This is a repost of a write-up I did over on the CBB forum about how I came up with the phonology and initial vocabulary of Commonthroat, my principle yinrih language. I thought it might find use here as well.

Phonology

I thought others might benefit from my personal approach to developing Commonthroat's phonology, so here's a post detailing how I did that.

Someone's bound to mention this Artifexian video, and while it does touch on a few things I did, they still use a primarily articulatory approach, and they still attempt to make the language approximately pronounceable by humans, which for me is a big no no.

Now in the case of Commonthroat, it's still using an oral medium that humans can interpret, even if they can't reproduce it. It's perfectly possible to come up with a language that uses a medium that humans have no access to at all, like modulated radio waves or releasing pheromones, but if you're working on something that humans can at least perceive, it makes it a little easier.

The first thing to do is to come up with a very high-level qualitative impression of the language. How would a person who is hearing or otherwise perceiving this language for the first time describe how it sounds? For example, Mandarin is chalk full of sibilants and is famously tonal, Russian paletalizes everything, (American) English is abundantly nasal. I wanted Commonthroat to sound like the noises a dog makes when it's dreaming.

OK, so we have a high-level description, the next question is, how do you come up with a phonology that gives that impression? The video linked above asks "How would a speaker of this language make this particular sound?" complete with IPA-esque charts listing manners and places of articulation. This was my first approach as well. I spent some time googling "dog vocal tract", but didn't get much I could use, especially since I'm neither a veterinarian nor a linguist.

The light bulb moment for me was when I realized that I was asking the wrong question. Instead of asking "How does a dog make a particular sound?" I should ask "what does each phoneme sound like?" without worrying about the anatomy needed to generate those sounds. That's a much simpler question to answer. Instead of slogging through scientific journals that I can't understand, I just had to listen to my dog as he slept, only supplementing that information with a few popular articles on dog vocalization to tie up loose ends.

So, for example, if you're creating a language for sapient neutron stars, you merely need to do some light research into what sorts of things neutron stars do, and ask yourself, at a high level, which of those things you could hammer out into a language. Neutron stars have jets of X-rays that they emit from their poles, and also experience star-quakes, so you could potentially turn those phenomena into a language. The key isn't to ask, "how could a sentient neutron star produce such and such?" but "How would an observer describe the patterns of X-rays the star is emitting?" or similar. No need to worry about the articulatory mechanisms at play.

Back to my doggo, my next step was to listen to the sorts of sounds he made while sleeping. He's quiet to a fault wile awake, to the point that I've forgotten about him in the back yard for hours because he wouldn't bark to be let back in, just sit silently at the door. (Don't worry, I've installed a camera pointing at the door so I can tell if he's ready to come in.) Anyway, he may be a mime when awake, but he's extremely vocal while asleep. After a few nights of observation, I came up with the following different noises: whines, yips, growls, and sighs through the nose.

I didn't feel that was quite enough to go on, so I thought about other sounds I've heard dogs make. My first guide dog, a golden retriever, would make these happy grunting noises whenever she greeted a human she recognized. That sounded like it could fit into the overall gamut of sounds without compromising the "dreaming dog" quality of the language, so I decided to add grunts as a category of sound. Of course, yinrih aren't just dogs. They're aliens that happen to look sort of like dogs, so I wasn't strictly limited to only sounds dogs can make. Tigers make a sound called a chuff that I find pleasant, so I decided to add that to the list.

Our bird's eye view of the phonology now consists of six sounds: whines, growls, grunts, sighs (which I call "huffs"), chuffs, and yips. But six sounds isn't a lot. That's still just over half the size of the smallest phoneme inventory for a human language. (Piraha and Rotokas I believe have something like 10 or 11 phonemes, depending on who's counting.) Herein lies the other aha moment for me. Instead of thinking in terms of atomic segments, think in terms of a feature space.

The first step here is admittedly a bit of a lazy shortcut, I decided to think in terms of syllables, specifically which sounds can serve as syllable nuclei (vowels) and which cannot (consonants). There's no reason why a xenolang would even have the concept of syllables. Indeed, it seems even in human linguistics the concept of a syllable is a "You know it when you see it" kind of thing. Anyway, I decided that huffs, chuffs, and yips shall serve as consonants, and whines, growls, and grunts shall serve as vowels.

Huffs, chuffs, and yips shall therefor be considered atomic, with no internal features beyond a vague qualitative description. Huffs are a sigh through the nose, chuffs are like huffs, but trilled, and yips are quiet little barks. Here's where some people may find my approach a little unsatisfying, especially if you want to produce audio samples of your language. We know what yipping sounds like in general, but at some point an obvious question comes up, how does a yip effect the sounds around it? And how is it effected in turn? This technique doesn't really help answer that question, and I'm left with the somewhat disappointing fact that I honestly can't say how a yip sounds on a technical level.

On to the vowels. We've got three broad vowel qualities, which I call "phonations": whines, growls, and grunts. The vowels are where the concept of a feature space really comes into play. What do I mean by feature space? Think of how you specify colors on a computer. The most common way is to specify how much red, green, and blue a particular color contains. Theoretically, you can define any color by specifying values for these three axes. So we need to think of axes that would define our vowels. Phonation itself can be considered an axis with three values: whine, growl, and grunt. Dogs can also change the pitch and volume of their vocalizations, so we can add two more axes to our feature space: tone (pitch) and strength (volume). You can have as many values on each axis as you like, but I decided to go with a rather coarse two values for each, with high and low tones, and strong and weak volumes (strengths). Remember, we're going for a high level qualitative approach. Don't worry about exactly how high or how loud. In the yinrih's case, they're fairly quiet even at their loudest, so even strong (loud) vowels are quiet by human standards. But is there some other feature we could add as an axis? Of course, length! It's everywhere in human language, and it's trivial to toss it in as a feature, with two values of short and long.

