Irýmmðësjâ: Learn the Language

Intro and Inspiration

Eßai, welcome! This guide will teach you everything you need to know about the Irýmmðë language.

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Warning: I have no real knowledge of linguistics. Excuse any incorrectness throughout this book, and let me know what I need to learn more about. I am happy to correct any errors!

[Things in brackets, be them names or ideas, will be changed once the Language is more complete. This format goes for every chapter.]

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Lore

Irýmmðë (pronounced "ear"-im-"they") is a language all about culture, description, and meaning. It is made for a fictional universe I am making, and as such, many of the Irýmmðë people's values (and some of mine) will be reflected in the language. It was created by a single righteous, caring, and intelligent person (in the universe, not describing me. Known as "The Speaker") who wanted to unite all the weak languages of the scattered villages into one of superior expression. Thus, as he toiled and created mediocre languages, he learned many things about humanity and linguistics. Finally, he created Irýmmðë. During this time in their universe, humanity was still very young, so this was quite the feat compared to making a language today.

An orthography is the writing system the native speakers of a language use. Romanization, on the other hand, takes an orthography and transfers it to another writing system. A good example is Japanese. In Japanese orthography, you would write the character "の." But, when romanized to English, it comes out as "no," so that English speakers can pronounce it without learning all the Japanese characters. Irýmmðë is odd in that it has two orthographies. What began as the romanization system actually became widely used as the main form of writing, as I will explain in the paragraphs below.

The first orthography: what we call True Characters. This language started as mostly a syllabary, where a character represents a syllable in the language, and often, but not always, consists of at least one vowel and one consonant sound per character. The true characters have been lost to time. I said it was mostly a syllabary, as there are some exceptions. A few single characters actually contain two syllables (writing musical lyrics will be interesting). There is also a single character that acts similar to an abugida. This singular character will have its normal shape, but if you add certain marks, it will add a sound to the end. This character will be used for changing verb tense. If you don't understand any of these terms, don't worry, they will make more sense when you actually start looking at the language. This guide if for linguist and everyday person alike.

The second orthography: Romanization. When the language's creator created the characters for his language, he realized he would also need to adapt the letters of the other villages' languages to help them learn. Once the creator taught the people his language, they gladly accepted it, but they decided to mainly use the romanization of the language, because it was simpler, making it an orthography. Thus we can write "Irýmmðë" instead of strange runes, and get a grasp of how to pronounce them.

The True Characters still remained in use by the intellectuals and the people motivated to learn them, but that was only a small portion of the people. This, however, slowly decayed and the True Characters were finally lost, and old records put into the romanization orthography. Thus it came to be that Irýmmðë had two orthographies that degenerated to pure romanization.

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Inspiration:

Having watched a fair bit of anime, Irýmmðë is inspired a lot by Japanese. I was interested in making a language using a different system than the alphabet of English, and because Japanese is a syllabary, I chose to make Irýmmðë also a syllabary.

I was also inspired by J.R.R. Tolkien's works, especially The Silmarillion. Tolkien said that he started writing as an excuse for his at-the-time strange hobby of making languages. I guess conlanging for fun is still fairly rare and strange to "normal" people, but it has become more common. I also liked the looks of the letter "Ë" in Tolkien's languages, especially in the names "Fëanor" and "Manwë." Now, it is a common sound/letter in my characters.

English looks boring. It has no diacritics, and lost some neat looking letters. That is why I use so many diacritics (as you will see) and special non-English letters like "ð," "þ," and "ß." I just want Irýmmðë to look cool, don't blame me...

I have taken 2 years of Spanish a few years ago, and I was bad at it, and wasn't really intrigued personally by the language, so it didn't really inspire me too much.

I have learned most everything about linguistics from YouTube channels. These include "Xidnaf," "Artifexian," "Langfocus," "NativeLang," "Alliterative," "David Peterson," and "Tom Scott." Without them I would have never been introduced to, got interested in, and learned about the fascinating subject of linguistics. After the horrors of Spanish class, I wasn't exactly the biggest word nerd.

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Typing in this language:

Do you want to type "ð" or "ë" or "á" with your US keyboard instead of copying every single character? There is a rather easy way. Search how to switch your keyboard to "US-International" on your operating system, as there is likely a tutorial. The "US-International" keyboard setup shouldn't need to be downloaded, it should be an automatic option (I am on Windows 8.1, and can confirm that it is a default Windows option). Once you have enabled it, (manually) copy this link to learn how to use it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QWERTY#US-International

I do not know how it would work with a non-US keyboard, sorry!

~~Option 2~~

I now have even more characters I can type. I can type "ǯ," "ǣ," "ʝ" and many other characters and diacritics. I used a (again windows only) program called "Microsoft Keyboard Layout Creator 1.4 ." I recommend you use it to customize your whole keyboard. It is rather fun to use, though I spent a few hours setting it up.

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Thus the introduction is wrapped up, and you are ready to learn Irýmmðë. The next chapter will get you familiar with the pronunciation of the language, then after that you will get to the characters that make it up. I recommend you read and master these next two chapters in order.

Once you have learned the pronunciation and characters, you can skip around the rest of the chapters with no recommended order. There are chapters about the words of the language, the number system, the grammar rules, and example texts of the language in [true characters], [romanization], and English translations.

Üsrë, good luck!