About

Conworld

When migrating from the Great Steppe, Italics took a "wrong" turn and found themselves on a northern rather than southern European penninusla. The historic develompent their culture underwent thereafter largely resembles that of the Vikings, adjusted for the wider conworld history.

Check my other conlangs:
Vandalon : Proto-Germanic -> French
Fou Tong: Proto-Germanic -> Chinese
Hiberio: Proto-Akkadian based conlang resembling Spanish
Quїan: Proto-Italic -> Ukraїnian
Phracian: a Proto-Balto-Slavic -> Greek

Coming soon:

Ilatvian: Proto-Helleinc -> Lativan
Rätzel: Thyrrenic -> Swiss German

Creation

Kyrsk or Qerwegian is my fourth extensive conlang project, and is largely influenced by Vandalon, Hiberio. In fact, it should not have existed in the conworld according to the extended Teh Roolz - a resies of unwritten guidelines I adhere in my langauge creation. Those stipulated that there should be no Greek or Latin loanwords in Vandalon, and to save myself from temptation, I initially removed Hellenic and Italic languages from my conworld completely.

Temptation came the other way, though, as I constantly needed Latin -> French sound change rules to derive Vandalon words from Proto-Germanic. Which I did by consulting Wiktionary, which, in turn, often listed Proto-Italic terms. This contact has redoubled as soon as I started with Hiberio: now for Latin -> Spanish sound changes.

Given that as good as nothing is preserved of any Italic languages. Yet, I found myself spending hours looking the Wiktionary lists of Proto-Italic terms, and that fillde me with a feeling of half-measureness. All of those ncie, archaic words - and I only use them to derive phonetics, while throwing semantics away.

Anyway, still stiking to the "remember, no Latin" formula, and my general unwillingness to spam conlangs, it was not after I downloaded De Vaan's "Etymological Dictionary of Latin" in May 2024 - even writing I have no idea what I did it for - that if finally occurred to me: I already have a Germanic language that sounds like IRL Romance one, why not having an Italic language that sounds like Germanic? Yes, Teh Roolz prohibit it, but the prohibition was to hinder me from minldessly copying modern complex terms into Vandalon. If, however, an in my conworld and Italic language were to be historically spoken by less advanced people and only had a fringe influece on the languages around, I am staying true to the spirit of Teh Rools - but now allow myself to use Proto-Italic semantics, and learn more about languages.

Norwegian then occurred to fit this historic pattern - but alas, a conference at Oslo many years ago left me with a lot of great memories about the city, and Querwegian/Kyrsk was my way to pay tribute to Scandinavia.

Inititally I was quite skeptical if this language would ever become a thing - heck, at the time I considered abandoning Fou Tong - and was genuinely surprised to see it overtake much older Hiberio in no time, and approch Fou Tong by the number of lemmas in my offline dictionary. The key to that was cross-pollination - whenever I sought a suitable sound change pattern for Vandalon, I would stumble upon several cool Latin words and wish to add their cognates to Kyrsk. Which, in turn, would make me seek for Proto-Germanic -> Norwegian pattern, yielding new cool Proto-Germanic words from which to coin new Vandalon ones... and so on and so forth. Effectively, Vandalon, my most developed langauge, slingshut Kyrsk, and now the two languages - with some assist of Hiberio - keep enriching each other.

And here we are. I already have several texts translated into Kyrsk - primarily standalone chapters from Ursula K. le Guin's "The Left Hand of Darkness", which I opt to publish hrere, and there likely will be more.

For now, though, I have just 6 hours to sleep before a long travel whose tediousness is exascerbated by a quite unpleasant route change. So that will be it.