The feature space now has four axes: two lengths (short and long), two tones (low and high), two strengths (weak and strong), and three phonations (whine growl and grunt). This gives us a grand total of 24 vowels. With our three consonants (huffs chuffs and yips) pushing us up to a total phoneme inventory of 27 phonemes. Not too shabby!

But as the late Billy Mays would say: "I'M NOT DONE YET![". We've got our phoneme inventory, so it's time to start thinking about phonetactics. Let's circle back to the concept of syllables. Internally, syllables consist of an onset, a nucleus, and a coda. That nucleus need not be a single solitary vowel. We can dramatically increase our syllable count by using diphthongs, or as I call them in Commonthroat, Contours. There's no reason you can't just say any two vowels can form a contour, indeed, there's no reason you have to limit it to two vowels, but I wanted to be able to easily describe qualitatively how a syllable sounds, even if I can't tell you the nitty-gritty of how the sound is generated. I decided to come up with some phonetactic constraints to limit the number of possible contours. You can use whatever criteria you want when coming up with constraints, but my goal was to make it easy to programmatically generate a list of every possible syllable. With that in mind, I decided that there are two rules that govern which vowels can form contours. First, two vowels may not form a contour if they differ only in length. A short low weak growl and a long low weak growl cannot form a contour. Second, the two vowels must have the same phonation type. A short low weak growl and a short high weak growl can form a contour, but a whine and a growl cannot.

Since this process is all about getting the general vibe of how a language sounds, we should probably come up with a concise way of describing contours as well as simple vowels. We have two vowels, and each vowel has four features, one of which (phonation) will always be the same between them. So let's say that if the two vowels have the same value for a particular feature, we can simply describe them like a simple vowel with that feature. If both vowels are short, the contour can simply be described as short. If both vowels are high, the whole contour is high, and so on. If we want to be nit picky, we could clarify that a long contour is probably quantitatively longer than a long simple vowel, but the key to this approach is to use broad strokes, not get into the phonological weeds.

Contours with different tones are trivial to describe, since human linguistics already has a way of describing them. Low to high is rising, and high to low is falling. It took me a bit to think of simple descriptors for contours of the other axes. I dropped the terms "volume", "quiet", and "loud" for describing the loudness of a vowel because I wanted to maintain the impression that the language is always spoken at a comparitively quiet volume. So the category is called "strength", with quiet instead being called "weak" and loud being called "strong". With new qualitative terms for the ~~volume~~ strength axis, we can extrapolate words for contours along that axis: weakening and strengthening. But the two vowels of a contour can also have differnt lengths. This was the hardest axis to describe. Eventually it occured to me that if the first vowel is short and the second is long, that means that the change from one end of the contour to the other occurs earlier in the syllable. So a contour consisting of a short vowel followed by a long vowel can be called early. A contour consisting of a long vowel followed by a short vowel can thus be called late, since the change from one vowel to the other occurs later in the syllable.

Now we have nice, qualitative descriptions for our simple vowels and contours, their timing, tone, strength, and phonation, from short low weak whine to long high strong grunt, and early falling weakening growl to late rising strenghthening whine.

Nuclei aren't the only part of a syllable, we still need to think about our consonants--onsets and codas. Since my goal is to keep things simple to program, I've settled on a very simple syllable structure of (C)V(C). Since I can't imagine how a yip would sound like at the end of a syllable, I'll restrict yips to onsets only. So we have three possible onsets (huff, chuff, and yip), with an empty onset bumping it up to four, and two codas (huff and chuff), three counting open syllables.

One quick Python script later and I have a list of every possible syllable in Commonthroat. 2016, it turns out.

That's our phonology done and dusted. The TL;DR is that you want to think of how a language sounds to the listener, not how it's produced by the speaker. You also want to keep a high-level qualitative view of the phonology--what impression does it give to the listener overall, and you want to think in terms of an abstract space of feature axes that combine to make a phoneme, and not simply limit yourself to atomic segments.

Vocabulary

Once I was done figuring out the phonology, and once I had a list of valid syllables, I needed to match those syllables to basic terms. I decided to start with the Swadesh list as a base. I've read many claims about the Swadesh list: that the terms in the list are the least likely to be replaced over time, that the list represents universal concepts that every language will have simple native words for, etc. I'm not concerned with the linguistic validity of these claims, since this is a constructed world, not a dissertation of the real one.

In my case, I decided to go with the angle that the list represents simple concepts that any language spoken by the yinrih would differentiate. However, there's a problem. The Swadesh list was designed with the perfectly reasonable assumption that the languages it would be used to analyze were spoken by humans living on Earth, not a spacefaring civilization of arboreal monkey foxes. So the first thing to do is go through the list and cull terms that wouldn't make sense for the yinrih.

This is also a good time to mention that you should have a few ideas for some high-level features you want your language to have, as this may effect what words on the list are valid for your language as much as the species' environment and biology. In Commonthroat's case, the big feature is the complete and utter lack of pronouns. If you're using the large 207-word list available on Wikipedia, that means that the first 15 entries are no good.

After that we can trundle merrily along until wee get to entries 36 to 41, (woman, man, person, child, wife, husband, mother, and father). It is at this point that you need to look deeply within yourself and ask some very important questions--how is babby formed? How girl get pragnent? In other words, what is your speakers' reproductive strategy and lifecycle? Do they use sexual reproduction? If so, do they use a two-gender system like terrestrial vertebrates? Any weird phenomena like parthenogenesis? Do they have extreme sexual dimorphism? Do they even reproduce at all, or are they immortal gods for whom such biological niceties are utterly meaningless? This is going to have a huge impact on your language's vocabulary. If your speakers are asexual sponges that reproduce by budding, then all those entries go out the window. In the yinrih's case, they do have analogs to males and females, so "woman" and "man" can stay.

