Background
Hrakkn is a language I need for a sci fi story I am working on at my other newsletter. It is a science fiction story, and Hrakkn is one of my first conceptual conlangs, but earlier iterations have been lost so I am starting fresh for the purposes of this newsletter.
Hrakkn society began when a colony ship from earth got lost and didn’t end up around the right star. They didn’t know how to get back in contact, and so had to form a civilization all their own. They found a habitable planet and landed, knowing they would have no additional colonists from home, and no resources or reinforcements. As a consequence, Hrakkn society is harsh and brutal—the language has, in isolation, evolved away from the Earth languages we are familiar with, but will have some familiar roots if you squint. Hrakkn is also a theocratic society, centered on the religion which rose during the hard times on the colony ship while they were looking for a planet. Hrakkn is known for it’s advanced technology, gleaned from reverse engineering the technology available on the colony ship and improving it since they didn’t have the vast intellectual resources available either.
Approach
I am going to begin with a phonetic inventory, I will catalogue the words and sounds I already have, then I will define a basic grammar and start with a “naming language” in order to flesh out some of the basics. As the language starts to come together, I will do some morphological derivations and look at some situational words.
What We Already Have
We have some words and sounds already.
HRAKKN - THE PLANET, THE PEOPLE, THE SYSTEM, THE FACTION.
HUUL HAD HADAR - [PRONOUNCED HYOOL HAHD HADAR] - HADAR IS THE INVENTED GOD OF HRAKKN SOCIETY, THIS SENTENCE MEANS “IN THE NAME OF GOD”
HRAEL - ANOTHER PLANET OR PLACE IN THE HRAKKN SYSTEM
HAKAN - ANOTHER PLANET OR PLACE IN THE HRAKKN SYSTEM
NOVID - THEOCRATIC HEAD OF THE HRAKKN PEOPLE
What can we observe?
Lots of harsh consonant combinations and dipthongs
some liquidity to the language though
consonant sounds H, HR, K, KN, L, D, R, N, V, D
Vowel sounds AH, YOO, AYE, OH, IH
the HR combination shows up in Hrakkn, the name of the planet/people/system, and in Hrael, which is discretely the name of a place. HR words are about THE PEOPLE—kind of like how in hebrew “el” is usually a reference to God. “Michael” means “who is like unto God”—the el at the end means God. Maybe we can do the same with HR, since Hadar is the god here, HR is a shortening. HRAKKN could then mean something like “God’s chosen people” while HRAEL could mean “God’s Holy Place”. HR = God, short for Hadar
A = Holy
AK = Chosen/Chosen by God (A + K)
KN = People
EL = Place
What does HAKAN mean given this?
H + AK + AN
H can refer to “one” or “first”—which is meaning adjacent to HR, their god being their first recourse, something like that. AK we have alraedy decided means Chosen. “First + Chosen by God + Home” —The First Home Chosen by Good—Hakan refers to the planet they landed on, Hrael refers to the city they founded upon landing, and Hrakkn refers to the people who live there.
This feels like it is taking grammatical inspiration from Hebrew and I haven’t done much with it yet, but essentially what I am establishing is that every sound carries meaning with it and I need to tread carefully.
Let’s pause here and make our phonetic inventory.
Phonetic Inventory
Consonants: [H, R, K, N, L, D, R, N, V, D] + [T, S, CH, SH, ZH, G, M, P, B, Z]
Vowels: A (ah), AE (ay), O (oh), U (ooh), UU (yoo), E (eh), I (ee), II (yah)
A Basic Grammar
No articles
sounds carry meaning, like hebrew
compound words, like german
nouns have no marking (yet) in nominal form
verbs need a tense indicator, lets make it a suffix of some kind
Lets follow english sentence construction—Subject Verb Object
A Sample Sentence
Let’s take a sentence and flesh it out.
“God Leads his chosen people home"
We know God is Hadar, “His chosen people” is Hrakkn, Home is indicated by AN, so we are only missing the verb “to lead”.
Home is a noun, and is the object, so needs no marker. Because HR is a short form of HADAR, lets make AN the first and last letters of the word for Home. The root for Home is Indo European *tkei, which forms the root of hamlet, which we could derive into amlet → almed → aldem → alden → adin. Lets make the word for home “ADIN”.
We want the verb to be “To lead”, which we can take from a metaphorical sense from the word “to sail”. Sail comes from old english “Segl” or proto-germanic *Segolm. We can derive from Segolm into Zikeln, but include the sense that we are “pushed by God”, so from Zikeln to Zikhren → Zikhr + an = “To be led by God” or “To lead”. present tense God Leads would be Zikhr + on which would devolve into ZH+ I as the root, and the suffix “+on” meaning “he leads”. the R is added in to make the vowel transition work: Zhiron.
“God leads his chosen people home” = Hadar zhiron hrakkn adin. This will be a Hrakkn proverb.
We have begun our first conlang!