Conlang Showcase Extra: Ilothwii

Here's five random fun facts about Ilothwii:

1. Possibly my favourite word in Ilothwii, at least from an etymological standpoint, is ithokshangji, “lava”, which breaks downs as Water.INSTR.CLS-Fire.DIR.CLS-go/move-HAB, so something like “the fire that customarily moves like water”, or less literally “liquid fire”. A close second would be ghëëlithyuhlqaji’, “archipelago”, which parses as DIVERS-Water.LOC.Cls-Land-LOC.COP, or “The land that is located here and there in the water”. 

2. Many have pointed out that the language sounds like something out of the works of H.P. Lovecraft. This is no coincidence; the names used in Lovecraft’s mythos were one of the original points of inspiration for the language. In fact, the working title for the language before I settled on “ilothwii” was literally “Lovecraftian”. There are also many lovecraft-related easter eggs in the lexicon, probably the most obvious being the fact that the word for “he/she/it is eating” is kthuulu.

3. For the sake of full disclosure, the writing system featured in the video was basically thrown together at the last minute. Before a few weeks ago, I just had this nebulous idea that ilothwii would be written using a “Romanization” of the Nekāchti script, but while I was making the video, I realized that the Nekāchti would have been in contact with the Nhlogqwa islanders long before the Nekāchti script was actually developed, and so Ilothwii would almost certainly develop its own derivative of the original simplified Edun script. Once I realized this, I had to scramble to put a new script together ASAP. I made it very angular and orthogonal, partly because I wanted it to look vaguely reminiscent of futhark and cuneiform, and partly because doing otherwise would have taken way longer to make. Considering how rushed it was, I think it came out looking alright, but I definitely need to revisit it and touch it up at some point. 

4. It was very early on in Ilothwii Version 3 that I decided that I wanted to get rid of the /e/ vowel, but I wasn’t sure how naturalistic that would be. Luckily, it was around this time when I happened to meet David Peterson at a talk he gave in Edinburgh, and I asked him his thoughts on the matter, and it turns out that in his language Munja’kin, he implemented a sound change in which /e/ became /i/ in stressed syllables and /a/ in unstressed syllables. I loved this idea, and decided to blatantly steal it, except I decided that unstressed /e/ would go to /ә/ not /a/.     

5. When I did the collab with Worldbuilding Notes, the premise for that video was that in Ewa’s conlang Itlu, 3rd person verb forms can be used as agent nouns, and over time the 3rd-person plural verb suffix was reanalyzed as an animate plural marker. This idea came directly from this response that David Peterson gave to a question I asked on his tumblr: https://dedalvs.tumblr.com/post/173779327486/i-have-a-language-in-which-nouns-are-not-marked. This question, as you can probably surmise, was in reference to Ilothwii, where true noun roots don’t have any plural morphology, but deverbal nouns (which most nouns are), take the verbal distributive plural marker.