You may decide to tweak the meaning of an entry rather than remove it outright, so "child" becomes "pup". This is mostly for flavor, as yinrih also refer to human children as "pups", the change is simply a reminder that the yinrih are canine. The next four entries--whife, husband, mother, and father--also warrant scrutiny. If your culture has no concept of marriage, husband and wife are out the window. Mother and father similarly hang on your species' reproductive strategy. The yinrih do not have a sex drive, and consequently don't have a concept of marriage. A litter of pups can also be the product of up to twelve genetic parents. With that in mind, we need to axe "husband" and "wife" altogether. I also decided to tweak the meanings of "mother" and "father", as a pup usually has more than one of each, so the terms become "dam" and "sire", respectively. We'll have to circle back to family life later, but let's move on for now.

The next several entries (44 through 60) have to do with flora and fauna. Here you're going to have to put some thought into the ecology of your conworld. You can get really creative with things like aeroplankton and giant tardigrades, or you could be lazy like me and dust off the uncreative conworlder's favorite tool: Convergent Evolution! Does it really make sense for things like fish, birds, dogs, and lice to have emerged on a completely different planet? probably not, but it's an easy way to make your speakers more relatable by giving them a familiar environment. In the case of Yih, I decided to chuck the terms for fauna (except for the generic "animal"), but keep all the terms for plants. You can't be arboreal if you don't have trees, after all.

The next entry, 61 "rope", forces us to ask if our critters are tool-users, and if so, is rope a thing? In the yinrih's case, the answer is yes, so rope gets to stay.

Entries 62 through 91 are all parts of the body, human or otherwise, so we need to think about our speakrrs' anatomy, and should you be so inclined, to circle back to the fauna of your conworld to come up with some non-sophont body parts that you deem important enough to include. Going down the list, everything seems reasonable enough until we get to "egg". Is ovipary present in your world? If so, are your speakers themselves oviparous? The yinrih are, so while "egg" gets a direct translation, it has much weightier cultural connotations. Male yinrih also lay eggs, since their reproductive strategy is somewhat like broadcast spawning, but I decided not to differentiate between male and female eggs in common speech, even though medically they're very different. This implies that, to the layman, the two types of eggs at least look superficially similar enough to share a common word.

Here is where I had to come up with a term from whole cloth. Yinrih aren't just oviparous, they're "exovoviviparous". After they lay their eggs, they gather the male and female eggs together in a safe place. Once the eggs are together, a protective membrane forms over the clutch and grows into what I can only describe as an external uterus. This is called a "womb-nest", and is vital enough that a simple, single morpheme word ought to exist for it. You may need to make similar additions for your own list as the need arises.

Continuing on, we eventually reach a cluster of nonhuman body parts: tail, horn, and feather. Yinrih themselves have tails, so the word gets to stay. I decided to exclude horn and feather, but you will need to decide based on your speakers' anatomy and that of other relevant animals in your world whether these terms stay or go, or whether more need to be added.

"Hair" gets a slightly expanded meaning, as the yinrih are covered in fur, so the word now becomes "pelage" or "coat". "Head", "eye" and "ear" translate more or less exactly, but here's an instance where I decided the yinrih would make a distinction not present in normal human languages. Like the canids that inspired them, yinrih have muzzles and wet noses. They don't have a single term for "nose", but a word for "muzzle", which includes the jaw and lips, and a term for "rhinarium", the wet tip of the nose.

"Mouth", "tooth", and "tongue" stay as-is, although since the tongue doesn't move to modulate yinrih speech, it isn't associated with language. Instead, I inserted the word "throat", since it's almost solely responsible for producing their vocalizations, it gets the honor of being associated with speech, with the word doubling as "language" in a similar way to how "tongue" does in many human cultures. This is why the language is called Common_throat_. If your speakers use a signed language, the word for "hand" or similar may serve the same function.

Moving on, "fingernail" becomes "claw". "foot" and "hand" merge to become "paw", as the yinrih use all four paws for both locomoation and manipulation. Both their front and rear paws look very hand-like, they are monkey foxes, after all. "leg" now refers to any of the four legs, and "knee" becomes the more general "joint". While not part of the original list or the list of basic words I derived from it, "finger" and "toe" also merge to become "digit", and "palm" and "sole" are both referred to as "palms".

"Wing" gets the axe, as I didn't think it essential enough to include. Once we get to "breast", we need to circle back to reproduction. Are your speakers mammals? While the yinrih do produce milk, they sweat it out like monotremes. Yinrih milk is produced from a patch of skin located on the forepaws of the female. It looks like an undifferentiated patch of bare skin, which is translated as "lactation patch". Here I add another basic term, "ink", as the yinrih produce a musky blue-black excretion from one of their claws that once served for scent marking, but evolved into a written language, so I've also added "write" to the list.

Now comes a series of basic actions performed by the body. Hopefully the earlier body part terms helped you come up with your critters' anatomy, and this series will detail basic actions that they can perform with that body. We start off with "drink", which gets swapped out for "lap", meaning to draw liquid into the mouth with the tongue, as the yinrih drink like dogs. "Suck" relates to "breast". since kits draw their tongue across their dams' paws to lick up the milk, "Suck" becomes "lick", in the sense of draw the tongue across a surface.

The next entry worth mentioning is "laugh", which I swapped out for "pant". As it happens, both chimps and dogs use panting similarly to human laughter.

A series of words denoting sensory and mental processes comes next. Here you need to think about your critters' psychology and how they perceive the world around them. The yinrih are all good until we get to "to smell". They have rediculously sensative noses, so while the term comes over as-is, it gains extra connotations related to perceiving the emotions of others, as yinrih use pheromones that tell those around them how they're feeling.

The next bump in the road is "sleep". Yinrih are incapable of losing consciousness, and the closest thing they have to human sleep is a period of reduced activity and dulled awareness called "torpor". So "sleep" goes and "torpor"stays.

