Orphaned languages of Teppala

Note that, despite the title of this page, it might be better described as Orphaned conlangs of Teppala. These are not actually minor languages; they're languages that don't have a place in my current conworld because it's historically impossible for them to exist alongside the others. None of them has proper diachronics because I created these languages at a time when I didn't know better.

Moonshine (1994)

This was a language I created in 1994, and was my first true a priori conlang. It had no ancestors or daughters, and I remember considering it to be eternal. It was very compact, and I remember writing "Power speaks a language that works in its written but not its spoken form". That is to say, Moonshine was so full of homophones that it was literally impossible to communicate in Moonshine out loud without being ambiguous. It could be compared to a hypothetical Japanese in which the kanji are used freely, meaning that, for example, the syllable /shō/ could refer to any of more than 70 kanji, which nevertheless would be perfectly understandable when written down.

Phonology of Moonshine

Early signs of my love for babylike speech were visible in Moonshine. On my very earliest sketch of the language, I gave it a phonology with no dorsal consonants at all: there were labials and coronals, and that's all. However, I slowly warmed to the idea of pushing the postalveolar series (/č ǯ š ž ñ ṇ̃/, the last being a voiceless nasal) into velars.

Another trait that Moonshine had in common with baby babbling was that there were no /r/ or /l/ sounds. However, this was because I wanted the language to have a perfectly symmetrical phonology, and could not figure out a way to work liquids into the system. Later on, I added them anyway, saying that /r/ was the opposite partner of /l/.

Moonshine was also tonal, but I literally didn't know what tones were, even if one might think it should have been obvious. I seemed not to realize that it was possible for people to change the pitch of their voice while speaking and thought that it must have been a metaphor for some concept I didn't fully understand. Later, I abandoned the tones and repurposed the high-tone vowels as diphthongs, meaning that there was exactly one diphthong for each pure vowel.

Almost every root, even those for complex things, was monosyllabic. I remember wanting a language that looked "modern" and compact, and I remember holding up Hungarian as a model to follow.

Moonshine culture

I always identified Moonshine with cold weather, imagining its population as somehow consisting entirely of teenagers and children eating ice cream outdoors in the middle of a blizzard. It was the language spoken "north and east of Russian".

The name had nothing to do with alcohol, but rather with its speakers' apparent cultural habit of being nocturnal and avoiding the sun.

Mathematics

Moonshine was a mathematical language, meaning that new words were oftne derived by mathematically adding two words together. For example, pō might become pūb.

Dictionary

Although I had access to a computer, I kept my dictionary on paper, which meant that the dictionary was not in alphabetical order, but rather in the order that I came up with each word. Some years later, when I copied the English side of the wordlist to a computer, words that had been created on the same day in the original Moonshine ended up being next to each other alphabetically in the new language. This is why the words for "housewife" (wurop) and "urethra" (wupurop) resemble each other so much in Pabappa and other languages that I derived from this old paper wordlist.

Aesthetics and goals

Despite the handicap of a paper dictionary (which my mom eventually threw out) and a naive phonology, I considered Moonshine my best work for a long time, and it is the only one of my "oldoldold" conlangs that I've attempted to revive. I had such high standards, though, that the lexicon was never more than a few hundreds words at its peak and it is lower than that now.

Asup

One of a few names for a conlang I created in 1997 and played with for about a year afterwards. It was rigidly structured, and good at succinctly expressing religious concepts. For example, the root word for church was an, and there were two roots for God: al and m. (I believe that I didnt capitalize them.) There were also monomorphemic roots for things such as "forgiven baby" (īpp) and "spirited man" (I dont remember this one though). Both of these were intended to be interpreted with meanings related to Christianity.

The phonology of Asup was not as babylike as that of Moonshine. However, I still do not consider it to have been a "harsh" guttural type of language. There were five vowels and an array of consonants somewhat smaller than that of Moonshine. There was also a syllabic m, which could be short or long (this was around the time that the song MMMBop came out).

Asupian was a very dynamic language, in the sense that I changed it rapidly as I worked on it. Eventually I shaded into Echo.

Echo

Echo was a lanuggae I created in 1998. It was my first language to embrace ideas that I disliked, such as a relatively small phonology, and a slow speech tempo that made sentences in Echo longer than in English quite often.

