It's WIP Week on Chromatic Conflux! I searched through my metaphorical blog post vault and found seven projects that I'm proud of — but may never "finish." So I thought, why not just publish them? Yesterday's post was "Beyond Definitions: Prototype Theory?"
So, you know grammatical gender? English doesn't have it, but many languages do. It's where a language assigns every noun a gender, and that gender affects how the words around it are conjugated. For example, in Spanish, "The tall and red chair" is "la silla alta y roja," because chairs are feminine, but "The tall and red book" is "el libro alto y rojo," because books are masculine. So, Spanish has two grammatical genders (masculine and feminine). Latin has three (including "neuter"). Amateur numbers!
In 2021, I created Ravniconlang ("Ravni" for short), a language with ten grammatical genders. But they're not called "grammatical genders": instead, they're "grammatical guilds."
The language is inspired by the plane of Ravnica, from the world of Magic: The Gathering. It's divided into ten guilds, each with a distinct vibe! Each Ravni noun gets the guild that most matches its vibe.
Anyway, I built a grammatical system (which has a few other interesting components, like the system for "to be," and the fact that verbs are conjugated from the front as prefixes), and came up with the translations for 435 words, so the lexicon is not close to complete. But the rest of the grammar is functional (if not fully featured).
For the rest of this post, I took the overview and charts I wrote in 2021 — which is somewhat barebones — and organized them into sections. I also added substantial commentary and examples in italics.
I'm not sure how interesting this will be if you're not into constructed languages, but if you are, enjoy!
Fuller information about the language is in this spreadsheet: tinyurl.com/ravniconlang
Introduction
I should probably rewrite this. I'm well aware it's not super clear. Anyway! Welcome.
Lol.
Ravniconlang is a constructed language, still in progress, based on Magic: The Gathering guilds of Ravnica.
Grammatical Guild of Nouns
Some languages have grammatical gender, wherein each noun, animate or inanimate, gendered or nongendered in real life, is given a gender and is conjugated differently based on that gender. However, in Ravniconlang, each noun has a "grammatical guild," and is conjugated differently based on that guild.
This chart, which I just found online, gives a decent (though imprecise) summary of the guild vibes:
Note that guilds are sometimes abbreviated by their first two letters in all caps.
Here's an excerpt of the conjugation chart (the full one, with the remaining seven guilds, is in the spreadsheet):
You can see that there's also a case system, somewhat similar to Latin. In Ravni, nominative is used for the subjects of sentences, accusative for objects, genitive for possessive, and ablative for most prepositional phrases — though Azorius, being the most inclined toward laws and systems, is actually the only guild that distinguishes the nominative and accusative forms.
Meanwhile, because Gruul is so anarchic, it doesn't use cases at all. And because of Selesnya's communal focus, you can't express possession without an additional word, "pe." I think Dimir is sneaky and therefore copies some of the Azorius forms, but has more irregular words?
Proper Nouns
Proper nouns: simply use a proper noun normally, without changing its ending. Lowercase it. After each proper noun, place the pronoun that you would use for that proper noun.
Example: Suppose Fblthp is in the Azorius guild. Then you would refer to the little guy as"fblthp azon," since "azon" is the Azorius pronoun — well, the nominative form.
Non-Pronouns
"I, me" and "you, y'all" have their own nouns for each guild. These are not pronouns; when referred to another time, use the standard pronoun. For 3rd person, simply use the generic pronoun for that guild.
Example: Suppose you are Selesnya. On first reference, I would refer to you as "tina." On future references, I'd likely use the pronoun "ana" instead. (I might revert to "tina" if there's another Selesnya noun that it could be confused with.)
Adjectives
Adjectives follow nouns, and take their guild ending. If the adjective ends in a consonant or vowel which is inconsistent with the guild ending, the final consonant or vowel of the adjective is dropped. (The normal Selesnya singular of "medzhic" is "medzhina," not "medzhicna.")