Now we come up to a series of more dynamic actions, including some body postures and terms describing different types of motion. So we need to think about how your critters get around. Everything looks fine for the yinrih, but "to walk" specifically refers to walking on a level surface on four legs, and I added a term "to brachiate", meaning to swing hand over hand, since that's how the yinrih move through the trees as well as how spacers pull themselves along using paw cabling in microgravity. As for static postures, "to sit" gets split into "to perch", meaning to straddle a branch lying on the belly, and "to squat", meaning to sit like a dog. Yinrih also differentiate between lying on the back and lying flat on the belly, and I also added a term meaning to stand on the hind feet.

The next entry of interest for me is "sing". Yinrih language relies very heavily on timing, volume, and pitch to distinguish meaning, so they can't put words to a melody as that would make the words unintelligible. They can, however, howl, rather tunefully, in fact, so "howl" replaces "sing".

The next couple terms relate to weather and environment. If your speakers live underground, they probably lack words like "sun" and "rain". For the yinrih, everything looks good with the exception of "moon". Yih has no moon, but it does have a ring, so "moon" gets dropped in favor of "planetary ring". Note, however, that from the surface of the planet, it doesn't look like an annular shape, but an arch, so the word doesn't get used for circular objects as the word "ring" would imply, but rather bow- and arch-like ones.

After that, there are some color words mixed in with the other environmental entries. This is an aspect of worldbuilding that deserves more attention. If your speakers can't see, they probably don't have simple words denoting colors. If, like the yinrih, their visual system works dramatically different from humans' then its likely their color vocabulary will work very differently as well. Monkey foxes'eyes are more like radio receivers than cameras. Behind their normal eyelids are four pairs of "bandpass membranes" that filter incoming light. The eyes proper are patches made of billions of quarter-wave dipole nanoantennas sitting on a shared ground plane. They look normal as long as their outer eyelids are closed, but when fully open, it looks like they have empty eye sockets behind their eyelids. Yinrih have a much wider visible spectrum, although they can't perceive the entire range all at once. They use their bandpass membranes and signal processing in the brain to "tune" to different spectra, so an object may appear different depending on what spectrum they're currently tuned to.

The end result is that their color vocabulary works like English's odor vocabulary. That is, there are no words for basic colors, only descriptive terms that relate to objects that are so colored. Conversely, yinrih's odor vocabulary works (or will work, once I'm satisfied with my research) like English's color vocabulary, with words denoting abstract subjective experiences not tied to specific objects.

If you want to make your critters more unique, think about how their perception would effect their way of thinking about the world, and how that would in turn impact their language.

We're coming up on the end of the list, and I don't have much of substance to add. If your speakers aren't bilaterally symmetrical, they likely don't have words for "right" and "left".

TL;DR: think about your speakers, how they look and move, their environment, how they reproduce, how they sense and think about the world. Use that to come up with a few hundred words to use as a very basic lexicon. You can make the process easier by using the Swadesh list, or a similar list, as a base, adding, removing, and altering the entries to meet your needs.

Now you have a phonology that allows you to construct valid syllables, and a lexicon of basic terms. The next step is to assign valid sequences of phonemes to each of those terms, and bam! you've poured the foundation for your very own xenolang! You can use this foundation, as well as the high-level ideas you likely have in mind for the grammar, to start teasing out things like morphology and syntax. My personal approach is to use that basic lexicon and start writing simple glosses. I see what I like and what I don't like, adding, removing, and tweaking things as I go along.

While not strictly related to xenolangs, I've found that glossing is an extremely powerful tool for conlanging in general. You can write glosses to tease out grammatical features even when you don't have your lexicon handy.

dog-ERG man-ABS bite-1SG.ACT

man-ABS bite-1SG.PAS

I do this all the time at work when I'm away from my notes.

From here on out it's not much different from any other conlang, so have at it. I hope to see more xenolangs on this board in the future.

I figured someone might find this useful. I never intended my conworld to be a speculative biology project, but part of me is always striving to put everything in its place. So I usually think of random critters first and only later try to cram them into some sort of taxon.

The idea is I write up a note explaining what the critter is, then place the note on the canvas where I think it should go. Yinrih and tree dwellers are in the same genus (vulpithecus) so they're grouped together. The Bobtailed Hob is more distantly related, so it goes in a vulpithecoid group above the vulpithecins. Vulpithecoids are tetrapods, which on Yih evolved from six-limbed hexapods.

Other hexapods include Wormcows (common livestock animals) and (tentatively) forest flyers (the most common pet kept by yinrih). Hexapods are terrestrial animals that evolved from fish-like aquatic vertebrates. The Lapras-like shell-fish I posted about earlier is one such aquatic vertebrate.

Vertebrates emerged from soft-bodied invertebrates, which include the nannerpus I just posted about. Hard-bodied invertebrates are a sister taxon to the soft-bodied invertebrates, and include arthropod-like animals like fireflies.

All of these are animals. There are also plants (multicellular autotrophs) and fungi (multicellular heterotrophs that are not animals), and so on and on it goes.

The nannerpus (plural nannerpi, nannerpods, or nannerpuses), is a member of a group of terrestrial soft-bodied invertebrates that has evolved a thick skin similar to the peel of a banana.

The common nannerpus has a somewhat elongated “head” with four or more flat tentacles emerging from its ventral surface, lending it the appearance of a cartoon banana peel. While its name suggests a similarity to cephalopods, it is in fact more analogous to a starfish, with many tube feet on the undersides of its arms and an annular mouth in the middle rather than a hard beak.

Its thick but supple skin is mostly yellow mottled with brown and black spots. Its eyes are located on the base of its body above where the arms meet. The number of eyes vary by species but usually there are as many eyes as arms. The eyes are unlike those of Yih vertebrates, being humor-filled balls with lenses rather than the featureless black “radio eyes” seen in vertebrates.

The common nannerpus feeds on the fruiting bodies of a particular variety of fungus that are round and flat. it parks itself on top of the fungus and scrapes bits of flesh off with its mouth.

Vreem are a bug like sophont species roughly the size of a crow. I figured since they have crab claws they would have a hard time using cylindrical writing tools so I came up with a stamp like pen instead. This is an example of Khlhk one of many vreem languages in my setting. It uses a vertical script of lines and dots and is an agglutination heavy language, so an entire sentence or phrase is also a single word.

