Okay, so I'm going to fully nerd out
in this one, and no-one can stop me. For the uninitiated, this is a
"conlang", a constructed language, specifically an "artlang", which is a
language created for artistic purposes. This conlang is one of many I've made
for a fantasy world called Dycratus, but it was my first, so it's... I mean, I worked on this for years,
in-universe this language has over a thousand years of history, its own literature, poetry,
linguistic debates, sociolects and dialects... This is Meyhendgar (the "h" is silent), and we
are not going to go into all that in this video... It's like Tolkien's elven
languages in Lord of the Rings, made up to exist in-universe, so
still supposed to be naturalistic. Naturalistic conlangs are supposed
to seem like real languages, with features that could feasibly appear in
the natural development of a human language, whilst the more non-naturalistic a conlang gets,
the less emphasis is put on this, until you get languages like Ithkuil, which could never - and
isn't meant to - have evolved as a human language. It's arguably not even possible
to be fluent in it as a human! For the rest of the video, I'll be
talking about Meyhendgar in-universe as much as possible, as if it were a
real language, to give an overview. So if you're as big a nerd
as me, sit back and enjoy! But first, how about you sit back and enjoy all
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you to Blinkist for sponsoring this video. And now let's get back to it! Meyhendgar is the official language
of the Great Republic of Meyhend, a USA-inspired federal republic on the
continent of Meyhend in the centre of Dycratus. It is also called "the Midlands",
but I generally use the Meyhendgar name now to avoid confusion with
the most hated part of England. I'm going to be talking here about Classical
Meyhendgar, spoken in the 7- and 800s Second Age. This is a largely constructed language -
in-universe, I mean - because at the time, the GRM was split up between hundreds
of different local languages, and a common tongue was deemed necessary. Enter Asoro Undu, who created
the first version of Meyhendgar, essentially a heavily simplified version
of his own native Mekeyar language. Mekeyar was one of the major languages in
the union, and I've designed this one as well - it has nine cases and five grammatical
genders and it's certainly believable... in the same way, I don't know,
Hungarian or Mongolian are believable... but it's very complicated. It was
the de facto official language of the country because it was spoken
in one of the most powerful states, Mjukar, and was the lingua franca of the
capital city, where a lingua franca is a language used for communication between
people with different native languages. A faction of academics and politicians viewed this
highly difficult language as a further barrier to poorer states in the union, and to those without
the wealth and/or luck to be educated in it. Undu was one of these, which is why he,
and later his students, created Meyhendgar. It has only four cases,
which might seem complicated, but is a massive improvement, remember... it had completely regular
derivation systems for adjectives, nouns and verbs... and it
had no grammatical gender. In fact, Meyhendgar has no
gendered vocabulary whatsoever, apart from "mother" and "father". If you
want to specify that your sibling is female, you have to say just that -
"sibling female", "bolhan doya". This is again due to its
semi-constructed nature in-universe. Since it was being championed by a band
of progressives, such as Undu himself, the language was actively created
to de-emphasise gender roles. The gender system in the Renral
Desert has men (gaya), women (doya), and a third gender, which originally
grew out of a priest class, teya. For the philosophical fun of it, I
decided to go for a confining and highly discriminatory gender
trinary instead of binary. Meyhendgar was successfully introduced in various
stages, and became the common language of the GRM. Because of the multilinguistic
nature of the city of Särnukno, it actually became the language of instruction
there, until it completely replaced Mekeyar. Because of the influence of the city in the
surrounding areas, much of Mjukar became Meyhendgar-speaking, and by the 8th century,
we have native speakers of the language. A lot of Mekeyar irregularity has at this
point been reintroduced into the language, because of the close contact between the two, and a lot of new vocabulary has
been generated from derivation and from loanwords, making it look
much more like a natural language. It is at this point the language of government
at the federal level of the Republic. It continues to develop, throughout the next
millennium, becoming more naturalistic as it moves away from its constructed roots, going through
several sound shifts and changes in morphology, one of its cases disappears - but this
version here in the 8th and 9th centuries is what I want to focus on, because it's
the most fleshed out form of the language. Meyhendgar's phonology is relatively simple, as Undu defined the phonemes very loosely
and used few of them (at least compared to Mekeyar) to allow for variation for the
different first-language speakers in the GRM. The Mjukarian Standard, which is what we're
