Faetongue Documentation

Faetongue is spoken by alien fairies. They are tiny, humanoid, and winged. They have a society of advanced technology elaborately integrated with their rainforest biome of big-ass trees. They value fashion and chaos. Each is born with one of 6 kinds of nature magic, called ‘covens,’ which places them in one of the 6 corresponding guilds that run society.

Notes

My favorite thing about learning languages is when they gank your assumptions about how concepts relate and ideas are expressed. So my approach with this project is to make it perversely un-English in every possible way.

I pretty much started with my favorite things about Japanese: logographs, being able to drop a lot of structure words and leave them to context, and the hilariously free-wheeling way you can tack a whole relative clause on the back of a noun. (e.g. "I saw that always-chases-the-mailman dog today.")

Then I added my own innovations, as you’ll see below. The branched writing is especially indulgent, but my favorite idea is having every single phoneme correspond to a type of organism. If we think about the way traditional ‘fairies’ would speak, they might be all woo-woo nature, right? Daffodils this and hibernating otters that. So what would better suit a fairy’s native tongue than a language where every word is a plant or animal (or fungus...)? They literally speak in nature.

Riffing on the idea of fairies as ferngully nature spirits, I imagine this as a species whose ecological niche is to maintain the entire rest of the ecology. So they had an encyclopedic understanding of every living being before they ever actually invented language, and they used it as a jumping-off point.

I chose the phonology based on what would make a really fun accent if the fairies pronounced English words. I like that Alita ('uh-lee-tuh') becomes Eliche ('uh-lee-chuh') and so on. As for how I imagine the 'sound vibe,' I feel like pop culture fantasy languages are always pretty rigid and precise, so I want this to sound kind of lazy and sloppy like American English. Of course, the grammatical pitch-changing would have a big effect on the prosody and make it seem ridiculously sing-song and musical, which is fitting.

If you like my fake language and feel like writing something in it, you can make up anything you need, whether words, glyphs, grammar structures, or worldbuilding. I’m not precious about it.

Basic Unit: Char

Faetongue consists of a library of characters or ‘chars’. Each char consists of a single glyph, a consistent pronunciation, and a broad range of meaning. Each char also corresponds to one taxonomic category of living beings on the fairy planet.

Sounds

Notice!

We have the Spanish vowels except for e. The letter e is co-opted to represent some other vowel sounds.

Unlike in English, ng never comes with a hard g sound like in ‘mango’.

Unlike in English, the voiced and unvoiced versions of th are different phonemes.

The t and d sounds only exist as part of the compounds ch (t + sh) and j (d + zh).

Here the letter y is always used as a consonant.

Unlike in English, the sound ng can begin a word, and ei and eu can end a word.

Structure

Any char can serve as any part of speech, depending on placement and context.

The main part of a sentence consists of 3 or 4 chars called the ‘Root’ chars. They are read as Modal, Subject, Verb, Object (MSVO), with the Modal being optional.

Any char can have any number of ‘Qualifier’ chars attached that alter meaning or add information.

A full sentence can be embedded as a Qualifier (which makes it a ‘relative clause’).

When speaking, Qualifiers are spoken after their parent char and are distinguished by a higher pitch. Qualifiers of Qualifiers in turn have a still higher pitch.

Romanized writing is done the same way, / with // slashes /// representing \\\ change \\ in \ pitch.

When writing natively, you arrange your Root chars in a clockwise spiral, going from the center outward.

Each sentence of 3-4 Roots is strung together by a curved line (stem) following the spiral. In between sentences (and interjections and fragments) there is a gap with no stem, where the curve of the spiral is just implied.

Qualifiers float in the space outward from the Roots and are attached to their parent chars by straight stems.

For a relative clause, the first Root of the clause is attached to the parent by a straight stem, and the following Roots are strung along a clockwise curved stem.

Phonology Phacts

I imagine the pronunciation as pretty loose and creative. The language gets quite simplified and abbreviated in casual speech; chars are slurred together, chars are cut short when obvious, and pitch change is neglected in really common constructions.

For ex, ~choai / vonga~ (lit. ~female / not~, meaning ‘male’) gets contracted to ~choivong~.

When speaking, you can choose to lower your pitch for Qualifiers instead of raising it, which makes you sound more serious and less friendly.

Grammar Points

Modal Char

A char in the Modal position defines things like certainty, time, questions, commands, hopes, and emotion.

If you want to include more than one Modal, make one the Root and attach the others as Qualifiers. It often doesn’t matter which gets to be the Root.

In relative clauses, Modals are more often skipped and left to context clues.

Passive Voice

You can reverse the sentence order and compose it as Object, Verb, Subject, Modal (OVSM), which puts the emphasis on the Object.

