June 18, 2025
In Progress
Premise:
The Apolutiyan language project is a full linguistic family descended from Proto-Apollonian, the equivalent of Indo-European in the conworld of Kautos. Apolutiyan itself is a synthetic, case-rich language spoken during the height of the Apolutiyan Empire and forms the root of multiple divergent daughter languages, including Audenti, Automi, Velike, and Thulean. The project explores diachronic change over 1500+ years, simulating realistic sound shifts, morphological erosion, grammatical innovation, and sociolinguistic influence from contact languages and substrate effects.
Why it mattered:
Language is culture in motion: and this project captures that motion across centuries. By building a coherent internal linguistic family, I created a framework that makes the world of Kautos feel alive across time, geography, and ideology. Every noun case, lost vowel, and borrowed prefix tells part of a larger story: of empire, migration, isolation, and theological rupture. It also deepens the narrative power of the Piuhonist Scriptures, embedding faith, law, and myth in the structures of speech themselves.
What I tried:
I constructed detailed grammars, phonological systems, and evolutionary sound laws for each major branch, with attention to how language contact, geography, and ideology shaped divergence. I tracked changes like case collapse, gender shifts, analytic drift, and retained archaisms across daughter languages, and grounded them in historical events (e.g., the Soulculling, religious schisms, or imperial decline). I also created sample texts, reconstructed proto-forms, and mapped the linguistic family tree from Proto-Apollonian to modern dialects.