Conlang poetry

[sasasha]

Has anyone done any serious poetry-writing in their conlangs, and if so, would you care to share?

I haven't (tried to do that since I was 12*), but it's something I would definitely like to work towards.

By 'serious' poetry, I suppose I mean con-poetry that is written at least in part for its poetic value (judged entirely by yourself), rather than purely its conworlding value i.e. to demonstrate a poetic metre or somesuch.


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*It was an aabb... rhyming poem with 5 variable feet per line, in my first conlang Hyiltë - something embarrassing about stars of which I only remember two lines... it's juvenile (both the conlang and the poem), but being shared as payment for yours, so no one need be more embarrassed than me.

Onen ce isradïn sïm o adhrielan alena
Tin gagrüli e sïm o adhrielan ondena

Those who stare at the beautiful stars
Are more beautiful than the stars themselves

[Kuchigakatai]

I remember once seeing about 10 or 15 poems by Rhetorica (who hasn't come here in four or five years) in her conlang, written in the conscript...

Hallow XIII used to write a lot of tiny 2-4 line poems as conlang samples. After seeing him doing that now and then, I once wrote a short 8-line-long poem as a sample of an old conlang of mine that I once worked on a lot, but I can't find it again. It was about Nature not caring about human affairs. I do remember the first line though:

iulla mreoso lu atrilli eiaias
[ˈjul.la ˈmɾeo̯so lu. aˈtɾil.li. eˈja.jas]
iull-a mreos-o lu atrill-i ei-aias
sun-SG.NOM moon-SG.NOM 1PL observe-PRES equal-ADV
'The Sun and the Moon observe us all the same...'

atrilli is derived from trillu 'eye' with the noun>verb prefix a-. iull-a is derived from il 'day' with the suffix -Ca that geminates the last consonant and derives agent nouns from nouns, the metaphor being that the Sun is 'what does/makes the day' (the -u- is an epenthetic vowel that follows /i/ before coda /l/, and then */iw/ phonologically turns into /ju/ [ju]; il escapes this because it's a monosyllabic noun, so it gets length instead [i:l]).

And don't forget the tons of translations of the 7-Kill Stele that Nortaneous, Hallow XIII and Travis B. have done for years.

[Nortaneous]

languages of the Allosphere have occasional translated excerpts (of varying poetic convention adherence) from the Vtsznxmqpye Pvpchqpye Zzxzzyx, an epic poem detailing the formation of the Empire of Zzxzzyx (and heavily promoted by the imperial government as a tool of legitimization), although a full text in the original Zzyxwqnp does not currently exist and is unlikely to, and the translations do not particularly attempt to be "good"

my guess is that the majority of such content has been produced by zeuhl bands. I considered repurposing Hlu into a zeuhl band language but then realized it's even uglier and more unwieldy than English, which is an achievement

[Pedant]

I managed to get most of the way through the story of Quethan and Cequiyan (basically Cain and Abel) in Ytalanite when I was in high school. Even had a song to go with it...

[Curlyjimsam]

I've never really got anywhere with this sort of thing, though I've often wanted to. The closest I've got to it is in making up languages from scratch as I write the poems in them - those languages have never been used for anything else or had extensive grammars etc. But I've not done much even of that, and the ones I have I don't have to hand.

I'd be interested to hear what people's method is, in trying to write conlang poems. I've always felt I'd be strongly tempted to just make up the words to fit, which would be a lot easier than restricting myself to the existing vocabulary (and would be a good way of widening it), but which would also feel like cheating somewhat.

Oh, and I really like the example you give, sasasha, I don't think it seems juvenile at all.

[warbear]

When I tried to write the first text in my conlang it turned out to be poetic. I did it unintentionally.

Rúdǝ kʰíla čánti tʰáṷti pʰákak
íša čánta čúgod mútax wógod
bʼátǝč áli tʰáut íkʲǝ tápak
bʼátadǝ daxrúnʲ ǯukárgče nándak
cʰal buód: jurlýgʷak wáš tʷumárxo
ǯézlo bʼáta pjátak kʰidǝ jánxak,
tʼátak wášǝm kʰíwǝ bórgod úlla

The World is a Tree, that grows from the Great Goblet, in which it's roots repose. It is covered from above with a great Shield, on which the Ever Being Forgeman designed all the times. The Aeonic Fire revolves around the Goblet, it's light is reflected by the Shield and lights the Tree, giving it life.

tʼ, pʼ, kʼ are ejecktives, bʼ, dʼ, gʼ are implosives, ǯ stands for d͡ʒ, x for voiceless velar or uvular fricative. ǝ is an extra-short vowel.

Then I wrote a little more. Since the stress is mostly on penultimate syllable, it's quite easy to compose verses in this language.

[Pabappa]

I like the ǯ.

By 'serious' poetry, I suppose I mean con-poetry that is written at least in part for its poetic value (judged entirely by yourself), rather than purely its conworlding value i.e. to demonstrate a poetic metre or somesuch.

"Serious" isnt a word that goes well with my main conlangs, but .... from an internal perspective, Poswobs are proud of their poetry. Prayers, for example, have a predictable rhythm, such as 4-3-4-3:

http://verduria.org/viewtopic.php?p=24720#p24720

I dont see it in the post, but I know I explained somewhere that rhyming poetry is no good in Poswa because there are so many repeating vowel-final inflections that it's actually hard to *avoid* having rhymes all over the place, and alliteration isnt much valued either because /p/ and /b/ are so common in word-initial position that it takes no skill to compose such sentences. Perhaps alliteration by full syllables instead of just the consonant would work, but I dont know. Likely, the best poetry in Poswa would be deeply intellectual, such that to anyone not fluent in the language it would appear to be just like any old text in the language, with no audibly distinct features except its rhythm.

I however am not much for intellectual poetry ... I can basically only do limericks and rhyming poems that look like they came from Dr Seuss. It's possible to write long chains of sentences in Poswa in which the only consonant is /p/, but there can never be any transitive verbs (as those always contain /b/), genitives or serial verbs (as those both contain /s/), or locatives or datives (as those always contain /m/; this use also covers categories of inflection difficult to describe with traditional terms). That means the only case marker allowed is the accusative, which is /p/, but because there can't be any transitive verbs, there's not a whole lot that can be done with it.

Papepapepapie, pu?
Pupo! Papepapopapopio, po pappapapo, pyp pep pope!

You need to spit, right?
No! I dont need to spit, I want to go to the bathroom really bad, but youre in the way!

Thats about the limit of what I can do, right there. Anything else would just be repetitions of the same basic dialog with different words.

There is no reduplication in Poswa of any kind .... /papepape/ does not repeat any morphemes within itself, and neither does /papie/ contain any of those morphemes except for the 2nd person marker /e/. The only repeating morphemes here are the person markers and /papepap/ "spit".

Whether this counts as poetry is a matter of opinion .... it's more narrowly part of what in English is called constrained writing.