JTtheNinja.com - "Vowelland"
 

"Vowelland" 

 

The "Vowelland" moniker is more of an umbrella term I use for several conlang projects characterized by their lack of consonants. I don't think any of these really inhabit the same world (although it would make sense if they did!) but none of them have any other home.

 

 

ê Èëe

The Eeeeish language, ê Èëe, was my first attempt at a vowel-only language. It was spawned from an AOL Buddy Chat conversation I had with a friend, during which I randomly began to sing the praises of the "ee" sound (as in green). Being that we're both conlangers, of course this then shifted toward making a language, all based around the sound.

Of course it also came with a religion, Eeeeism, centered around singing silly nonsense songs and making frequent use of the ee sound. But even as were were making up verses, I was putting together a basic wordlist and grammar, as well as a writing system, seen below.

The phonology of Eeeeish is as simple as can be, consisting solely of five tonal variations on the phoneme /i/: a flat tone (e), high tone (é), low tone (è), rising tone (ê), and falling tone (ë). These are strung together to form words, and the effect is somewhat melodic (at least in theory).

As part of they Eeeeish mythos, my friend and I came up with the concept of Eeeeland, where they worship the Eeee, and Ooooland, where they worship the evil Oooo and speak Ooooish. There was also the more neutral Aaaaland, of course. We made a map, of course, but it never really went much further than that.


 

Ii42hah32reh12man41

As we were talking about Eeeeish, I had the idea that perhaps the gods of Eeeeland might speak a tonal language as well, influencing that of their followers. Of course, they would probably be higher-dimensional beings, and hence their vocal capabilities would include tones with sound waves going in three dimensions, instead of just two. Or something like that. It might have been more like them being able to do two tones at once, along two different axes in the same 4-dimensional sound wave. I indicated the tones with numbers after each syllable and came up with a smattering of words, but nothing much ever came of it. Hurt my brain too much, and in any case it wasn't vowels-only.

Incidentally, though I suppose the name of the language means "speech of heaven," but either I made a typo when writing the name of the language, I typoed twice when writing the words for "God" and "heaven," or there was a rule about tones shifting for compound words of more than three syllables. Who can say?


 

Aeo

Not content to have a language with only five phonemes, I decided to try my hand at putting together one with only three: /a/, /e/, /o/. This ys yet another project that never went very far, but I did put together a short wordlist and grammar page for it.

At least the script was interesting: since there were only three characters, and I thought it might be a culture where writing was done more by scribes and sculptors than the ordinary person, the three phonemes were done as somewhat elaborate tile-pictures, which could be fitted next to each other in sequence.


 

Uoai

Uoai was probably my most ambitious project among the various "vowellangs" around with which I noodled. The concept came from a role-playing character I created who spoke a language of only vowels, hence giving him a curious character trait of difficulty in speaking consonants.

What made this both more complete than any language I'd ever done and more complicated was that I decided that not only should the phonology be limited (just the vowels /a/, /i/, /o/, and /u/), but also the morphology. The entire language has only 105 distinct morphemes, comprising the distinct combinations of 1, 2, and 3 vowels. Each morpheme has a very basic meaning, and the morphemes are linked together with a special "combiner" morpheme to create words of more complex meaning. Quite a mouthful, and not quite suited to scientific discourse, since most of it would just be circumlocution and approximation to get a word that means roughly what you want, but it was intended for priests, not physicists.


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