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, a riffle-through of some of the more curious features of those languages: noun classification, multiple very specific demonstratives, compulsory locative and evidential marking, fourth person, ditching tense in favour of aspect, and so on, which 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 ages 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 my hand at writing something. Though I discovered that I lack some of the necessary talents, it did force 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 shows off 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 for ages, but then in 2007-2008 I had a period of illness that kept me at home, and I decided to create a lexicon to go with the grammar. I quite seriously aimed at around 20, 000 words, but ran out of steam after about 4, 500. Again I lost interest, then the idea of posting the language here revived it. 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 rather boring mechanical method of adding affix to affix. Still it seems that I have in fact created a language unlike any other, as far as I know.