Introduction
I don’t think I can fully describe the way in which Eldich has been part of my life. In fact, I believe it has been my longest artistic relationship I’ve ever had. Even I myself recognise the effort and time I’ve put into every detail and shape of, what ultimately is, just a fictional language. One of the reasons why Eldich has a place in my soul which no other language I have created particularly inhabits, is simply because it reflects my journey into the linguistic world. It reflects my naïveté, my amateurism, my over-eagerness and it reflects my expertise, artistic talent and dedication to the glossopoetic.
I first started inventing languages when I was eleven. I remember it distinctly. I was in the car, bored to tears at the long journey we were taking from the other side of the country. I had been world-building for a number of years before then, and had already drawn maps and organised cultures. Conceptually they already had languages, but I hadn’t ventured to create my own. However, that wet evening in the car, I noticed a wad of lined paper stuffed in the front pocket of my seat. I pressed the sheets up against the window and I became compiling a lexicon in pencil. The initial wordlist, for the language which would soon become Classical Hopyratian, was, of course, basic. It relied on mere translations from one English word equated to another Hopra word, yet it reflected the beginning of my path into glossopoeia.
Hopra was quickly followed by invented scripts and even further languages and, during the winter of that year, I began designing Eldich (original stylised as Eldićh, the accent being used to show that the h was not pronounced). It was not my finest effort; too lazy to write yet another wordlist from English to Eldich, I opted instead to design some simple code. One letter of an English word would correspond to another in Eldich and from there I generated a lexicon. From this primitive Eldich however, was born a number of cultures and people and also a number of different scripts which I trialed and errored.
I didn’t begin properly writing grammar until I started understanding it. I had experimented, taking influence from Spanish which I was learning at school, but without properly knowing what it was I was trying to do, it failed and was forgotten. By my early teens, I had by and large abandoned language construction. I sat in my Spanish class without a clue as to what the teacher was talking about. Language seemed like some impossible puzzle that I was never going to fully comprehend. In fact, my apathy was such that I wanted to drop out of Spanish after that first year. During the summer holidays, however, I discovered Esperanto. I had already heard of Zamenhof’s international language and had pretended to learn it, but during this particular summer I started reading about the grammar. I was surprised. Just from the simple explanations provided by the website, I was understanding tenses, objects, subjects and a range of other important grammatical points which had eluded me before. And I started applying them to Hopyratian. I bought copies of Mark Rosenfelder’s two books: Language Creation Kit and Advanced Language Construction and from there I started learning about the more complicated aspects of foundational linguistics; mastering participles from Esperanto was now nothing compared to understanding morphosyntactic alignments!
The process continued: I learnt and then applied, exercising my newly acquired linguistic knowledge to improving my own languages. Soon Hopyratian and Eldich had full phonologies and grammar tables, filled with declensions and conjugations which gave them a life I had never imagined was possible. So fluid was my knowledge now, I continued to expand into even more projects, building families and refining etymologies. In 2015, I decided to showcase my creations and knowledge for the first time. That year, the Language Creation Society was to host its 6th biannual conference in Horsham in the UK, which was only an hour’s drive from where I was living. I didn’t waste any time and applied to give a talk about “Vulgar Eldich”.
It was in 2015, after the conference, when I decided to expand on a proper, extended grammar of High Eldich, which was to be a precursor language to the “Vulgar Eldich” I had given my talk on. In all the free time I could get from schoolwork (and even when I didn’t have any at all), I started redacting the High Eldich grammar. I elaborated on the declension and conjugational systems, as well as the syntax and phonology, and produced a fifty-page document which included all the details on the language I had developed up until that point. During my time at university – a brief one-year stint of a linguistics degree – I pushed myself further to develop even more of the language. I build a dictionary out of the lexicon I had been keeping in a spreadsheet, a process which took over two months, and I created a stable font for my language to exist digitally. When I moved to Madrid in 2017, I continued with my project, expanding the language to include even more features, writing original literature, and tweaking the odd thing here and there.
Even while at school, I had already begun planning the daughter languages. Lothanish, Valian, Talán, Merian, Balatian and Vasorian were already more than just names, but it wasn’t until Vengelian that I accounted for a list of diachronic sound change rules. Into Vengelian, I poured in my passion for the Romance languages, employing a personal glossopoeic idea of mine for allegorical languages, where I would try and symbolize our world’s languages into a constructed one. At university I wrote the first Balatian grammar, and decided to attach each of the subsequent grammars to the original High Eldich grammar. And from all this, I expanded on the culture, the political system and the economics of the world which had been generated purely from my glossopoeic creations.
In 2019, I began thinking about glossopoetic theory. Yes, it was nice to create languages as a hobby and it was entertaining, but I wanted to do more. As a glossopoeist of a long time, I wanted to write something which would draw together my language making philosophy and my own personal theories about linguistics. I started seeing that the aesthetics that we glossopoeists utilise for shaping our languages in a way which is both pleasing and naturalistic, was maybe a fundamental reality as to languages in the real world. I believe there is a lot which glossopoeia can tell us about languages which we cannot completely understand from a purely positivist perspective. All of this I published in my 2020 work On Glossopoetics which I detail the importance of aesthetics and beauty as an essential part of naturalness for a language. And straight after publishing that book, I began work on developing this one.
This Grammar of Eldich is to serve not just a presentation of my invented language, but also as an example of my own glossopoetic philosophy. I consciously have designed High Eldich and the daughter languages to include the aesthetical element which I regard as paramount to all languages, and I have also incorporated my own glossopoetical ideas such as allegory; it is to express my deep love for the Romance languages and Greek. Through its pages, I hope I transmit the passion and love I have poured into this language. No longer is it just some made-up code, neither is it some “conlang” made for boredom’s sake, but is aimed to be a serious contribution to the glossopoeic and artistic world. Eldich truly is an artistic language.