Also an example of some graffiti with a stylized version of the script.

This is a quick sketch in Plasticity of a stereotypical dense urban center. Buildings sit on pylons above the ground, and there are pedestrian walkways between buildings on the level of the real first floor of the building.

There are a few factors that lead to this design choice. First, yinrih are arboreal animals and prefer to be high up if they can help it, so most buildings from houses to skyscrapers are constructed on stilts or pylons making the "first floor" above the ground and leaving an open space called an underlay underneath.

Second, The greatest rule of yinrih urban planning is that vehicles and pedestrians do not occupy the same space. The vast connected underlays of densely populated areas are used for vehicle traffic, with foot traffic accommodated above. The subspace used by ansibles and mass routers for FTL communication and travel is named after this feature of the urban landscape.

Underlays are also home to electrical and plumbing infrastructure as well as bums and junkies.

I was thinking of the Docker logo (pictured) and thought that a living container ship would be cool, so I made one.

Its canonicity is tentative, but it's a fish (well, xenoichthys, I suppose) rather than a whale. It has a hard shell on its back. It's a filter feeder that floats on the surface and eats photosynthetic plankton. The shell is there to deter airborne predators and parasites. Through the process of domestication the shell has been made flat to serve as a deck.

At the time of First Contact they're extinct on Yih but can be found on Sweetwater. Attempts have been made to reintroduce them to their native range on Yih but none have succeeded, since the plankton they feed on can no longer thrive there.

Yinrih don't have a very good sense of taste. To the human palate, yinrih cuisine is either flavorless or inedibly spicy or minty.

Their gastronomy focuses more on mouth feel than flavor. Texture plays a big role, and contrasting textures, such as dry and wet, firm and creamy, crunchy and unctuous are often seen as desirable.

There exists a candy that has a thin pliable outer membrane encasing several inner chambers filled with filling ranging from gummy to gelatinous to creamy liquid. The membranes are clear, and the contents are brightly colored, though as often as not outside the human visible spectrum). These fillings have varying heat capacities, and the snacks are often stored in a fridge for a few minutes to give the fillings contrasting temperatures.

The correct way to eat them is to bite into the outer membrane and lets the various fillings wash over the tongue. If you're a weirdo, you puncture the membrane with a claw and squeeze the innards into your mouth.

To a yinrih these candies are flavorless. To a human they taste like soap.

This is somewhat more specific than I think I can fit in a title. I don't mean giving "bad guys" traits that most people would consider evil. Do you give otherwise sympathetic or neutral people or groups characteristics that you would find annoying or bothersome if you had to deal with them?

Let's say you hate neckties, but you rather like your Republic of Æügh. Sure it's not a utopia full of Mary Sues, but you could probably stand to live there. Except, absolutely everyone wears a necktie. Ladies, gentlemen, boys and girls, no matter the occasion, you're considered naked without one.

Why? Maybe because you want to make extra sure you're not veering into Mary Sue territory by deliberately giving them a trait you don't like. Maybe you want to explore the cultural significance of neckties despite your dislike. Whatever the reason, neckties are an important part of the culture of Æügh.

I have a few examples in the Lonely Galaxy, though all have secondary inspirations besides being personal pet peeves.

One of my legs is significantly thinner than the other, and the corresponding foot is several sizes smaller than the other, due to developmental such and such. As a result, I hate going barefoot or wearing open toed shoes. I also wear pants regardless of the weather. I feel naked otherwise.

But yinrih hate footwear. The Watsonian explanation is that they're arboreal quadrupeds, so their "feet" are also hands. To avoid burning their paws, they'll spend extra money to shade walkways, use high albedo paving material, or in extreme cases, smear an insulating waxy paste onto their paws.

The other Doylist explanation is that yinrih are also based on canids, and we've all seen what heppens when you put shoes on a dog.

To me at least, talking and public restrooms do not go together. I hate it when the guy in the stall next to me is having a protracted argument with his girlfriend while I'm a captive audience. I hate it even if I'm on the other end of the line and I can tell the caller is in the bathroom. I will let a call go to voice mail if I'm in the bathroom. If it's a really important call, I'll hurry up and leave. But most of all I hate it when people try to make small talk while I'm standing at the urinal. Bro just let me do my business and get out of here. This isn't a water cooler.

So naturally, yinrih treat public restrooms almost like a social gathering. I wrote a whole story about it. Granted this mostly applies in settings like offices or schools, where you're likely to run into the same people regularly. The reason is psychological. The yinrih's tree dweller ancestors felt vulnerable when eliminating waste, and would call out to other group members for reassurance that someone was watching out for them.

The other inspiration was my old dog, who sadly passed last year. She insisted on being with me in the bathroom, and would scratch the door and bark if I didn't let her in. Also, anecdotally I've read that dogs do this because they know you're vulnerable and want to make sure their pack member is safe while they do their business.

But I'd sooner pee my pants than use a yinrih restroom.

Here's an Underlay tunnel interface card (don't call it a UTI card😆)

The word Ansible refers to a chassis that contains one or more of these cards, serving to power them as well as bridge the underlay tunnel with a conventional realspace network. The cards, specifically the magenta wafer in the middle, are what do the actual FTL communicating, and the other end of the tunnel has to have a wafer of tailstone shaved from the same monocrystal.

Claravian womb ships, like the Dewfall that discovers Earth, have one ansible chassis with at least two cards, one in production and another serving as a hot spare. These cards have counterparts at a mission control station that monitors the ships systems while the crew is in metabolic suspension.

Both the womb ship and mission control have raw pieces of the same monocrystal used in the cards in case both cards fail and they need to manufacture new ones. These crystals are the single most precious objects to the mission. If either mission control or the womb ship loses their crystal, the ship is flying blind while the crew is in metabolic suspension.

