What kind of conlang is Aingeljã?

Share Button

Aingeljã, IPA pronunciation: [ai̯ŋgeˈlja], is the conlang I started in 1992, when I was 15 years old, although my first experiences in conlanging trace back to 1986. The main reason to create it is that I find conlanging as a linguistic experiment. I’m not much interested in making up the corresponding conworld or constructed world where a hypothetical race or nation speaks my conlang. Other conlangers do so, and that’s fine for them. But I’m especially keen on grammar books, phonetics, compared linguistics, and so on. So Aingeljã is an artlang. I created it just because I love the idea of inventing my own grammar rules.

I’ve sometimes received several emails of people who like Aingeljã and they use a few words in my conlang as a show of courtesy. However, I’m sure no one else, apart from myself, will ever try to learn it (unless you, reader, decide otherwise!). This means Aingeljã is a personal conlang.

My favourite natural languages are the so-called Romance languages. My mother tongue is Spanish, but I have read a lot about Catalan, Aragonese, Galician, Portuguese, French and Italian. Only Romansh and Romanian are quite unknown to me. As I love these languages, I decided that Aingeljã would be an a posteriori conlang. This means it looks like a Romance language itself. The languages it resembles the most are Spanish, Aragonese and Catalan, although there are some influences of Galician, Portuguese, French and Italian. I also added some traces of English and German.

The usual word order in an Aingeljã sentence is SVO, this is, the first part is the Subject (who did the action of the verb), followed by the Verb (the word meaning action or state) and the Object (who or what received the action). It is the same order as other Romance languages.

For example, let the following sentence:

Oul’Aingeljãn eh ũ langaix costrujat romànic.

The structure of this sentence is:

  • The Subject is “Oul’Aingeljãn”.
  • The Verb is “eh”.
  • The Object is “ũ langaix costrujat romànic”.

The following picture shows the syntactic tree of this sentence. By the way, the translation into English is: “Aingeljã is a Romance conlang”. The word “conlang” is said with two words: “langaix costrujat” or “constructed language”.

Syntactic tree for the sentence “Oul’Aingeljãn eh ũ langaix costrujat romànic”

In Aingeljã there are some graphic symbols which are written over the vowels in order to give them a special meaning. They are the nasal tilde (~), the accute accent (´), the grave accent (`), the diaeresis (··) and the breve symbol (ă). In Aingeljã they’re known as tjudas.

In the following figure, you can compare how these special symbols should look like with how they are actually shown by your web browser. You might have to change the codification of letters in your browser if you want to read texts in Aingeljã. To do so, go to the menu “See”, option “Codification” and choose the one that best displays the symbols.

Image of the letters:

 

Letters as interpreted by your web browser:

ã ă à è é ĩ ì ï õ ò ũ ù ü

Ã Ă À È É Ĩ Ì Ï Õ Ò Ũ Ù Ü

Letter Name HTML Unicode
ã small letter A with tilde ã 00E3
ă small letter A with breve ă 0103
à small letter A with grave à 00E0
è small letter E with grave è 00E8
é small letter E with acute é 00E9
ĩ small letter I with tilde ĩ 0129
ì small letter I with grave ì 00EC
ï small letter I with diaeresis ï 00EF
õ small letter O with tilde õ 00F5
ò small letter O with grave ò 00F2
ũ small letter U with tilde ũ 0169
ù small letter U with grave ù 00F9
ü small letter U with diaeresis ü 00FC
à capital letter A with tilde ã 00E3
Ă capital letter A with breve Ă 0103
À capital letter A with grave à 00E0
È capital letter E with grave è 00E8
É capital letter E with acute é 00E9
Ĩ capital letter I with tilde Ĩ 0129
Ì capital letter I with grave ì 00EC
Ï capital letter I with diaeresis ï 00EF
Õ capital letter O with tilde õ 00F5
Ò capital letter O with grave ò 00F2
Ũ capital letter U with tilde Ũ 0169
Ù capital letter U with grave ù 00F9
Ü capital letter U with diaeresis ü 00FC