considering in this video here, has 15 consonants. This velar fricative here only
occurs at the beginning of words, and /z/ and /l/ become devoiced - /s/ and /l̥/
- when in a cluster with voiceless plosives. It has seven or eight vowels,
depending on sociolect. The closed vowels /i/ and /u/ are pronounced
a little longer than other vowels. The vowel /ɛ/ is the only vowel with a long and short
version, from where /e/ has become long /ɛː/. Meyhendgar also has phonemic stress, with the
emphasis usually falling on the first syllable of a word, but being shifted with the addition
of a haka on the vowel of a subsequent syllable. This looks like a simple underlining. Put
this haka on the first vowel of a word, and you get that velar fricative from earlier. Talking of the orthography, this is the
Elemgrek alphabet used to write Meyhendgar. Originally, it was written top-to-bottom or
left-to-right, but the left-to-right version became more prominent due to the influence
of the left-to-right Archipelagan script. Some other letters aren't always included in the
alphabet, but are still used in the scripture. Then there's the system of "riyag",
shortened script, where pronouns, grammatical particles, and other commonly
used words and morphemes have their own logographic characters, usually descended
from the corresponding character in Mekeyar. Grammatically, Meyhendgar is again... fairly
simple, but it's still, you know, a language. Verbs are conjugated in four forms from the stem - two of these are imperatives, with the regular imperative adding
"-a" to the stem as in "tenepa", "do!", and the imperative ending "-ene"
as in "tenepene", "please do". The other conjugations are the forwards and
backwards forms, as Meyhendian linguists call them in-world, which relate to the order
of the agent and patient of the sentence. The word order is completely free, but
if the agent appears in the sentence before the patient does, the forwards
form is employed, ending in "-tu", like in the sentence "chaka kumtu
nyewat" - "they like the town". If the agent appears after the
patient, the backwards form is used, with a "-rar" ending in writing, which is
generally shortened to "-ra" in speech, like in "nyewat chaka kumra", which could be
translated as "the town is liked by them", but is perhaps more accurately
"the town is what they like", or, "you know that town? They like it." Meyhendgar may have free word order,
but it prefers topic-prominent clauses, which means sentences and clauses
tend to start with the thing or information which is being talked about,
followed by a comment on that thing. You can also see some other word
order preferences in these sentences, such as the fact that pronouns
tend to go before the verb. For a negative, the prefix "-ru"
is added to the front of the verb. There's also no prepositions in Meyhendgar, you just have words like "dam" instead,
which is the verb "to be under". Nouns have four or five forms,
depending on who's counting. We can take the base form of a noun, like
"get" ("stone", or "stones", or "a stone", or "the stone" - you get the idea, there's no
articles or definiteness or number declension) and "dalchet", person. So there's the genitive,
with ending "-ia" for nouns, or just "-t" for pronouns, which shows
that something possesses something else, like in "get dalchetia", "the stone of
the person" or "the person's stone". Again, the word order is free here, so you can say "dalchetia get" if the
person is the topic of the clause. Then there's the secondary genitive, with ending
"-itia" for nouns, or "-tia" for pronouns, and this is the genitive of a genitive, like
in "get bolhania wätia", "my sibling's stone", whereas "get bolhania wät" would
be "the sibling's and my stone". By the way, in theory, the genitive of a genitive of a genitive would loop back round
to the primary genitive, and so on. Then there's the subordinate form, which is formed
by adding the last vowel of the noun onto the end. So "get" becomes "gete", "ayk"
becomes "ayka"... or by adding "-n" plus the last vowel onto a
pronoun, so "wä" becomes "wänä". This is triggered by certain verbs, conjunctions,
and is used to avoid super complex nouns. It essentially makes words get grouped together
into a single argument within the sentence and it even allows certain subordinate "clauses"
to be split. "Dalchet achan wä atipra yegan". "That person there, I think they're nice." Finally, there's a compound form, which is
used to string nouns together German-style, like "get" becoming "getas" to make
words like "getaspyal", "stone tool". Adjectives are declined according
to the noun they refer to, with these endings. They can also be
turned into adverbs by adding "-r". Then there's four types of conjunctions,
and there's also verbs which take what would correspond to indirect objects - these are added
in their compound form to the front of the verb... There are affixes which specify the
intensity of a verb or amount of a noun... There's temporal particles to show when an
action takes place, like "lak", to show an action is finished, "pik", to show an action hasn't
started yet, "her", where an action is ongoing... And then there's the weird particle "le"
that I don't even know how to define, and which we're not going into in this video... so if you want to know about that, uh, like
and comment and subscribe or something I don't kn-
