A conlang with ambitions of organic growth and poetic reach
The roots of this project are anchored in my ongoing fascination with endangered and extinct languages. A discreet yet important influence from Sanskrit, owing to the four years I spent studying it before and during my Bachelor's in linguistics, has guided my foray into this conlanging experiment. Since linguistic revitalisation efforts have multiplied across the United States and conservation projects are bearing their fruit in France, I wanted to see where an imaginary fusion of widely spoken and niche languages could lead. This conlang has two goals: the first is to fuel my creative writing by adding additional constraints to my process of composition, the second is to study how different languages grapple with meaning both in the past and in the present. My sources are a little haphazard (experiential evidence, etymology, translation studies, formal semantics etc.), based on personal research and motivated by my teachers' fight to keep their disciplines alive and relevant.
This language is called vērvānje [vɚ'vaɲɛ], or metamorphosis, as it represets a complete rearranging of sounds and signifiers of the languages I hear, speak, and study. In these sections you will find the various features of my conlang including its writing conventions with the latin script, the writing system as a form of calligraphy, its phonemes and how I envision its articulation, its phonotactics, its grammar, and a trilingual dictionary (still a work in progress).
Many thanks for visiting this page and don't hesitate to share your ideas with me on my socials!
In each of the three columns, the letters used in vērvānje are on the left and its pronounciation to the right of the arrow. Those unfamiliar with the International Phonetic Alphabet should check it out to better understand, as I avoided using conventions like "oo like in fool" which are subject to local accents depending on where the speaker lives or is from.
| Vowels | Consonants | Digraphs & Trigraphs |
|---|---|---|
| ā → [a] | h → [x] | an → [ɑ̃] |
| e → [ɛ] | ḡ → [ɣ] | en → [ɛ̃] |
| o → [ɔ] | k → [k] | on → [ɔ̃] |
| a → [ə] | g → [g] | īn → [ĩ] |
| ē/i → [e] | j → [j] | ēr → [ɚ] |
| ö → [œ] | ɥ → [ɥ] | kh [kʰ] |
| u → [u] | x → [ʃ] | ng [ŋ] |
| y → [ɨ] | ż → [ʒ] | tx → [t͡ʃ] |
| i → [i] | l → [l]/[ɫ] | dż → [d͡ʒ] |
| ü → [y] | s → [s] | ts → [t͡s] |
| z → [z] | dz → [d͡z] | |
| r → [ɾ] | th → [tʰ] | |
| t → [t] | nj → [ɲ] | |
| d → [d] | a'n → [ən] | |
| n → [n] | e'n → [ɛn] | |
| f → [f] | o'n → [ɔn] | |
| v → [v] | ī'n → [in] | |
| w → [w] | ph → [pʰ] | |
| p → [p] | ||
| b → [b] | ||
| m → [m] |
The spelling is phonetic in nature, in an effort to be as transparent as possible. Over the course of its elaboration, I've changed a number of the language's features including the pronounciation of consonant clusters and vowel combinations. Information on word pronounciation, accentuation and the like are available in the Phonetics & Phonology tab.