Ashtagon's Scratchpad: Orcish (dengweshmen)
Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2022 4:01 pm
The Orcish language is unashamedly a conlang intended to be that spoken by the humanoid races (orcs, goblins, etc.) in a certain D&D campaign setting.
There's a long backstory behind this, but I chose to create this language as an "offshoot" of Proto-Indo-European, because the English-language names for every one of the relevant humanoid races stems from one of the Germanic, Romance, Celtic, or Hellenic languages; this makes PIE (or more specifically western PIE) the most recent common ancestor language for all these that is at all well-documented. That documentation gives a good basis for generating a vocabulary. I plan on simplifying the grammar compared to PIE (I hated studying Latin with all those inflections, and I doubt goblins make great Latin scholars either). In terms of phonology, I intend for p/f and b/v to be allophone pairs; because some of these races have tusks, labial stops would be difficult for them to pronounce. I haven't quite decided what should happen to /m/ sounds. PIE seems to have a large supply of laryngeal/glottal sounds, which definitely suits orcs, but would probably be a little harsh for modern speakers of English; being actually pronounceable by modern speakers of English is, sadly, a requirement, in order to ensure this language could potentially see use around the gaming table.
I haven't yet decided on a name for this language. Currently, "dengweshmen" is the most likely candidate, which breaks down as tongue-abstractnoun. That seems to be one of the most common ways to express the concept of "language" in natlangs.
Metals
heshernom - iron
hehusom - gold
hergentom - silver
heyos - metal
There's a long backstory behind this, but I chose to create this language as an "offshoot" of Proto-Indo-European, because the English-language names for every one of the relevant humanoid races stems from one of the Germanic, Romance, Celtic, or Hellenic languages; this makes PIE (or more specifically western PIE) the most recent common ancestor language for all these that is at all well-documented. That documentation gives a good basis for generating a vocabulary. I plan on simplifying the grammar compared to PIE (I hated studying Latin with all those inflections, and I doubt goblins make great Latin scholars either). In terms of phonology, I intend for p/f and b/v to be allophone pairs; because some of these races have tusks, labial stops would be difficult for them to pronounce. I haven't quite decided what should happen to /m/ sounds. PIE seems to have a large supply of laryngeal/glottal sounds, which definitely suits orcs, but would probably be a little harsh for modern speakers of English; being actually pronounceable by modern speakers of English is, sadly, a requirement, in order to ensure this language could potentially see use around the gaming table.
I haven't yet decided on a name for this language. Currently, "dengweshmen" is the most likely candidate, which breaks down as tongue-abstractnoun. That seems to be one of the most common ways to express the concept of "language" in natlangs.
Metals
heshernom - iron
hehusom - gold
hergentom - silver
heyos - metal