more sense if I came up a similar language for it to interact with.

ʔulili isn't very far along yet, but it's shaping up to be a lot of fun to work on, and Kashaya's amazing system of affixes is proving to be quite a well of inspiration!

So, wow, that was quite the ramble. Anyway, I think it's great that there's a wiki like this, and I'm looking forward to reading more of what's already on here. Hopefully I'll get to know some of the other folks here too; I'll just have to remember to clean up my user page before I embarrass myself. :P