Sego
Posted: Mon Nov 06, 2023 8:19 pm
Context
I returned with teen-like vigour to my teenage conworld about five years ago. I guess I adopted a sort of ‘save the refugees’ mentality: all those old ideas of people, languages etc were going to die unless I gave them a proper home. My 30-something-year-old self started plucking old bits of papery debri out of the vast ocean of life and drying them out next to each other on little mind-rafts, and for a while just stared at them, wondering what it could possibly all be for.
Slowly I realised how much material is here. The more work gets done, the more connected and cohesive it becomes. I'm finally getting towards building one coherent language family in particular...
And that's why I need help. Never really got this far into one conlanging project before: my technical skills have been pretty much exhausted, and I would need pointers to keep stretching and growing this practice.
I've got a Google Drive folder I'm trying to turn into an encyclopedia. But I don't want this work to miss out on the opportunity of being informed by much cleverer and more experienced conlangers than I.
You may find stuff to review in here that you can really help me with; and/or stuff that you might find interesting. If so, thanks and you're welcome.
Note: I haven't (at all) abandoned working on Almean music. I work at a totally erratic pace (for which I apologise) and work on many things in parallel but I would still appreciate this space to ask for feedback on my own conlanging and conworldery, which tends to happen as a backdrop to my life whether I want it to or not. The music project is, in fact, so unwieldily large, I am struggling to document it properly due to lack of time. Mark suggested I use videos, which I'm down for, but there's a lot going on in my life right now so sadly I'm more behind than I want to be. Anyway. I think I'm actually a bit blocked with that by feeling like I should only post here if it's about that: so this is, perhaps, reverse psychology which might, actually, help get me going with sharing the, by now, several years I've enjoyed spending working out corners of Almean music!!!
So... What is Sego?
A ‘planet’ run in a vastly powerful simulation by near-immortal beings who would be bored to death, were death not illegal for them.
NB: I may have just spoiled the twist of possibly more than one inchoate novel. Ah well. It was pretty obvious anyway.
How does it manifest?
As a handy setting for fantasy-like fiction, which also allows plumbing of existential questions of the type more akin to sci-fi.
As a bunch of scrawled notes, maps and Google Docs amassed over 20 years, weathered by time and obscured by the billowing shrouds of ADHD.
At some point, hopefully, it will exist publicly as an encyclopedia (simply as a link to the Google Drive folder all linked up and shared for viewing).
There are also over a dozen novels/stories in some degree plotted... mostly (though not exclusively) rather vaguely. Will they ever fall through the gates of not-being into the realm of being? Who can say. Perhaps this thread will help the birthing process.
What are some of its features?
Its main ‘now’ is set about 10k years after a ‘Thermal Crisis’. Agricultural communities survived the Crisis mainly in polar and montane refuges. The sea continued to eat up the best land for millennia afterwards. The common name for one of its chief continents, Aretia, is derived from a word meaning ‘burned’.
Recovery was, to some extent, aided by a non-human sentient species, the winged Vashari. Humans, usually, repayed the Vashari by trying their hardest to wipe them out as soon as they remembered how to do genocide in their respective parts of the globe. Vashari today are the stuff of legend in most of the densely populated areas.
Most of the ancient belief systems are rooted in what Felonian scholars called ‘The Talent’, and what most people might call ‘magic’. They are also rooted in veneration of what are known (in a calque of the Iozhi word) ‘Sentinels’: portals through which one might communicate with the gods, whence powerful intercessions can be sought.
Modern peoples are unlikely to believe in The Talent, or even the existence of the Sentinels, let alone their effectiveness. They believe in steamships and insurance and Secularism, which teaches the innocence of the Old Ones and the need to stamp out all the old poppycock about gods and magic and golems and angels and suchlike. They are statistically pretty likely to have fallen sway recently to the Goğon Empire, which purports to rule over half the people of Sego. They are quite horribly unlucky if they are from the large southern continent of Seguwe, which the steamships reached not too long ago.
This modern outlook sits uncomfortably next to the world-views of more traditional peoples, and, in some places, surviving pockets of Vashari.
There are a few subsequent twists which I will keep close to my chest; but this is a neat-enough gateway overview of the setting.
Why does it nearly share its name with a brand of stuffing?
Yeah, that bothers me, too. My subconscious stole the word ‘Segoy’ from Ursula Le Guin as a kid, and vomited it up as ‘Seguwe’, the continent (and endonym of one of my teen conlangs, Seguwe-akhe). I can't shake it and decided not to, out of tribute. (‘Sego’ is currently telling me it is a sad Megâzi borrowing of ‘Seguwe’, taken thanks to the counter-culture spread of Seguwean religions in the slavery-heavy colonial era, a last hurrah of non-Secularism... but that's subject to revisal.) The planet has many endonyms, of course. Seguweans call it all Seguwe. The Caebaeq priesthood call it, in the ceremonial language Peoppaeq, Luvaśkah (‘big round platform’). Old Orlogians called it O. The Hamak call it ‘perch of the soul’. Aretians usually just call it ‘soil, dirt, earth, ground’, like we call our planet; I often use ‘the earth’ and ‘the world’ for it in my writings. It may get a different common name, in the end.
When I need to refer to the setting as a simulation rather than a planet, I call it ASego. Like Artificial Sego, I guess. Or ‘non-Sego’. It just happened like that because I wanted the folder to be alphabetically first... Then it, too, stuck.
