Bright languages

Bright languages are constructed languages often intended to be aesthetically pleasing, predictable, and phonologically stable. Examples are the elvish languages from J R. R. Tolkien's Middle-earth.

Introduction

Bright Tongue vs Dark Tongue

• lack of gutturals vs lack of labials
• synthesis vs anathesis
• words don't repeat vs words repeat
• diphthongs allowed vs diphthongs forbidden
• only sonorants as free coda vs only stops as free coda
• constraints...

The catch is that no Bright or Dark Tongue is fully understood. The former is far too complicated (though steady) to be learned by Men, while the latter is easily taught in vain, as its dialects change rapidly compared to a human's life span.

Dark tongues may access /ɥ/

K [associated with choking

P [associated with kissing

In Veno's Dark Tongue gog yoguguluk "X speaks"

yo- "X" + -gu- [X] + -g- [X] +-ul- [X] + -uk [X]

sebeze paddaen adres nirdasbar vs zhogodosh kaktatona atrosh nurtaskara

ídrā naiaris "I was bitten by a serpent", siverae aebidis "I was bitten by a mosquito" ...

nazil "flower", naevalla "sword"

belep (nom) bellī (pl) albā (col)
bel (acc) parabel (pl) ambī (col)
elbī (gen) il (pl) pasadarvā (col)
vs gog, gog-nagog
gogash, gog-nagogash
gogu, gog-nagogu

• Belep vs gog
• Balardemea vs kalaradunga

Mixed Breed Dark Tongue: gog yoguguluk dash /ɠɔɠ ɥoɠuɠuɠuluk daʃ/

Pure Breed Dark Tongue: kꜣ̥k yꜣ̥kwkwlwk tsh /ƙħ̩ƙ ɥ̊ħ̩ƙʷƙʷlʷƙ tʃ/

Vocabulary drawn from the Lovecraft Mythos, Tolkien's Legendarium ...

rꜣlyẙh khlw̥hllw "city", kl̥ rꜣ̥k "demon", ns̥k kw̥l "ghost", shw̥k nw̥kwrth "goat"

Laiberim Ungrauzuru Trizandir Naevalla

If without D-equilibrium:

• Language rich in consonants and no vowels
• Language rich in vowels and no consonants

• Language rich in intersegmentals and no metasegmentals

wl̥krꜣn /w̥l̩krħn̥/, kl̥x /kl̩ks/, wr̥l /w̥r̩l/, kr̥kt /kr̩kt/, tn̥c /tn̩ts/, tn̥k /tn̩k/ nẙx /n̥ĭks/, lw̥kwky /l̥ŭkʷkʲ/, sꜣ̥t /sʕ̩t/.

/jɪee̞ɛæa īi̯/

īy ay "the man", ī īnain "the mountain"

A pure anathetic language would rather focus on the combinations of words than the words themselves (meaningless individually in this case): In Veno's Dark Tongue, associations strike as grammatical in zodrak hu "dog" versus hu zodrak "cat".

A pure magis-synthetic language focuses instead on words of a variety of meanings. In Veno's Bright Tongue, elbī is a genitive of "person".

Anathesis: In Portuguese, ca alone means nothing, as does sa, yet casa means "house". Synthesis: In Latin, the particle -orum means not only [genitive], but also [plural] and [masculine]/[neuter]. Agglutination, on the other hand, is the neutral morphological nature.

degrees of purity

important remark: anathesis is not that the components don't have meaning, but that the composition has a novel meaning because of them