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Vahthil. Ah'arvhylelfarel'ai halno-uleholyl'y? (Greetings. Do you speak Elvish?)

Yep, conlanging is fun. Over the past few... weeks or so, I've been working on the elvish language. Well, not much has been done, apart of a bit of grammar and sounds. Vocabulary is quite small. I've also worked on something a bit odd, a program to assist me - a dictionary program written in Java. Makes the whole work a lot easier later on.

This has been an eye-opening experience all right. =)

I'd better write a little bit more about this later when I'm more sure of what the heck I'm doing. But so far, I have to say, that making the Obligatory Elvish Language seems to be rather fun and probably far more useful than I imagined. In fact, it quite reminds me of the fun I had years ago, with my first weird artistic language. Wow, this new thing actually has a sane grammar: A bit of old Finnish persevering agglutinativeness, combined with a bit Klingonesque suffixing, somewhat original vocabulary and not at all Klingonesque sounds. I try to not make it as simplistic as Klingon though (not that Klingon's simple grammar is a bad thing at all)...

Oh, and I tried to draw some letters, too. Hope these will look like something.

A note to self and other people who write: If you think you make a good joke, hope you'll find it funny in a couple of decades. And, you may end up needing to live with it.

A good case would be Gnerdnygr Adithebadoggr. The character was first mentioned in Faira's backstory. Faira's backstory, of course, was written semi-jokingly; While I want the overall tone to stay fairly serious and realistic, I went consciously slightly over the top with that story.

At that time, I didn't think much about the character naming. Fantasy stories are always rather complicated what comes to naming of the people. After making the bad joke, it was time to get back to the reality and start rationalising this... challenging name.

I initially thought it'd be fairly simple; humans speak one language, elves another language, and Gnedrnygr is from a distant country with a completely different language. Nowadays, the languages would be Varmian, Elven and Colemian, respectively.

The real story behind Gnedrnygr's name is very simple: There's Grignr, widely known as "just like Conan but more difficult to pronounce". Then I rationalised my choice as "Okay, it's a good fantasy name. Good fantasy names are difficult to pronounce." And then I realized that hey, where Gnedrnygr comes from, there's more folks named the same way.

That's the lesson that you need to remember. Jokes may not kill you, but you end up supporting them if they get real enough!

So this is where the Colemian language starts evolving from. It's probably going to sound kind of like ancient Norse. Just that I don't know much how that sounds like, but still.