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, despite the fact that I don't tend to spend much time thinking about real life religions on account of being an agnostic atheist.

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

At the moment I would like to work on Osrican grammar to make it fit in better into the geographical region it exists in (that's why I haven't posted anything in the grammar page yet, the grammar is going to change a lot in the relatively near future), it currently doesn't fit in very well into the area and here's why:

There's a phenomenon known as a sprachbund or language area, and this phenomenon is basically when various unrelated languages that exist in proximity of each other start influencing one another, not just in that they borrow vocabulary from one another, but in that they borrow grammar, so even if there's no common ancestry between them they may share some peculiar features just because they co-exist a lot.

There is a sprachbund in the Balkans, which is where Osric is spoken, and Osrican does share a few grammatical features with the surrounding languages, but because I only learned about the Balkans sprachbund after I had already worked on the language a fair amount there's some features that I didn't add and at this point it's going to be a pain to change.

For example (if I remember correctly) most languages in the Balkans don't have an infinitive form of their verbs, instead they use the subjunctive for that function, but Osrican does have infinitive verbs, this is something I'd like to change at some point but just thinking about it is making me yawn, the way I'm working on the language means that most of my verbs haven't been conjugated already, I only have the infinitive form for them written down, because the infinitive one is the easiest one to get from wiktionary (which is the site I use to look for Proto-Germanic words to evolve them into Osrican words) so making that change won't be the easiest (or very fun to be honest) but it will lead to a way more interesting language.

Another important feature of the languages in the Balkans is that they have evidentiality, which basically means that verbs are actually conjugated to indicate where you got your information from: i.e. you would use different verb conjugations for "the food is on the table" depending on whether you mean "(I saw that) the food is on the table" or "(I was told that) the food is on the table" and so on. Osrican doesn't currently have a system of evidentiality, and I'd love to add it, I just don't fully understand how Balkans evidentials tend to work no matter how much I try to read up on it, so I'm currently trying to figure out how to implement it into Osrican, if you know how to explain it in layman's terms I'd love to have a bit of help.