Art Orcish Conlang

Disclaimer: Go read the attached PDF. That's where the actual work is, this post is just a flyer.​

The Orcish Language
Xunoster olina yepokyunu. R hisrrejo. Ostertein hessabehes hot.
by hmtn​

Total Dev Time: 10 months.
Number of "Final" Versions: four
Fugue Counter: something like twenty
Ridiculous Spellings/Pronunciations? Yes.
Cursed-O-Meter: better than Ancient Wynnic ig


Overview/Credits

Orcish, endonym Orsyepok, is a constructed language, fresh from the presses. This was a solo project, but the various other people in the small conlanging community we have set up helped look over and proofread quite a bit of it. Special thanks to @Selvut283, who both wrote a lot of the original lore for the Orcs and answered a bunch of questions during the project itself.

Structure

Orcish is another agglutinative language, though it has some fusional elements and a large number of analytic constructions. It is stress-timed, generally head-initial, and has a default Verb-Object-Subject sentence structure, though word order can be somewhat loose.

The language has a strict Ergative-Absolutive morphosyntactic alignment, which means that the subject of intransitive clauses (Durbeo sleeps) and the patient of transitive ones (Miliyus sees Durbeo) are marked the same. The agent of transitive clauses is marked separately.

Within the aforementioned loose word order, Orcish tends to emphasize the topic, with -tein clauses and oon constructions to draw focus to and front it. Extensive passive and antipassive voices allow the agents and topics of clauses to be easily disconnected from the subject. Orcish is syllable-timed, though the penultimate syllable of a word almost always receives the stress.

Script

The language also comes with an extra goodie: That writing system that you may have seen me peddling around here a few months back. Here is the Western Greenskin Alphabet:

Spoiler: Several Rather Large Images

Consonants


Vowels


In action.

The script is broadly descended from classical High Gavellian, with some alterations made to better fit the languages it was designed for. Think of the alterations made to the Greek Script to arrive at Cyrillic, for example.

For more information on the entire language, I very much do recommend checking out the PDF attached to this post. This thing is massive, and dense, and no tl;dr I could give here of its major features could do the full documentation justice. Said documentation is designed to be readable even if you don't have a background in linguistics, and feedback on that would be appreciated <3

See you all next time!
- hmtn​

 

me when i see :

 

Good job!!!

 

Jeludiryeoyun Hmtna xuntein.

(might have errors, correct me if so)

 

"hmtn is this eloquent written material, which is good."

Verbs are clitic prefixes. Jeludir being fully expanded and only having suffixes means that this is a copular phrase between two nouns.

 

Oops. (btw jeludir doesn't have a clitic form, at least according to the lexicon section). I try again thus:

Jeludiryepokyun Hmtna xuntein.
Wrote-language-this Htmn good-ly
"Htmn wrote this language well."

 

nnn, i see i see. a lack of clitic in the dictionary means that the clitic and expanded forms are the same, which means that this is grammatically correct. And thank you, that's very sweet.

 

i have dogun. now i have this. i am happy.

 

soon, we will have more!