Much of the mystery surrounding Firefly the Apostate is thanks to just such a communication failure. The mission control team was attacked, their ansible was destroyed, and the monocrystal was stolen. When contact was re-established two of the three missionaries had died

I describe ansibles further in this story

The Yinrih Ansible Protocol (YAP) is used to communicate between ansibles over the Underlay. YAP is a human-coined term, and the pun on the word yap referring to sounds made by various canids is almost certainly deliberate. Yinrih themselves call it simply Ansible Protocol.

YAP addresses are 27 trits long. A YAP frame consists of an inter-frame flag, a topology trit, a destination address, a source address, a 6-trit payload info field, the payload itself whose length can vary, a checksum, and then the flag for the following frame.

The topology trit says whether there are only two ansibles communicating point to point, or whether multiple ansibles are on the same link. Because of the physics behind tailstone and the Underlay, the link is a shared medium, meaning it's half duplex and only one ansible can talk at a time, so the topology trit dictates when an ansible can talk and for how long.

The source and destination addresses are self-explanatory for the most part.

The payload info field says what protocol the payload uses. It also dictates how big the payload is.

The checksum helps insure the message was received correctly.

The inter-frame flag separates one frame from the next.

I had a purdy packet diagram I made using the online Mermaid diagram editor, but they make you sign up for an account in order to export them 😝

Yinrih lack the raging hormones seen in human teenagers, so what's an adolescent monkey fox to do with all that extra time and energy? Why poke his pointy wet nose where it doesn't belong, of course.

Urban exploration is a common hobby among older pups and young adults. Cheap respirators such as one might find at a hardware store are worn to prevent mold inhalation when rummaging through abandoned buildings. The masks have become emblematic of the pastime among the general public, and in the Commonthroat-speaking world, the word for respirator, qlqlg (pronounced /huff, short low weak grunt; huff, short low weak grunt; short low weak growl/), has become a term for urban explorers in general.

While most explorers are in it just to see where they can go before being politely asked to leave, there are other reasons why a young monkey fox might want to skulk (hehe) around areas not frequented by the public. There's a large overlap with the drug scene, as many explorers are looking for a place to trip on mind candy. In fact, many of the species of mold that their iconic masks protect them from produce spores that are hallucinogenic when inhaled, and there's a subset of so-called h Hqlqlg (no-maskers) that specifically seek out areas where this mold grows in order to huff it.

Among the Outlanders of Moonlitter and the Outer Belt, urban explorers are called spaprql (singular spapr, pronounced /yip, overlong dipping strong grunt, chuff/), which is a type of thick but flexible paw covering worn to prevent lacerations and punctures. The term spapr has a narrower meaning when used by explorers themselves, where it refers to someone who is new to the hobby or otherwise overly cautious. Yinrih avoid covering their paws if they can help it, so someone who insists on covering them in spite of the discomfort is seen as either exceptionally well prepared or overly cautious, depending on who you ask.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/44425631

Here's a minimal multilingual conlang database idea.

All words in all languages use the same lexeme table and the same pool of IDs. There is a language column to indicate which language a word belongs to. The words and meanings are stored in separate tables and connected via a senses table. If two words from the same language share a meaning they're synonyms. If two words from different languages share a meaning they can be translated back and forth.

The senses table has a rank column indicating how salient a particular meaning of a word is, with lower numbers being more salient. A sense with a rank of 1 is likely the meaning inferred by a listener without further context, and higher numbers refer to rarer senses of a word.

Importantly, lexemes and sememes can have zero or more entries in the senses table, meaning you can enter words or meanings on their own. Maybe you have a particular string of sounds but don't know what they mean yet, or have a particular concept you want to have a word for but don't know what that word is yet.

Ages are approximate, and reckoned after hatching[^1]

[^1]: Yinrih reckon age from conception rather than hatching. "Hatching" is a less accurate term for when kits leave the womb nest. The preferred English term is "yeaning". [^2]: Early childhood amnesia can end as early as 3 or 4 Terran years depending on individual and culture

I archive my stuff on The Lonely Galaxy Wiki https://constructed.world/.

I currently use DokuWiki but previously used MediaWiki. Before hosting my own site I had a TiddlyWiki on Neocities. Do you host your own site? Do you post your stuff in other places like forums? I'm active mostly on the CBB forum.

Dear Sister.

Thank you for your letter. I hope my reply reaches you well. At the time of writing, we are about to embark on our trade expedition to our fair sister city of Emeraldsmoke, there to trade the blood wine as discussed. The agreement in return is for a single canister of what we in the business call kvrna-krurot; that is, "black death", a very dangerous poison, suitable for application on spearheads and arrowheads and the like to guarantee a quick kill whilst hunting.

I hope our sisters in Emeraldsmoke are impressed by our recipe we have spent so long refining. I understand Sister Krmida is especially keen to hear their response. The recipe was originally hers after all.

Our expedition is smaller than usual, but please don't fret. I've done this many times with both smaller and larger caravans, and I've been on my own a few times as well. I will keep everybody safe on the road. Honestly, I thought I'd put the new girls through their paces, rather than let them go with a larger, safer caravan, for their first time.

Me and Sister Prmenta will be the senior Trademasters for this expedition. We will try to get regular messages to you as we make stops, and after we arrive at Emeraldsmoke, but please, if you don't hear from us, just assume it is a problem with the messenger worms. Be patient.

Regarding our good friend Prmenta, she still talks wistfully about the absent sunlight, as if she were actually there when it disappeared. She still desires the return of the Sun. I can sympathize with her desire, but I don't believe I can ever share it. From my point of view, the Sun is gone permanently. The world has ended, and there is now no possibility of a return to the world that was. We are living (or lingering) in the after-days of our world. It is not even the twilight of our world - that twilight has come and gone with the last sunset, which was over a thousand years ago (or so we estimate).