Example: "good law" would be "leslon ponon," since "leslon" is Azorius, but "good friend" is "palyana ponna," since "palyana" is Selesnya.
Now, before I talk about verbs, the system for "to be" in Ravni (slightly modified into "Rivna") was the subject of a linguistics puzzle I wrote called "Linguistics Is A Puzzle." Go solve before reading, if trying to decode the copula system sounds fun to you!
As a diversion, here's an image with zero verbs on it:
Verbs
The same system exists with adverbs and verbs.
The copula ("be" in English) is a special verb, since it conjugates differently based on the guild of the sentence's subject. Also, it's divided into three types — definitional (literally how the noun is defined), permanent (not definitional, but stays true for awhile, similar to Spanish ser), and temporary (will not necessarily be true for awhile, similar to Spanish estar). Really, it should be considered thirty verbs.* Each of those verbs, though, conjugates like a normal verb of that guild. "Exists" is the same verb, just without an object.
*Gruul, like so many things, doesn't do copulas, and some guilds merge definitional and permanent or merge permanent and temporary, so it's actually fewer than thirty.
Again, this is just a sample of the verb chart, but you can see there's a lot going on:
Verbs conjugate from the front. (I added this because I was like "huh, you could do this, and I can't think of any languages that do." You can tell I had a throw-all-my-interesting-conlang-ideas-into-this-language approach...)
Instead of the normal singular/plural paradigm, Ravni conjugates verbs by the set of people involved. Consider the Simic verb "change" ("-otato"). If I changed, that's 1p, so the verb would be "lotato." If you changed, that's 2p, so"cotato." If we both changed, that's 1p + 2p, so "clotato." If we changed, but now I'm using "we" to describe me and four people who aren't in the room, that's 1p + 3p, which is "slotato."
Again, different guilds vary by how much they inflect verbs. Simic has a very formulaic system where the words evolve from the parts, while Gruul is more freeform, and Golgari is somewhere in the middle. Rakdos doesn't indicate parts of speech, but does indicate tense; Izzet fully indicates parts of speech with a Simic-like system (including the possible fun consonant cluster "psr-"), but doesn't indicate tense. Azorius makes all the distinctions, but unlike Simic they're less formulaic so a speaker has to memorize all 23 forms individually. Meanwhile, Selesnya doesn't allow a direct imperative; the convention is use an extra word to say "You might do this."
There are also pro-verbs, which are like pronouns but for verbs! You might think you never use these in English, but I bet you do. They're sneaky!
An earlier version of the language included evidentials for Izzet, which were thematic but too complicated for me.
Word Order
Word order is VSO, meaning the verb is first in a sentence, then the subject, then the object. Verb endings do not replace pronouns or when the subject of the verb is a generic "one" (sometimes replaced with "you" in casual English).
Here's an example translation (from Totally Lost).
English: Fblthp had always hated crowds.
Literal: Hated [RA] + generally [RA] + Fblthp [AZ] + crowds [BO].
Ravni: ohatra oregne fblthp azon floros.
"se" and Relative Clauses and Suchlike
Use the word "se" to replace "that," "what," etc, and it should go on both sides of the relative clause; there should be a full sentence, VSO, in the middle of the main sentence. The second "se" can be dropped if it would be the last word of the sentence. For multi-sentence relative clauses, place a colon after "se."
So a quote from Borborygmos might be introduced by "haba borborygmos gruul se:" ("Borborygmos [GR] said this:")
Relative clauses are confusing though. I don't know if my system worked for everything. I found this translation I did of the flavor text of Nimbus Maze that you can try to unravel the logic of if you want, but I'd prefer not to think about it.
English: To find its center is to find one's own.
Literal: Is [perm. DI] + that + finds [DI] + [one] + soul [SE] + it [AZ gen, implied to be the maze] + [end clause] + that + finds [DI] + [one] + it [SE] + you [AZ gen].
