The Shady Post Shadowed's Personal Blog From the Depths of Her Mind by: ShadowedSin

My thoughts on the world and what is coming about for the future! Expect at least one post from the Shady Place of my mind at least once a week or once every two weeks when I'm busy.

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"Dia daoibh mo gcairde!" Sa bearla, "Hello my friends!"

This last week has been - good and not good. I have been experiencing only what I can call mental crashes or possibly small psychotic breaks. Luckily, my family, friends and the woman in my life has helped me through it. Only through my inner circle have I really been able to work through the ongoing stress. Most don't know this, but my little sister is immunocompromised and so is my dad. This whole COVID-19 thing has driven me insane. I've done my best to field the random customer questions at work and trying to not let my ongoing mental health get too bad. Some people are respecting the six-foot imposed distance here in my home state, and others aren't really caring.

I work in a pet shop as a cashier and as a petcare specialist. One problem I've faced is that there are times where my brain blanks and my usually awesome customer service just -ceases-. I do feel bad when this happens, but at the end of the day I can't worry over every unhappy customer. I help at least 20 people daily.

NOW ON TOPIC!

I have likely mentioned it at least to anyone who has met me on knows that I make up "constructed languages" or "conlangs" for short. I have about 2-6 that have small dictionaries and a few pages of notes. More so with lists of phonologies and even more. Basically, I'm a modern Tolkien in my style of writing and even the simplest thing I work on has some weird little rules on how I name things. One of my favorite styles is much like what we see say in A Song of Ice and Fire where everything has a very simplistic, and yet specific style.

Middle Earth, on the other hand, has a lot of linguistic work put into the unique toponyms found across the world. I mean Gondor coms from the Sindarin words meaning "Stone" and and "Land". I like to apply these rules to the world I'm building and to give the world the history it needs. All of it requires a lot of thought and my conlang process (which I will describe at length in future blogs) involves a lot of thought. Often, I take inspiration and ideas from natural languages (natlangs) to help me build something that feels authentic. The other thing I try to do is, in turn, draw attention to the languages mine take influence from.

I always start with the phonology - the sound category of the language. Next, I start assigning sound clusters to create the unique cadence of the words itself. Once that is all done comes the fun part designing the initial morphemes (units of meaning) to the language itself. From that I paint a unique view and voice for the people who use it.