Orphaned languages of Teppala

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.

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.

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 child with 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.) Thus Wamians "couldnt even say their own country's name".

The (post-2010) Thaoa lanuggae 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.