User:Hinotema

Like I suppose most people who post here I started trying to invent languages as a teenager. My high school still had a set of the 1970s Britannica, in which the article about Indigenous Languages of North America was contributed by, surprisingly, Franz Boas (he must have been quite old.) It was just 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. This opened my mind to the fact that the structure of European languages was only one possibility among many; later, when I studied Japanese, I came to understand this in much more detail. So my ideal was always to create an a priori language unlike any other; but for ages I just 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 along those lines. 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, or language,) at the heart of the complicated history I created. The name itself shows my intention to create a couple of consonants not found in any natural language: improbably, I seem to have succeeded in doing this. But though the grammar was fully worked out, and has changed only slightly, I had only a tiny vocabulary, I think fewer than 100 words: I used to agonise for ages over a single word. 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. To start with I quite seriously aimed at about 20, 000 words, but I ran out of steam after about 4, 500. Again I lost interest for a while, then the idea of posting the language here revived it. I have fine-tuned the grammar a little, and created about 1, 000 new words (it's easy for me now.) Pkalho-Kölo is a strictly agglutinative language, like the Turkic or Bantu languages, with the advantage of clarity and simplicity, but also the slightly boring, mechanical method of adding affix to affix. Still, have a read through and you will find that I have in fact created a language unlike any other (as far as I know.)