Contents

Gwaur's conlangs: The language of Adra'hkgatan

Overview

The language of Adra'hkgatan was my very first conlang. I only ever wrote two sentences in it, and never intended to write any more. I made it for a film script that I was planning in around 2005–2006. This story took place in my conworld that I'm still working on, and it is still an important story in that world, although all things more detailed than the general synopsis of the story have pretty much completely changed.

Here is the entire original documentation of the language:

Amiraali: "(Adra'hkgatanin kielellä) Da'randel er hehkgai'sen, hkgantoi. Henhkgor tahk hehkgai'horan, tahk inuwan!"
                                   ("Vihdoin minusta voi tulla täysi anderiali. En unohda teitä, en koskaan!")

Da'r = täys-
andel = anderiali
er = muuttua
hehkgai = minä
'sen = voi ( sen = voida)
hkgantoi = voihdoin
Henhkgor = te
tahk = päinvastaisuussana
'horan = unohdan ( horan = unohtaa)
inuwan = aina

Here is a contemporary English translation of it. The square brackets indicate editorial additions.

Admiral: "(In the language of Adra'hkgatan) Da'randel er hehkgai'sen, hkgantoi. Henhkgor tahk hehkgai'horan, tahk inuwan!"
                                          ("Finally I can become a full Anderial. I will not forget you, ever!")

Da'r = full
andel = anderial
er = to change into
hehkgai = I
'sen = can[.3SG] ( sen = can[.INF])
hkgantoi = foinally [sic]
Henhkgor = you[.PL]
tahk = oppositionword
'horan = I forget ( horan = to forget)
inuwan = always

Another conlang featured in the same script was Kahnter. It appears later in the script, so it is safe to assume that this language is the first I made and Kahnter is the second. Of that one I have written many more lines than of this, but no explicit grammar or vocabulary.

Conworld context

Starship captain Jami T. Kyrp is appointed a ship. While going to see that ship, mysterious lightning in space suddenly destroys that ship.

The Admiral meets Captain Kyrp and tells him that the lightning was fired by people known as Anderials who live in a parallel universe known as Adra'hkgatan, "Second World". These Anderials wield fang swords with which they are able to shoot lightning. The Admiral says that the Earth was built by those people, and humans are their descendants who have been stripped of their great abilities. In fact, it is the fang sword that gives those powers simply by wielding it. The Anderials are not happy with what humans are doing with the Earth, and they have now come to destroy the world.

The Admiral knows all this because he has visited Adra'hkgatan. Generations ago, he was in command of a space station orbiting the Earth. Suddenly Anderials came to the Earth and destroyed the planet. That incident, however, was not to punish humans for what they have done with the Earth, but to make sure that humans will not see and enter the universes-connecting portal that would soon open near the Earth. Although predictable, the opening of the portal was beyond the Anderials' control.

But the space station survived the attack and entered the portal. In the other world, the Admiral made friends with Anderials, and started practising fang sword use. Accidentally he got hit by a sword, and a fragment of it stayed in his body, making him partly Anderial and thus immortal. Later, the crew of the space station returned, and the Anderials undid the destruction on the condition that the other world is kept a secret.

But now, with the Kyrp incident, the Admiral lets his secret go. The Admiral orchestrates a large counter-attack, as another portal is about to open. The fleet enters the portal, and the Admiral unites with his loved Anderial woman, and bids farewell to Kyrp with this line of the language.

Analysis

When I told a conlanging friend of mine about this conlang in June 2015, and mentioned that it was my first, he dearly hoped it would have been a relex of my native language Finnish, but it seems that it isn't. At the time of creating this language, I was already using English daily on the Internet, and had recently started learning Japanese and Swedish. I was way beyond monolingualism and aware of the fact that languages can and do indeed express various things very differently.

The fact that the name "Adra'hkgatan" means "Second World" would imply that Swedish influenced the creation of this language's lexicon at least somewhat, even if only for that one word, as the Swedish word for "second/other" is "andra". But I have no memory of creating that word from that background.

As I had virtually no knowledge of linguistics back in the day I made this language, I now have to reconstruct the grammar of this language. The interlinear gloss of the line would be this, based literally on the original documentation:

Da'randel     er     hehkgai'sen, hkgantoi.
full-anderial become 1SG-can.3SG  finally

Henhkgor tahk hehkgai'horan, tahk inuwan!
2PL      NEG  1SG-forget.1SG NEG  always

The basic word order is OSV. The inspiration behind this was most likely the SOV order of Japanese; the three other natlangs I knew are SVO much of the time.

Verbs are somehow inflected in person in two ways. The first person singular marker is the prefix ', and a clitic-like pronoun is also added in front of the verb. I have almost no recollection as to what the apostrophe means in terms of pronunciation. Maybe the clitic should actually be analyzed as an independent word.

The apostrophe may have been a mark of secondary stress, which would mean that this language would have grammatically distinctive secondary stress, as whether or not the verb receives secondary stress makes the difference between infinitive and 1st person singular.

One thing that quickly catches the eye is the verb construction 1SG-can.3SG. The reason behind this analysis is a quirk in the original documentation that's most likely a simple typo:

'sen = voi ( sen = voida)
'sen = can[.3SG] ( sen = can[.INF])

The Finnish word voi, in this context, means can in third person singular indicative present. Judging by the original translation of the line, the verb form 'sen should obviously mean can in first person, which in Finnish would be voin; the typo was dropping the final n.

The typo theory is supported by the other typo in this line of the original documentation:

hkgantoi = voihdoin
hkgantoi = foinally [sic]

The adverb finally in Finnish would be vihdoin.

Phonology

As the orthographies of both Finnish and Japanese are highly phonemic, I made this transcriptive orthography such too. Here are the consonants of this language as well as I can remember them:

BilabialAlveolarVelarUvularGlottal
Plosive/d t̪/ ‹d t›/k/ ‹k›
Fricative/s/ ‹s›/χ/ ‹hkg›/h/ ‹h›
Approximant/β̞ʷ/ ‹w›/l/ ‹l›
Nasal/n/ ‹n›
Trill/r/ ‹r›

And here are the vowels:

FrontBack
Close/i/ ‹i›/u/ ‹u›
Mid/e/ ‹e›/o/ ‹o›
Open/ɑ/ ‹a›

As I already stated, I have almost no recollection concerning what pronunciation the apostrophe represents. The only thing regarding that that I do remember is that the pronunciation of Adra'hkgatan is /ˈɑd.rɑ.ˌχɑ.t̪ɑn/, so it could have been a sign of secondary stress or simply nothing.

Future

I never say never, so I say that it seems extremely unlikely that I would ever continue work on this conlang. In fact, most of my more recent conlangs are other languages for the peoples in what Adra'hkgatan is today. Years ago I demoted the Anderials into normal humans, meaning that it would be very unrealistic to have a single language that everyone in that world speaks. The words "Anderial" and "Adra'ghkatan" don't refer to anything that exists today.

There is a new race with similar abilites in the conworld. Those are the Angels, divided into Mercraceaxons and Ewasteners. I have planned some of the Ewastener language, and it is completely independent and different from the language of Adra'hkgatan.