Hail Njörðr!
Hail Rán!
Hail Ægir!
Hail to the Nine Undine Goddesses!
Thank you for the bounty of the sea, of life that swims and strains
Thank you for the sweat of fishermen, the strong meat of the oceans
That raise up from the depths and nourish us
Thank you, Holy Ones.
Hail to the Gods of the Seas, the Oceans, the Rivers, the Lakes, and the Streams!
Hail to the Gods of the Waters,…
Seeing how my recent conlang sketch that takes place in the same universe is so well received, I might as well share my second most realized conlang. this one is for the aquatic goths at the bottom of Tera's oceans.
the language employs a four consonant root system. like any semitic language but with an extra letter. this was shamelessly lifted from a now-missing language of Lichen the Fictioneer's Skjor. because Ægir is such an old norse aesthetic, and skjor has such in its name alone, I just had to incorporate this feature somehow. (To Lichen the Fictioneer, if this post ever finds you, First of all, I hope this feature won't end up copying what yours would be doing, as unlikely as that may be. second of all really big fan of your work, keep it up).
There are no plosives, affricates, clicks, ejectives, implosives, nor any consonants that completely close the airway. the closest to those would be fricatives, of which there will be many of as explained in the tentative section of this post. this will mean that Skadi's name would be more pronounced [Sxa,.ðhi']. I really like the phonaesthetics of this choice and will not be changing it any time soon.
Now that we got the confirmed features out of the way, let's look over some maybe-inserted ones:
I was thinking that what consonants there are will have a three-by-three-way distinction via voicing and articulation. voicing would distinguish voiced, breathy voiced, and voiceless. while articulation would be plain, aspirated, and palatalized. though I'm on the fence about the palatalization.
I am honestly stumped about what to encode morphologically with the aforementioned features listed above. maybe the classic person-number-case seeing as the four-consonant root system and lack of plosives meets my self-imposed quota of "features I have yet to see in a conlang".
this is all I got for this one. hope you found this interesting. as always, your feedback is appreciated. till next time... ;).
I don't know why but I have an obsession with very minor deities from the norse pantheon.
Ran and Ægir as well as the dynamic I imagine they'd have is one of these obsessions! As well as their 9 daughters like come on how adorable is this?! 🥹
also i love that the Iberian's called the first Ægir who fled to Iberia "Islanders" because of course they wouldn't understand what the Ægir mean when they say they come from the ocean, the idea of whole cities existing underneath the waves seems fantastical, of course they'd reach the conclusion that they must really mean oceanic islands instead
Ægir has a few grammatical numbers that not only mark the amount of a group of the nouns but also the composition of said group. In other words...
Singular applies when there is only one of such noun.
Balanced Dual applies when a pair of something is considered the same or equal.
Biased Dual applies when the two nouns are considered different or not equal.
paucal is for when you have a few of a noun regardless of composition.
Even Plural is for when a group is considered equally distributed in some way.
Odd Plural is for when the group is considered to be unequally distributed.
Collective is used for when referring to all possible types of that noun regardless of composition.
What is considered "balanced" or "biased" or "even" or "odd" is a subjective matter left to the speaker to decide therefore making it telling of what the speaker values through its usage.
In the person marking system these numbers are marked with a vowel that is which out of the eleven that the language has, this system uses seven of. placing the vowel in the place denoting the person in the consonant root (more on that later) determines the number of the person in the subject and/or object of the verb. there is a total of 441 possible combinations of person, number, and case without tense, aspect, mood, nor positional infixes (more on those later).
Overall, I am quite satisfied with the results. (though I was considering having the singular come in different genders. but decided against it as the numbering system with what I consider a unique twist on how nouns are marked for number).
That is all for now. as always, feedback is appreciated.