Τëξëνι

Osrican in the real world

This page contains information on the meta aspects of Osrican, 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 enjoy the way Germanic languages sound, I self-studied German for some time mostly because it just sounds incredibly beautiful to me, I don't get why so many people have this perception that it's an "aggressive sounding language" (or actually I do get why, it's cultural stereotyping, but that's a can of worms I don't want to open right now).

I also really like the way Norwegian and Icelandic sound, and I would say that Early Modern English (Shakespeare's English) is one of my favorite sounding languages ever (here's a video explaining how it's pronounced and how we know, and here's a short video showing how the "to be or not to be" passage of Hamlet was pronounced back in Shakespeare's time).

I wanted to make a language that captured as much of that beauty as I could (mostly leaning into the phonoaesthetics of German), so that's when I decided to make a Germanic language.

Before creating Osrican I didn't have much experience making a posteriori conlangs, as most of my work is a priori, this means that I derived the language from already existing languages instead of making something completely from scratch.

Goals

Osrican is a naturalistic conlang, which is to say that it is meant to reflect the quirks and idiosyncrasies that natural languages have in the real world, it's meant to be believable.

However the emphasis on naturalism isn't as big as the emphasis on aesthetic appeal, the reason I started working on Osrican in the first place is because I really like Germanic languages on an aesthetic level, so while I do try to make decisions that I think seem reasonable and realistic I also made a lot of choices based on their aesthetic appeal, like deciding that the language would be written with the Greek alphabet, or choosing the phonetic inventory not so much based on how I think a Germanic language could really evolve but instead based on creating words that I think sound really good to my ears and are pleasant to pronounce.

Of course, since it's both a naturalistic conlang and also meant to be aesthetically pleasing, I tried to come up with justifications for why my aesthetic choices are realistic in some way.

For example after deciding that I wanted my language to be written with the Greek alphabet I ended up choosing to make it be part of the East Germanic branch of the Germanic language family. This is because the only attested member of this family (Gothic) was spoken around nearby regions, including parts of Modern day Italy, and it was also written with a modified version of the Greek alphabet, which means that making a language that is meant to be closely related to Gothic could lend some credibility to the location of the fictional nation of Osric (located in the Balkans) and its orthography.

Inspiration and aesthetics

As mentioned above I was heavily inspired by languages like German, Norwegian and Icelandic, as I find them all to be fairly pleasant in the way they sound, so that definitely influenced a lot of the choices I made when deciding what phonetic inventory Osrican should have.

An important bit of context is that back when I started working on the language (I think around early 2024) I was also really getting into a dark fantasy game called Blasphemous.

NOTE: that's a game I'm sure some people could find offensive or uncomfortable as it heavily borrows themes and imagery from a lot of catholic art, including lots of depictions of violence, so don't look into it if you're not ok with that kind of media.

Liking dark fantasy is very uncharacteristic of me, as I tend to really dislike violence and dour themes, but I found the game to be very artistically beautiful for some reason.

The game has a lot of aesthetic elements that are reminiscent of catholic imagery and all sorts of religious artwork throughout history, this is something that resonated with me in some way, and it made me start thinking of lots of ideas for worldbuilding and fiction that would take inspiration from this kind of aesthetic and theming.

This ended up influencing some choices I took when creating Osrican, it's the reason why there's a cross in the flag of Osric, and it's why I've focused on adding a lot of religious terminology into the language (mostly loanwords from Ancient Greek).

Of course, given the geographical location of my fictional setting (the Balkans) I thought it would make more sense to make it so the predominant Abrahamic religion of Osric was orthodox christianity rather than catholicism, which has very different artwork and imagery compared to catholic art (it's not similar to the "dark fantasy" aesthetic), but I still decided to include a lot of religious vocabulary as I worked on the language.

Because of all of this I have also considered writing stories with a darker tone set in medieval Osric, or perhaps literature written by Osrican speakers which fits into the dark fantasy aesthetic that I find so inspiring, these would most likely be written in Old Osrican or Early Modern Osrican.

However I don't have as much detail about the older forms of the language as I do for the more modern ones, and even the modern language is kind of barebones in terms of grammar if I'm completely honest with myself, plus I'm not the kind of person to really enjoy horror or very dark media generally, so it'd be difficult to write stories that fit the exact type of theme that I'm interested in without overdoing the dour atmosphere or grim elements, so I don't think I will actually write these stories.

If you want to use Osric as a setting for your dark fantasy stories feel free, or if you want to use Osrican names for your dark fantasy characters I'm also fine with that (I will make a page listing Osrican names at some point, I need to make more masculine and gender neutral names first cause most of the ones I've made are feminine).

Easter eggs

  1. The word for evening is a reference to the game Blasphemous, for context: The developers of the game released free downloadable content on 2021, and it was released with the name Wounds of Eventide (since I'm not a native English speaker this was actually the first time I heard the word "eventide", I know, it was weirdly recent huh, I guess my vocabulary isn't that good).
    The word "eventide" in English is basically a compound meaning "evening-time", and while other Germanic languages don't seem to have that compound or any cognate words (as in, they have cognates for "evening" and "time" but not direct equivalents of "eventide") I decided that the Osrican word for evening would be εwëνσιψι · (evënsidi) /ˈe.vən.sɪ.dɪ/ literally even-tide, and of course they also use this type of compound for other times of day, so the word for night is ναχτσιψι · (nakhtsidi) /ˈnɐx.t͡sɪ.dɪ/ (I leave it up to people's interpretation whether these are direct calques of English "eventide" and "nighttime" or if these words developed independently in the two languages).

What I'm currently working on

This (along with basically all of my other conlangs) has been in a hiatus for a while, I'm not entirely sure I will go back to working on it if I'm honest, but I do at least want to share more of the info I have on the language. I'd like to upload at least a list of Osrican names and maybe even a full word list or dictionary for it, even if I don't actually have the inflections of most words figured out at all.

I may return to working on Osrican at some point in the future (especially since I love the phonoaesthetics of this language so much, it's probably one of my favorite sounding/looking languages I've ever made), but it will basically require a complete overhaul of the grammar to make it more coherent and naturalistic, one of the things I failed to account for when making this language is that there exists a Sprachbund in the balkans and that would influence the features of Osrican.

The new version of the language would probably keep the same or a very similar phonology and spelling, but would most likely have a system of evidentiality, more noun cases and verbal conjugations, and I would figure out how these would work in more detail so I can know how many declension patterns there are and understand the irregularities better.