well alrighty! been waiting to do one of these for a good while now. in fact, logging and implementing conlangs is one of the big factors in why i wanted to put a blog together in the first place. practice, expand, discuss. that’s kind of the goal of these posts, which i plan on turning into a kind of series. not with any regularity, for sure, but maybe a post every few weeks or so, just talking about what i’m thinking about when i add things to a lang, explaining concepts and mechanics within a lang, etc. i’m no linguist, so expect rudimentary descriptions at best and completely incomprehensible strings of words and punctuation at worst.,

intro and some etymology

“what is aurna?” i hear you say, “why do i care?” well, first, aurna is a conlang, a constructed language, of my own creation. it’s been an entirely solo project, is incomplete, and only partially functional. why should you care? no reason. it’s not groundbreaking. but it is mine and i’m proud of it. and it’s my blog, so you can suck it.

aurna (or ji-Åk'ŭna, as the aurna would say) is the language spoken by the aurna peoples (barring dialects). it is the native language for most people born on the continent of Aurunum. that word (aurunum) comes from the Chroma (another conlang) for “golden land” or “place of the golden people”. this name, in turn, comes from “aurna” (topical!), a bastardization of the “-ŭna” sound from above. the Chroma are a colonial people, but at least mildly culturally aware.

aurna is the most comprehensive conlang that i have put together as yet. i’ve tried a few others, but normally get hung up on the lexicon nefore working out the grammar. the step that came prior to aurna was Chroma, for which i basically just stole a bunch of Latin-esque sounds and words and fit them together in ways that sounded cool. as i was working on it, i started to notice a lot of things that i didn’t really like. things like the sentence structure, how stress fell, the way long sentences would be strung together, and so on. i started to think of novel ways i could construct words and sentences in a more naturalistic way. i also had some ideas i wanted to explore, like the idea of “domains”, which still exist in aurna and will be discussed a bit later. these ideas synthesized into a structure that made sense amd could be expanded more easily.

chroma was, at its core, a game language. i made it to make puzzles and texts in my homebrew d&d world more immersive. but it had a lot of shortfalls because of that. it was too rigid, too essentially english. aurna, on the other hand, was conceived from the beginning as an independent entity. it has some ties to chroma and my homebrew world, yes, but is mostly a clean slate. i’ve dived way deeper into the lore and culture and customs of aurna than i did for the chroma people, despite my thousands of years of very surface-level histories of the latter. i think that’s why aurna holds such a special place in my heart, too. it’s got its own soul, its own life. i can imagine how people talk with aurna, i can see how to formulate new sentences, more complex sentences. i know the rules for how words are formed. it’s alive!

the basics

so like i said above, aurna uses a few different “domains” as the base of many words. for example, anything to do with the four elements (and inanimate objects in general) starts with í: íd is fire, ím is earth, íç is water, and ís is air. aurna uses one click in its phonology, as well, which is represented (in ascii) with the character ŧ. this is the animal domain. k' (including the apostrophe) is the character representing the human domain. there also exist domains for “fish” or water creatures, and plants. these are represented by ń and ɫ, respectively. that last one is a pain in the ass, since my keyboard won’t type it via composition, so i have to copy it or look it up every time. ugh.

putting words together is a pretty simple process, too. it’s just plain-jane concatenation! to illustrate: think about a bird. birds are animals, so they must be in the ŧ domain. since they also fly, we pair the domain with the word for air, ís, to create our morpheme ŧís. this can get pretty lengthy pretty quick, as you might expect. as such, the aurna make extensive use of contraction. this is pretty often unmarked and is an aspect of their culture to the point that many children are given nicknames that are contractions of their full given names.

word order is also super important in aurna. or, rather, phoneme order. maybe morpheme order? i don’t know. anyway, the bits of basic words that get stitched together to make a new word can be rearranged to put the emphasis on other ideas. take the very similar words k'oçím and k'ímoç. both of these words are made from the same roots: the human domain indicator k', ím “earth”, and oç “part”. in both of these words, we actually take differing meanings of ím, neither of which are “earth”! in k'oçím, which means “bone”, we think of ím as a hard thing or stone. paired with k'oç, which is essentially “human bit”, this makes “hard bit of a human” – k'oçím. on the other hand, for k'ímoç, we take k'ím as a whole, meaning “person”. with oç this makes “human part”.

final thoughts

this post is getting pretty long, so i’m going to go ahead and wrap it up. tune in next time for some notes on sentence structure, maybe a new translation if you’re lucky! for now, i’ll leave you with one of the samples i have ready on conworkshop. thanks for reading.

kˈuç ʋavòí-heð roeðemŭn· ijha, k’a eçí k’uç, ga joʋí-soðumríɡůð k’as uʋa ɫiçí ga ísuvò jeʋa naχ uʋa avçí ga·

I thoroughly disapprove of duels. If a man should challenge me, I would take him kindly and forgivingly by the hand and lead him to a quiet place and kill him.

— Mark Twain