Ravni: na se nazha sazhna aza te se nazha ana taza.
If-then pairs use the particles for "if" (-tane) and "then" (-nate), and are separated by a colon instead of a period.
Sometimes English uses infinitives when Ravniconlang doesn't, e.g. "want to know" – in Ravniconlang, just conjugate "want" and "know" the same. However, sometimes there's no way to avoid it, like "to be or not to be." In that case, use "se" to build a noun phrase, and it takes the guild of the verb.
Comparatives
Comparatives are required to be multiple sentences, with the adverbs "-errem" and "-erret" signaling more or less.
English: Hatred outlives the hateful.
Literal: Lives [GO] + hatred [RA]. Does [pro-verb GO] + less [GO] + beings [SE] + hateful [SE].
Ravni: hinev hatros. hi herret orina hatna.
Superlatives
For superlatives, add "mas" to the end of the adjective, for instance, "happiest" would be "hapmas" for Gruul, "haponmas" for Azorius nominative, etc.
Numbers
Numbers are typically adjectives, and cannot stand alone as nouns. However, there is a way to formulate them as nouns for doing math and stuff. They're in base ten because, there being ten guilds, it seems like a logical number. Not because I'm a decimalist or anything like that.
The "both" forms, which generalize "both" beyond groups of two, are actually used instead of "and." The way you would translate "white and blue" is "white blue both," and the way you'd do"white, blue, black, red, and green" is literally "white blue black red green all-five".
On the topic of bases, I was previously a jan Misali-pilled seximalist, but I recently watched an incredible YouTube video called "the best way to count" that's caused me to shift my allegiance to enlightened binary. Two is the smallest integer greater than one, after all.
Articles (or Lack Thereof)
No "the," "a," or "an" in Ravniconlang.
Pronunciation
Pronounce the words as listed in the pronunciation chart.
The phonology and orthography aren't very original or interesting. I wanted to keep all ten guild names, including "Simic," "Orzhov" (with my non-/z/ pronunciation) and "Selesnya," as valid words, which led to some awkwardness, and a rather Englishlike set of sounds overall. Looks like I cut "th," though (allowing it as an alternate pronunciation of s or z).
Oh hey, I also made a fancy IPA consonant chart! This way jan Misali would have less work if they featured Ravni on Conlang Critic (lol, lmao). At least it looks aesthetically clean. I bet that's why I allowed "zh" to be pronounced like "sh," though.
Dictionary / Conclusion
Work In Progress. In particular, the dictionary is nowhere near complete.
Here's a screenshot of the A section of the dictionary.
Some of these are kind of lazy (Englishy or Romance-derived words; check out "aer-" for "bird") or eastereggy. I never thought through the lore of Ravniconlang — it doesn't fully make sense for Ravnicans to speak it, because presumably you often have conversations among only people of your guild, and then everyone would use the same pronouns, leading to a problem familiar to authors of gay fanfiction.
Addendum
You might rightly ask: is Ravniconlang really unfinished? I initially thought the answer was "yes," and it's true that the lexicon isn't done. Because that takes forever (with a normal-size language)!
But from a grammatical perspective, ignoring the mess of relative clause syntax, I suppose the answer is mostly "no." If you look in the spreadsheet, I actually translated over 26 sentences, including these three full Magic cards!
If I spent long enough, and added a few new words and maybe grammatical constructs to Ravniconlang, I could translate this whole post into it! (Wait, could I? I never properly supported questions, though it seems like I added a question word "sem-".) And with this information, I think if you had infinite time to dedicate, you could, too. So maybe I shouldn't have counted this for WIP Week...
...but then again, this whole WIP Week thing tricked me into spending hours cleaning up the descriptions for my grammar of Ravni, and it's here now, so I hope you enjoyed!
Teaser for Tomorrow
Next on WIP Week: we're going back into the annals of American electoral history. It's the stories of every US presidential election from 1789 to 1852!
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