Anyway, I digress. On to happier things. I am pleased to hear that Sister Ankuria has expressed an interest in joining our household. I am happy to reply that she would be very welcome. I believe she would be a valuable addition to our coven, and I am excited to formally initiate her when I have returned.

Hail Father,

Kreda.

I sometimes feel embarrassed by this hobby. I'm a grown man playing make believe, and I don't have the excuse of saying it's for a book or game. But occasionally I gain useful skills through the course of my conworlding.

Over the weekend I ported all my Obsidian notes for the Lonely Galaxy to DokuWiki. Part of that process involved extracting the hashtags from each markdown file and transforming them into a format that the DokuWiki tag plugin could parse. This involved some Python regex nonsense.

Now I'm at work, and lo and behold, I'm encountering a nearly identical problem, porting an Obsidian vault to another format, with tag extraction being one of the steps. So I revisited the script I wrote for the LG wiki to see how I did it. It's one function with a single return statement.

def get_tags(some_string):
	return re.findall(r"#\w+",some_string)

So as shy as I am about this project, it is proving useful.

Some branches of Agentivist Neoshamanism believe that every species of living thing has a pool of mana distributed across the entire population of that species. Consuming members of that species grants you its portion of mana. The fewer specimens, the greater each individual's portion of the overall mana pool, and thus the more mana granted to the consumer.

YIP (Yinrih Internetworking protocol) is used to address nodes on the realspace internetwork. intra-planetary links are made with optical fiber, and inter-planetary and interstellar links are made using FTL Underlay tunnels.

The Allied Worlds, having a much denser population compared to Partisan Territory and the Spacer Confederacy, can afford a network of realspace repeater satellites that have much slower ping times but far higher bandwidth.

YIP addresses consist of 81 trits (27 BB27 digits). This gives YIP an address space of 3^81 or roughly 4.43*10^38. Since it's balanced ternary, half the space is negative and half is positive. This distinction is likely significant but I'm not yet sure how. Perhaps negative addresses cannot cross the borders between autonomous systems, making them similar to IPv6 unique local addresses or RFC 1918 IPv4 addresses.

A YIP address may be written in nine groups of three BB27 digits like this

bcd-fgh-jkl-mnp-qBC-DFG-HJK-LMN-PQb

The address may be further divided into a network prefix, subnet ID, and interface suffix.

Balanced bace-27 (BB27) is used in vulpithecine computing in a similar manner to hexadecimal. Yinrih computers are based on balanced ternary instead of binary, where each digit can represent -1 (written T), 0, or 1. Balanced base-27 uses 27 digits which can represent the decimal range -13 to +13. The Yinrih Internetworking Protocol (YIP) uses BB27 to represent YIP addresses.

The table below is a human-friendly version of what yinrih actually use. Yinrih numerals are written with the highest-order digit to the right, since yinrih write right to left.

For everyday use, yinrih use either base-12 or base-24.

• The Map
• Locations And Nations
• The Pantheon
• Magic and Might
• It's All Political
• The Past, Present, And Future
• Players' Backstories
• The Planes Beyond
• Environments
• Technology

Diarcesia, officially the Monarchy Diarcesian, is a sovereign entity composed of self-governing administrative units called diereses in western Bronte and overseas.

This is the original on-site photo of the recovered coilgun before it was transfered to Hightower's museum.

The Zebro 989 was designed and sold to colonies before the war as a budget armament for colonial security use. The 10x60mm ammunition slugs were sized to allow a versatile choice of loadings. All actual projectiles were encased in a compressed magnetic powder inside of a sealant layer. The powder would be dispersed at the muzzle, but unlike more advanced designs, the mechanism often caused a large spark or flash. The 989 had no recoil countering system. Some colonial forces added aftermarket recoil counters, but this example lacks one.

The optic originally came from a CLR-PV/6 disposable anti-armor launcher. It was common to salvage the optics, which were intended to be disposed of along with the launcher, for use on small arms.

In the polar swamp regions of Nasskugel, the guns' safety sensors for detecting clear bores often malfunctioned due to moisture. Against Zebro recommendations, it was common for forces to disable the clear bore sensors. While the chance of a slug not clearing the barrel was low, the repercussions could be catastrophic for the user if they fired a second round into an obstructed bore.

When the arweli invaded and the guns were used in war rather than against occasional hostile alien wildlife, they quickly earned reputations as being substandard. While the weapons were durable and needed little maintenance, none of their loadings were consistently effective against power armor clad arweli commandos. To shorten the guns to make them more maneuverable in the dense foliage, many had their stocks entirely removed and replaced with some sort of improvised sling attachment, as seen here. The 989s were sometimes called "Black Bess" in reference to ancient muskets of earth. The 989s were noted for their large, smooth bores and the feeling by those carrying them that they were as good as having antiques.

While they would be abandoned as soon as better small arms became available, some human forces on Nasskugel never got the chance to do so, and carried them through the end of the war.

The Lonely Galaxy is not a speculative biology project. I come up with flora and fauna as I need them, nevertheless I feel a bit sloppy about it. Yih's biosphere isn't terribly different from Earth's. Some of this is deliberate. I want yinrih culture to be more relatable while still being different, so their environment has to follow suit. Some of it is laziness. "Eh just stick an extra body segment on a bug and call it a day".

Anyway, here's a very basic insectoid body plan. It has organs analogous to antennae, but they're positioned on either side of the mouth. They're also much stronger, designed not just for sensing but also for grasping. It has two thoracic segments rather than one. Each thorax has a pair of legs and a pair of wings, for a total of four legs and four wings. There is an abdomen that does not differ substantially from that of a typical Terran insect.

As with IRL bugs, there's a lot of variation in this form, including possessing more or fewer thoracic segments, with wings and legs along with them.

Here's a few bugs I've come up with in the lore:

Fireflies: despite the name they're more like bees, living in colonies, feeding on nectar, and producing honey. Their name comes from their bioluminescence, which they use to communicate. They occupy a cultural niche similar to butterflies or ladybugs, being seen as beautiful and pleasant critters. Their association with light once made Firefly a popular given name, but its use has dropped off a cliff thanks to Lichlord Firefly, the leader of Partisan Territory.

