Angelica

Angelica is spoken by angels? But I don’t really have an idea of what those are in this context. Guys with wings and bioluminescent heads? I had half an idea that they are aggregates of microorganisms that live in the brains of other species, and this language would be derived from their sending strands of chemical proteins through the bloodstream, but I don’t see how such creatures would have the opportunity to develop complex culture, so idk.

Anyway, the gimmick of this language is nesting words inside other words. So pretty much all the words can split into two parts and have stuff in between.

The other gimmick is that there is only one vowel! Or in other words, the language makes no distinction between all the possible vowel sounds.

Vowels to them are like Chinese tones to us. “Listen, learning English isn’t too hard, but what you’ll really need to buckle down on is learning to pronounce vowels. For example, the letters B and T can actually make eight completely different words: bit, bat, but, bot, bet, boot, bout, beet. Could you hear the difference? Don’t overlook vowels, ‘cause they can mean the difference between eating a beet (vegetable) and a boot (footwear)!”

Sounds

The vowel, romanized as ‘o’, is usually pronounced like ‘ih’ or ‘uh’, but really anything’s fine.

The use of the vowel when speaking is pretty loose. There are some required places, but otherwise you can fit it in to break up difficult consonant clusters as you please. In fact, native speakers aren’t aware that they’re doing it.

As for consonants, well, I’m not really interested in learning the IPA, and I already used my ideal pared-down version of the alphabet with Faetongue, so for this I’m just gonna say it pretty much has the same ones as English. (And I’m going to use ‘tx’ to mean a voiced ‘th’ again. Just to zhzh it up a little.)

Structure

The order of words is free and has no hard rules. The nesting is what matters.

A verb is made up of a ‘root’ containing a ‘complement.’ There are exactly 6 root verbs. The complement can be any noun or adjective.

Any subjects of the verb go within the root. Any objects of the verb go adjacent to the root.

Conjugated nouns can go inside the root to give further information; think of it like prepositional phrases. Also the root usually contains a ‘tense’ word.

Conjunctions and other ‘wrapper’ words can surround the whole clause (the root and its objects).

Nouns can contain adjectives and other nouns which add information.

Root Verbs

The root verbs conjugate for mood. I wanted this to be a funny exaggeration of obtuse conjugation rules, so they each conjugate in a completely different way. Luckily there’s only the six.

The root verbs can also be used without a complement, in which case they have pretty broad and versatile meanings, approximated in the left column here.

Tenses

The ‘past’ tenses include anything ongoing or habitual up to the present, so there’s no need for a ‘present’ tense.

Noun Conjugations

In theory there are a lot of these, but here are the ones I actually came up with in the course of translating my sample text.