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Description

This little bit of conlanging was done on behalf of bensen-daniel of The Kingdoms of Evil for an alt-history idea of his known as the Saharan Seas . While that scenario is shelved for now, I have permission to post this little bit that came of it.

The idea of the Saharan Seas is that the Sahara Desert does not dry out, and so is never the Sahara “Desert,” but rather a milder land of large lakes, and numerous languages and civilizations unknown in our world - such as Podzran, the speech of a Hurrian-dominated Egypt.

As in the real world, the Hurrians of the Saharan Seas wrote in a cuneiform syllabary by pressing a stylus into clay tablets, creating wedge-shaped marks. However, once they settled in Egypt, they adopted the local practice of writing in ink with a reed pen on papyrus. While originally imitating the shapes of cuneiform wedges, over time these shaped were altered to better suit ink-writing, and ligatures evolved, radically changing the form of the signs.

This table presents the signs as they would be used to write Old Podzran. The forms are derived from the historic Hurrian cuneiform syllabic signs (and thence from Akkadian, and ultimately, Sumerian), with the loss of some signs. In particular, actual Hurrian sometimes distinguished /e/ from /i/ in VC signs like /el/ vs. /il/ - but not often, so I did away with that and let them collapse into a single series of signs. (Perhaps I should do it for CV symbols too, hm?) Nevertheless, the signs, and the way of spelling, would more closely resemble historic Hurrian than the newer Podzran, in much the same way that English spelling doesn't change and instead reflects centuries-old pronunciation.

Description

This little bit of conlanging was done on behalf of bensen-daniel of The Kingdoms of Evil for an alt-history idea of his known as the Saharan Seas . While that scenario is shelved for now, I have permission to post this little bit that came of it.

The idea of the Saharan Seas is that the Sahara Desert does not dry out, and so is never the Sahara “Desert,” but rather a milder land of large lakes, and numerous languages and civilizations unknown in our world - such as Podzran, the speech of a Hurrian-dominated Egypt.

As in the real world, the Hurrians of the Saharan Seas wrote in a cuneiform syllabary by pressing a stylus into clay tablets, creating wedge-shaped marks. However, once they settled in Egypt, they adopted the local practice of writing in ink with a reed pen on papyrus. While originally imitating the shapes of cuneiform wedges, over time these shaped were altered to better suit ink-writing, and ligatures evolved, radically changing the form of the signs.

This table presents the signs as they would be used to write Old Podzran. The forms are derived from the historic Hurrian cuneiform syllabic signs (and thence from Akkadian, and ultimately, Sumerian), with the loss of some signs. In particular, actual Hurrian sometimes distinguished /e/ from /i/ in VC signs like /el/ vs. /il/ - but not often, so I did away with that and let them collapse into a single series of signs. (Perhaps I should do it for CV symbols too, hm?) Nevertheless, the signs, and the way of spelling, would more closely resemble historic Hurrian than the newer Podzran, in much the same way that English spelling doesn't change and instead reflects centuries-old pronunciation.