Fur lice: ectoparasites that infest yinrih fur. They thrive in crowded environments like the floating cities of Welkinstead and on orbital colonies. There are two species, a basal form that lives on the surface of planets, and a more derived form that has adapted to microgravity, losing its wings. They may be eusocial, forming colonies on their host.

Armorbacks: marine animals in a related clade. They look very crab-like. Legends circulate among the salty-pelted sailors on the surface of Sweetwater of a gargantuan armorback capable of devouring the crew of a mini sub, and the sub along with them. It is said to be completely invulnerable except for a weak point on its ventral side. To kill it you have to flip it over on its back.

Nasskugel was one of the last planets discovered by humanity along a starway route.

The planet in some ways resembles earth in its very ancient path, with a thick atmosphere and humid surface. At the poles are massive swamps as the planet's conditions are long past even a technical ice age. Inwards from the swamps there are large oceans and bodies of water going into and breaking up the land; what land pokes through is covered in jungles approaching the equator. The equatorial region is too hot for humans to survive.

Despite the miserable conditions, much of the planet is still habitable for humans, and in '41 SD the first human colony set down. Over the next two decades more outposts on the planet were set up and people turned the planet into a home for themselves. Unique biological specimens were researched, and useful ones were grown, gathered, or hunted by the colonists as a large part of their economy.

However in '63 SD, Nasskugel was invaded by the arweli as part of their wide scale rapid surprise attacks on human controlled worlds. Nasskugel was seen as a stepping stone into the interior of human territory by the arweli, but when they jumped further in from Nasskugel the next human planet in had massed space assets to repel them. The damaged arweli fleet that returned to orbit over Nasskugel could not attempt to attack again, nor could they abandon Nasskugel defense to ensure human ships did not go through it to enter arweli territory.

The arweli ground forces landed to secure the planet and wipe out the humans to prevent them from being a long term threat. Orbital bombardment was held back on as humans were scattered in such low density that it was deemed to be inefficient, and the hot, wet world was seen as a paradise by the amphibian-like arweli who wanted to preserve it.

The human colonists originally put up defenses with the home guard and security forces fighting conventionally to defend the larger, slower floating colony hubs. As arweli ground forces intensified their campaign of extermination, the humans adapted with the military forces shedding helmets and armor and donning multi-spectrum camoflague anti-thermal suits which were like saunas in the conditions but could make them vexing for the arweli to track. The human colonies broke up into smaller groups of living space vehicles designed to move silently in rivers, or walk in swamps just above the waterline. The few remaining large human settlements were permanent outposts built at the bottoms of oceans, originally as research centers, but they had become central command centers.

The pictured helmet was of a type used very early in the conflict when human forces were still wearing old pre-war issued equipment. The one was found in an abandoned outpost on the southern polar swamp. Markings indicate it belonged to someone in the 6/1, or 6th Region, 1st Brigade Guard. The outpost was abandoned in early '65 SD, and it can be assumed it was left behind then although with poor record keeping there will likely never be an answer to who exactly it belonged to or what their ultimate fate was.

I differentiate between "figures" and "characters". Characters are given more of a personality, and might be someone you could identify with, as you'd expect from a literary character. Figures are people primarily known through their effect on the world around them, the stories told about them, etc.

I say this because back on the worldbuilding subreddit I read an exchange between someone who was explaining several historical figures in their setting, and another person who insisted that they were "characters", that they ought to be given complex personalities and internal motivations as you would when writing a story. The other person said more or less what I did above, that they weren't concerned with their personalities and life stories so much as their effect on the setting.

I have both characters and figures in the Lonely Galaxy. For figures, I have a few named Claravian saints.

Pre space age:

Redclaw: described in another post, the founder of the order of Farspeakers, more or less the monkey fox version of Samuel Morse.

Starlight: a healer and botanist who invented a type of self-adhesive fabric inspired by the spiky plant burs that would stick to her fur.

"Blast powder" Blessed Guts[^1]: a ~~test subject~~ I mean tertiary assistant to the research monks experimenting with manned projectiles. Martyred when the projectile he was piloting crashed into a canyon. He possessed an at times destructive interest in blasting powder and firearms, lending him his nickname.

Post space age:

Sunfire: a steadtree hermit[^2] and spiritual councilor who is (in)famous for a particular icon depicting him striking the muzzle of a penitent who sought his spiritual direction. The ritual is common in the Bright Way but often misunderstood by secular yinrih.

Clearwater: a poor bum who lived and died a drunken mess, whose fame in religion comes from him sacrificing himself to save a group of kids drowning in a pit filled with raw sewage, who, in a darkly humorous twist, has become the patron of lone bathroom-goers.

Greenleaf the Steadtree Hermit: credited, along with Iris the Hearthsider, for kicking off the War of Dissolution where a traditionalist faction of internal reformers seized control of the Bright Way from the majority of clergy whom they felt had grown corrupt and worldly. Most famous for calling the High Hearthkeeper a heretic to her face.

Iris the Hearthsider: A cleric aligned with the Pious Dissolutionists who preached against the ruling hierarchy's corruption and greed. Her name has become so ubiquitous among the pious that the word "iris" is almost a synonym for woman. Another Iris would achieve fame for being one of the missionaries to finally make First Contact.

Cloudlight[^3] the Sensible: a rather portly fellow known for his wit, down to earth wisdom and, common sense. One of the major figures hwo helped re-establish the Bright Way after the war.

[^1]: "guts", or viscera are considered the symbolic seat of emotion, so the name is less whimsical to the yinrih ear, perhaps better translated "favored soul".

[^2]: a type of ascetic similar to a stylite

[^3]: "cloudlight": sunlight reflected off the glaciated tops of convective clouds near sunrise or sunset, making it appear as though the sun is rising in the west or setting in the east.