The only way people know to interpret it in reversed order is from context, e.g. knowing which chars are commonly used as Modals.

A sentence with no Modal is always SVO, so it can’t be passive voice.

Levels of Certainty

Levels of certainty are a big deal!

A Modal is often used to convey a specific gradation of certainty. Otherwise, the default is a neutral ‘maybe’ (except in cases that are obviously certain, like providing your name).

What we think of as ‘yes or no’ questions are answered by expressing a degree of certainty.

Time / Tense

The default time is the immediate present.

Unlike English, habitual actions and fundamental truths aren’t part of the present tense, and require their own Modals.

There are a huge number of chars which convey different nuances of time and duration when used as Modals.

No Intransitive, Oops All Reflexive

All sentences must have an Object, so for ‘intransitive’ actions, the Object is usually a repeat of the Subject.

For ex, “I stand” would be more like "I stand myself."

Surprising Objects

In many cases, something that would be the Object in English is instead a Qualifier on the Verb.

For ex, “The dog wears a hat” would be more like ~dog wear / hat \ dog~. “I draw a skunk” would be more like ~I draw / skunk \ paper~.

I’m not sure if there’s a pattern to this in my mind that I haven’t figured out how to articulate.

The Generic Pronoun

To cut down on repetition, there’s a formally sanctioned shorthand:

When speaking, you can abbreviate a repeated char to its first syllable.

When writing, you can replace a repeated char with an empty circle.

This is most often used when the Object is a repeat of the Subject, and when part of a relative clause is the same as the parent char.

Names are pretty much always abbreviated to their first char as soon as they have been established in the discourse. This is due to a culturally significant legend where a fairy with a really long name got stuck in a well and also forgot she could just fly out

Numbers

Fairies use Base 6. Their hands have four fingers including thumbs, like little cartoon guys; traditionally they use their finger-fingers to count 1s and their thumbs to count 6s.

Multi-digit numbers are expressed starting with the ones place, then attaching each higher place value to the previous as a Qualifier.

There are some rules exceptions that help with large numbers:

When speaking, pitch change is optional, and digits can be abbreviated to their first syllable.

In writing, numbers may be written smaller than other chars, and are often arranged in a compact curled shape.

Not ‘To Be’

There’s no simple equivalent of ‘to be’ – instead many chars with different nuances.

This sounds cool so I should expand on it some time

Reported Speech

For indirect reported speech, the reported statement is the main sentence; a relative clause expressing who said it is attached to the Modal.

Kind of like, “definite (dave told sandy) he is calling it quits.”

For direct quotation, the main sentence expresses who said it; the quote is a relative clause attached to the speaking Verb by a special stem.

Kind of like, “dave told ‘I’m calling it quits’ sandy.”

Punctuation

In writing, exclamation is expressed by multiple empty straight stems coming off the final char, or off of specific chars being emphasized.

Hesitance or shakiness is expressed by wavy stems between chars.

Color

All colors are expressed by attaching a Qualifier to the char ~ocha.~ Any char can potentially define a color, and fairies do love to talk in hyperspecific shades.

Bonus: The Faetongue Accent

Mistakes fairies would make when learning English:

Stuffs auxiliary verbs and everything about time and certainty at the beginning of the sentence, making things accidentally sound like questions or accusations. "You don't have an annoying voice!" -> "Don't you have an annoying voice!"

Every sentence gets a degree of certainty. Frustrated by the limited options, some let it be vague and others resort to clunky longer phrases like 'almost definitely' and 'barely possible.' Negates by saying 'impossible' instead of 'not.'

Never lets adverbs float separate from the verb.

Finds it almost impossible not to do the pitch raise on all adjectives and modifying words and sub-clauses; have to take special classes to speak flatter so everyone doesn't think tHeY'rE mOcKiNg ThEm.

Absolutely lost with prepositions. Jumps to their own conclusions about how each one is used, and then feel attached to their version like it's a form of personal expression.

Uses nouns for colors. "Wow it's so whale"

Mistified and vaguely offended that a given word can only be used as one or two specific parts of speech. "Hey I'm gonna pick up some oranges and yellows on the market"

Can't count in base ten, but charges ahead and makes wild estimates at values.

Can use prepositions to connect subclauses, but also restates parent word. "Is that the new comic that Marvel published comic?"

Extremely charmed by the occasions English uses the name of a plant or animal to mean other things, then uses that word too broadly. "Yeah, I've been squirreling away movies for my week off." "Man, when I have coffee I get way too squirrel!" "My radiator was making a squirrel all night." (Meaning a chittering noise)

Gets too enthusiastic with memetic language and actually imitates intense and alarming sounds. "Yeah the ball went straight for the window like CrRrSpShHh"