Τëξëνι

Kxënt'exo in the real world

This page contains information on the meta aspects of Kxënt'exo, the influences in the real world that shaped it to be the way it is and the way I, as the language creator, have interacted with it.

This also means that the page is written mostly in first person, which feels a bit weird, but I'm not sure how else to write this.

The creation process

Background

I really like Minecraft, I'm not generally the type of person to play a lot of games, and my interests have shifted a lot over time, but something that has remained consistent throughout the years is that I enjoy occasionally booting up Minecraft and building things in a survival world.

Sometimes it can be a bit of a lonely experience since I only get to play it in single player mode (all the multiplayer servers I've played in over the years are now offline), but I have a lot of good memories and I've managed to turn the procedurally generated worlds of Minecraft into special places that I know like the back of my hand, special enough where it would actually be emotionally upsetting to lose access to my Minecraft worlds.

Before creating Kxënt'exo I had never made a fanlang, a fanlang is basically a conlang that is based on an already existing intellectual property, like fanart but for conlangs.

I tend to prefer having full control over my creative projects, whenever I create something based on already existing material there's always a bit of fear in me that I will be told to stop by the people who own the intellectual property, or that fans of the original work will dislike my project and give me backlash, but I decided to try it out because making a fanlang means that a lot of the worldbuilding is already done for you so it's not as time-consuming of a process, and also if you're already a big fan of the media you're basing your conlang on then it's very exciting to be making something for that universe, it's such a special way of engaging with your favorite games or series, and as mentioned above Minecraft is special to me.

In Minecraft there is this item called the enchantment table (or enchanting table depending on which edition of the game you play) and it is used to add special magical abilities to your items, like adding the feather falling enchantment to your boots will allow you to fall greater distances without taking as much damage, or adding the fortune enchantment to your pickaxe will make it more likely that you obtain more resources when you're mining ore desposits.

The enchantment table has glyphs emanating from it, and when you click into it to enchant an item it shows you randomly chosen sets of glyphs in the user interface, these glyphs give the impression of some sort of arcane language.

If you're a conlanger you might already have guessed that those glyphs are actually just a cipher for the roman alphabet, which, as a linguistics and worldbuilding enthusiast, is always disappointing to come across, ciphers tend to give the initial impression that a fictional language exists for the setting, which is very exciting, however upon further inspection they break immersion and they're not nearly as creative or interesting as a proper language would be.

The "enchantment table language" is relatively well known, after all Minecraft is one of the most popular games of all time, and the "language" tends to be mentioned jokingly among Minecraft players a lot, I've seen it being referenced in memes.

Given all of those reasons I saw an opportunity to make something fun, so I started working on Kxënt'exo.

Goals

Kxënt'exo is my attempt to take the enchantment table cipher from Minecraft and turn it into an actual, fully speakable language, so I want to eventually develop enough vocabulary and grammar that it would be possible to translate all sorts of stories into it, and even learn it if you're nerdy enough (though I'm not planning on learning to speak Kxënt'exo since learning a language is a huge time commitment).

Perhaps one day I could even make a datapack that you can download so when you play Minecraft you can pick Kxënt'exo in the language settings. That'd take a lot of work though, I'd need soooo much vocabulary to translate the entirety of Minecraft, so it's still a long way off, but wouldn't it be amazing?.

Just like with some of my other projects the two main goals for the language are:

  1. To be naturalistic, which means that the language is meant to reflect the quirks and idiosyncrasies that natural languages have in the real world, including irregular words and complex rules.

  2. To be aesthetically pleasing, I first considered making it easy to pronounce for English speakers in case my conlang gained any popularity among Minecraft players, but I decided to go for something that, while being harder to pronounce, sounds good to me and truly gives me the impression of being a foreign language, completely unrelated to any natural language that exists in the real world.

I'm mainly making this language for myself but if it gains any popularity I'm more than happy to share the joy with others, I could even make a dialect that is easier to pronounce for people if there's demand for it, although I will say that Kxënt'exo becoming popular would make me kind of nervous because again, this is based on an already existing intellectual property, so I'm a bit scared of getting some sort of cease-and-desist letter or something, I don't know, maybe people won't want to have certain fan works associated with their products for one reason or another.

(hey Mojang, if you're reading this, I'm more than willing to work with you and let you use my work in your game(s) or other media, or even let you modify my work or ask for revisions, you could even ask me to remove all of the Minecraft references from the language so that it's no longer connected to your ip anymore, you don't have to sue me pls i beg).

Anyone can make their own modifications of Kxënt'exo, that's how language works, so to any fellow Minecraft fans, feel free to take what I've constructed and put your own spin on it, you can check out the Kxënt'exo proto-language page and the Kxënt'exo evolution page to get an idea of how I actually made the language so you can use the same foundations I did, and for any information that isn't available there you can feel free to ask me about it.

Inspiration and aesthetics

In the conlang community you sometimes hear of "fantasy _" when people are talking about conlangs that are aesthetically inspired by real life languages, people will say things like "fantasy Japanese" or "fantasy Arabic", usually this reflects that the phonology of the conlang is similar to the one in the natural language and also that the fictional civilization that speaks the language might be similar to the real cultures that speak the natural language, and this can be a bit un-creative or even problematic depending on how its done, but I think in moderation it can be fine.

For Kxënt'exo I basically made a "fantasy Latin", not in terms of the phonology but in terms of the worldbuilding.

These are the features of Kxënt'exo (and its worldbuilding) that I based off of Latin:

  1. It was spoken by a great empire similar to the Roman empire
  2. It's a dead language, and now only scholars know the language
  3. It has grammatical cases like Latin did, and grammatical gender / noun class (those are two terms for the same thing)
  4. It's used in magic (like how Latin is typically depicted in media as being in some way magical or used for incantations)

However making Kxënt'exo just like Latin would've been boring (at least to me) so I designed it to also have differences that make it stand out, like the phonology is entirely different from that of Latin, a lot of inflections are agglutinative prefixes rather than synthetic suffixes, the noun class system isn't "masculine - feminine - neuter" but instead its based on animacy, and this animacy even dictates some features like which nouns even have a plural form at all and which nouns can be subjects in a sentence.

Easter eggs

  1. Kxënt'exo uses a base 8 number system, which means that instead of having milestones of 100 they have milestones of 64, and every number written as "X0" is a multiple of 8, which aligns with the way that items stack in Minecraft.

What I'm currently working on

I really want to share with language with people and I'd be so excited if I saw another Minecraft fan take interest in this language and maybe even use it for fanart or something, so my current priorities are threefold:

One day I think it could be pretty awesome to translate the entirety of Minecraft into Kxënt'exo and make it available as a datapack so people could download it and play the game in the conlang, but that's a long term goal, it will take very long for me to get there.