Next update: major (modern) language families of Sego (as presently known).
I returned with teen-like vigour to my teenage conworld about five years ago. I guess I adopted a sort of ‘save the refugees’ mentality: all those old ideas of people, languages etc were going to die unless I gave them a proper home. My 30-something-year-old self started plucking old bits of papery debri out of the vast ocean of life and drying them out next to each other on little mind-rafts, and for a while just stared at them, wondering what it could possibly all be for.
Slowly I realised how much material is here. The more work gets done, the more connected and cohesive it becomes. I'm finally getting towards building one coherent language family in particular...
And that's why I need help. Never really got this far into one conlanging project before: my technical skills have been pretty much exhausted, and I would need pointers to keep stretching and growing this practice.
I've got a Google Drive folder I'm trying to turn into an encyclopedia. But I don't want this work to miss out on the opportunity of being informed by much cleverer and more experienced conlangers than I.
You may find stuff to review in here that you can really help me with; and/or stuff that you might find interesting. If so, thanks and you're welcome.
Note: I haven't (at all) abandoned working on Almean music. I work at a totally erratic pace (for which I apologise) and work on many things in parallel but I would still appreciate this space to ask for feedback on my own conlanging and conworldery, which tends to happen as a backdrop to my life whether I want it to or not. The music project is, in fact, so unwieldily large, I am struggling to document it properly due to lack of time. Mark suggested I use videos, which I'm down for, but there's a lot going on in my life right now so sadly I'm more behind than I want to be. Anyway. I think I'm actually a bit blocked with that by feeling like I should only post here if it's about that: so this is, perhaps, reverse psychology which might, actually, help get me going with sharing the, by now, several years I've enjoyed spending working out corners of Almean music!!!
So... What is Sego?
A ‘planet’ run in a vastly powerful simulation by near-immortal beings who would be bored to death, were death not illegal for them.
NB: I may have just spoiled the twist of possibly more than one inchoate novel. Ah well. It was pretty obvious anyway.
How does it manifest?
As a handy setting for fantasy-like fiction, which also allows plumbing of existential questions of the type more akin to sci-fi.
As a bunch of scrawled notes, maps and Google Docs amassed over 20 years, weathered by time and obscured by the billowing shrouds of ADHD.
At some point, hopefully, it will exist publicly as an encyclopedia (simply as a link to the Google Drive folder all linked up and shared for viewing).
There are also over a dozen novels/stories in some degree plotted... mostly (though not exclusively) rather vaguely. Will they ever fall through the gates of not-being into the realm of being? Who can say. Perhaps this thread will help the birthing process.
What are some of its features?
Its main ‘now’ is set about 10k years after a ‘Thermal Crisis’. Agricultural communities survived the Crisis mainly in polar and montane refuges. The sea continued to eat up the best land for millennia afterwards. The common name for one of its chief continents, Aretia, is derived from a word meaning ‘burned’.
Recovery was, to some extent, aided by a non-human sentient species, the winged Vashari. Humans, usually, repayed the Vashari by trying their hardest to wipe them out as soon as they remembered how to do genocide in their respective parts of the globe. Vashari today are the stuff of legend in most of the densely populated areas.
Most of the ancient belief systems are rooted in what Felonian scholars called ‘The Talent’, and what most people might call ‘magic’. They are also rooted in veneration of what are known (in a calque of the Iozhi word) ‘Sentinels’: portals through which one might communicate with the gods, whence powerful intercessions can be sought.
Modern peoples are unlikely to believe in The Talent, or even the existence of the Sentinels, let alone their effectiveness. They believe in steamships and insurance and Secularism, which teaches the innocence of the Old Ones and the need to stamp out all the old poppycock about gods and magic and golems and angels and suchlike. They are statistically pretty likely to have fallen sway recently to the Goğon Empire, which purports to rule over half the people of Sego. They are quite horribly unlucky if they are from the large southern continent of Seguwe, which the steamships reached not too long ago.
This modern outlook sits uncomfortably next to the world-views of more traditional peoples, and, in some places, surviving pockets of Vashari.
There are a few subsequent twists which I will keep close to my chest; but this is a neat-enough gateway overview of the setting.
Why does it nearly share its name with a brand of stuffing?
Yeah, that bothers me, too. My subconscious stole the word ‘Segoy’ from Ursula Le Guin as a kid, and vomited it up as ‘Seguwe’, the continent (and endonym of one of my teen conlangs, Seguwe-akhe). I can't shake it and decided not to, out of tribute. (‘Sego’ is currently telling me it is a sad Megâzi borrowing of ‘Seguwe’, taken thanks to the counter-culture spread of Seguwean religions in the slavery-heavy colonial era, a last hurrah of non-Secularism... but that's subject to revisal.) The planet has many endonyms, of course. Seguweans call it all Seguwe. The Caebaeq priesthood call it, in the ceremonial language Peoppaeq, Luvaśkah (‘big round platform’). Old Orlogians called it O. The Hamak call it ‘perch of the soul’. Aretians usually just call it ‘soil, dirt, earth, ground’, like we call our planet; I often use ‘the earth’ and ‘the world’ for it in my writings. It may get a different common name, in the end.
When I need to refer to the setting as a simulation rather than a planet, I call it ASego. Like Artificial Sego, I guess. Or ‘non-Sego’. It just happened like that because I wanted the folder to be alphabetically first... Then it, too, stuck.
Next update: major (modern) language families of Sego (as presently known).