I first started inventing languages when I was eleven. I remember it distinctly. I was in the car, bored to tears at the long journey we were taking from the other side of the country. I had been world-building for a number of years before then, and had already drawn maps and organised cultures. Conceptually they already had languages, but I hadn’t ventured to create my own. However, that wet evening in the car, I noticed a wad of lined paper stuffed in the front pocket of my seat. I pressed the sheets up against the window and I became compiling a lexicon in pencil. The initial wordlist, for the language which would soon become Classical Hopyratian, was, of course, basic. It relied on mere translations from one English word equated to another Hopra word, yet it reflected the beginning of my path into glossopoeia.
Hopra was quickly followed by invented scripts and even further languages and, during the winter of that year, I began designing Eldich (original stylised as Eldićh, the accent being used to show that the h was not pronounced). It was not my finest effort; too lazy to write yet another wordlist from English to Eldich, I opted instead to design some simple code. One letter of an English word would correspond to another in Eldich and from there I generated a lexicon. From this primitive Eldich however, was born a number of cultures and people and also a number of different scripts which I trialed and errored.
I didn’t begin properly writing grammar until I started understanding it. I had experimented, taking influence from Spanish which I was learning at school, but without properly knowing what it was I was trying to do, it failed and was forgotten. By my early teens, I had by and large abandoned language construction. I sat in my Spanish class without a clue as to what the teacher was talking about. Language seemed like some impossible puzzle that I was never going to fully comprehend. In fact, my apathy was such that I wanted to drop out of Spanish after that first year. During the summer holidays, however, I discovered Esperanto. I had already heard of Zamenhof’s international language and had pretended to learn it, but during this particular summer I started reading about the grammar. I was surprised. Just from the simple explanations provided by the website, I was understanding tenses, objects, subjects and a range of other important grammatical points which had eluded me before. And I started applying them to Hopyratian. I bought copies of Mark Rosenfelder’s two books: Language Creation Kit and Advanced Language Construction and from there I started learning about the more complicated aspects of foundational linguistics; mastering participles from Esperanto was now nothing compared to understanding morphosyntactic alignments!
The process continued: I learnt and then applied, exercising my newly acquired linguistic knowledge to improving my own languages. Soon Hopyratian and Eldich had full phonologies and grammar tables, filled with declensions and conjugations which gave them a life I had never imagined was possible. So fluid was my knowledge now, I continued to expand into even more projects, building families and refining etymologies. In 2015, I decided to showcase my creations and knowledge for the first time. That year, the Language Creation Society was to host its 6th biannual conference in Horsham in the UK, which was only an hour’s drive from where I was living. I didn’t waste any time and applied to give a talk about “Vulgar Eldich”.
It was in 2015, after the conference, when I decided to expand on a proper, extended grammar of High Eldich, which was to be a precursor language to the “Vulgar Eldich” I had given my talk on. In all the free time I could get from schoolwork (and even when I didn’t have any at all), I started redacting the High Eldich grammar. I elaborated on the declension and conjugational systems, as well as the syntax and phonology, and produced a fifty-page document which included all the details on the language I had developed up until that point. During my time at university – a brief one-year stint of a linguistics degree – I pushed myself further to develop even more of the language. I build a dictionary out of the lexicon I had been keeping in a spreadsheet, a process which took over two months, and I created a stable font for my language to exist digitally. When I moved to Madrid in 2017, I continued with my project, expanding the language to include even more features, writing original literature, and tweaking the odd thing here and there.
Even while at school, I had already begun planning the daughter languages. Lothanish, Valian, Talán, Merian, Balatian and Vasorian were already more than just names, but it wasn’t until Vengelian that I accounted for a list of diachronic sound change rules. Into Vengelian, I poured in my passion for the Romance languages, employing a personal glossopoeic idea of mine for allegorical languages, where I would try and symbolize our world’s languages into a constructed one. At university I wrote the first Balatian grammar, and decided to attach each of the subsequent grammars to the original High Eldich grammar. And from all this, I expanded on the culture, the political system and the economics of the world which had been generated purely from my glossopoeic creations.
In 2019, I began thinking about glossopoetic theory. Yes, it was nice to create languages as a hobby and it was entertaining, but I wanted to do more. As a glossopoeist of a long time, I wanted to write something which would draw together my language making philosophy and my own personal theories about linguistics. I started seeing that the aesthetics that we glossopoeists utilise for shaping our languages in a way which is both pleasing and naturalistic, was maybe a fundamental reality as to languages in the real world. I believe there is a lot which glossopoeia can tell us about languages which we cannot completely understand from a purely positivist perspective. All of this I published in my 2020 work On Glossopoetics which I detail the importance of aesthetics and beauty as an essential part of naturalness for a language. And straight after publishing that book, I began work on developing this one.
This Grammar of Eldich is to serve not just a presentation of my invented language, but also as an example of my own glossopoetic philosophy. I consciously have designed High Eldich and the daughter languages to include the aesthetical element which I regard as paramount to all languages, and I have also incorporated my own glossopoetical ideas such as allegory; it is to express my deep love for the Romance languages and Greek. Through its pages, I hope I transmit the passion and love I have poured into this language. No longer is it just some made-up code, neither is it some “conlang” made for boredom’s sake, but is aimed to be a serious contribution to the glossopoeic and artistic world. Eldich truly is an artistic language.