It was a "tropical" language as well, in the sense that when I was working on Echo I had fallen in love with tropical Africa and wanted to make the Camians somehow a warm-climate culture, despite their history of having always identified themselves with cold. THis is why Camia was suddenly a racially diverse nation, with the self-insert character being halfway in between white and black. I did not consider him mixed-race; I felt that Camia would have a separate identity for people like him that didn't depend on what his parents looked like. However, I seem to have considered dark-haired people to automatically not be white, meaning that someone could actually change their race as they grew up if their hair got darker (I didnt know at the time that people's hair often changed color ,despite it having happened to myself).

Echo was also the first language to have proper tones, as Moonshine's tones were created at a time when I didnt understand how tones worked.

Wamian

Not really a single language, "the Wamian language" is essentially a term for any lanuggae consisting of features I dont like, which goes to the nation of "Wamia", which itself is not a single nation but rather a term for any nation fulfilling a similar role.

When I was 10 years old, Wamian was essentially English spoken by a particular boy who had a speech impediment. So severe was his speech impediment that he didnt replace all /l/ and /r/ sounds with /w/, as stereotypical toddlers did ,but instead replaced all /l/, /r/, and /w/ sounds with /b/. (As some toddlers do.) The boy's name was Gary, but he could only call himself "Gabby". Thus just as Wamians "couldnt even say their own country's name", he couldn't say his.

Later I seem to have decided that Wamians spoke a language that had changed very rapidly over time, whereas Camians spoke a language that was extremely conservative. If planet Teppala had been settled by the Proto-Germanic people, Wamians today would be speaking modern English, while Camians would be speaking something resembling Gothic or perhaps even a language still intelligible with proto-Germanic itself.

Xap

This language could be considered to be as one with Andanese, since it shares the same phonology and alphabet, and has a similar grammar. But Xap's lexicon was still of the type where the language did not have a proper history, and therefore I "spammed" the dictionary by dumping in thousands of words from old, abandoned conlangs that didn't make sense when mixed together. On the other hand, the freestyle approach to lexicon building allowed me to make oddly specific words such as:

• kutaka "mayor sign in the middle of the road"
• kahalaca " locked in jail with the hands and head stuck outside the cell"
• yukana " relying on intelligence and physical strength only "
• nihilalaka "without any divine intervention"
• luala "to behave like a "mascot", trying to sweep away conflict by making jokes"

Some words had private definitions that, even with explanation, would still be meaningless to other people:

• muhua " uipila abandon all hope ye who enter here"
• kutau "Beethoven"

` The language also had enormous piles of synonyms, with no difference in meaning whatsoever between many words. For example, the words ahahama, kumihanana, kuna, kunana, lanahala, and luna all mean "moon" and each can substitute for any other with no change in meaning. (Luna is not a loanword from any Earth language; even here, I stuck firmly to a priori instincts. The pre-Andanese form of the word was something like lónay.) I think these six are just six of a much larger set of Andanese words of which most have not survived, because I remember once saying that Andanese/Xap had "nine words for cat and no word for pants" whereas in the dictionary I have now I can "only" find seven words for cat.

The most extreme example I can find is that Andanese has 43 words for "love". Although some are given specific definitions, more than half of them are defined simply as "love" and therefore can substitute for each other with no change in semantics.

Some words were taken from the names of characters (mostly female) in my earlier work. For example, a girl named Kaiciti gave her name to the emotion of being "in awe at the power before her".

History of Xap

Xap actually began as a language called Abapes. Xap is the same name after a series of sound changes, although the sound changes were not of the proper historical type; I was still thinking of the language as being detached from culture and time and therefore my sound changes were random and unrealistic. The name "Xap" actually merges several words, not just Abapes. One of them is Zebes, the name of the planet in the first Metroid game. Normally, I've thrown out all borrowed names like that, but in this case I kept it because it's a triple etymology (Zebes, Abapes, and Peepa).

Thaoa (2010)

The (post-2010) Thaoa language began as an attempt to create a language full of features I disliked, but as I worked on it I came to find beauty in it after all. Nevertheless, it is my least favorite of the conlangs I am working on now, and I find it difficult to put any significant effort into it.