A Somewhat Incorrect Description
of the Remdym Language

Remdym

Remdym (/remdɪm/) was the language primarily spoken by the ancient human civilizations of old. I should probably put more in this section, so until I think of more to say I'll just pad it out with more words.

Phonology

Remdym's consonants are:

You may notice that this inventory does not make a lot of sense, and is in general quite silly. This is what happened when I selected for sounds that sounded neat to me, rather than paying attention to what would make sense. This makes it frusturatingly incompatible with lots of popular languages, including english, which is my own native language. The voiced bilabial trill is exceptionally guilty in that regard. Also, even though the rhotic is supposed to be a tap/trill, it's technically a whatever rhotic, so if you want you can just pronounce it however you normally do. Wait, what do you mean you don't have one in your own language? Doesn't everyone have one? What's that, you want me to stop refrancing jan Misali and get on with things? Why would anyone want that?

I can't actually find any languages that are fully compatible with Remdym's consonant inventory without any weird asterisks. The Komi-Permyak language has the bilabial trill (only appearing paralinguistically and in one real word, but it counts), but lacks the voiceless dental fricative and the glottal stop (although in my opinion, for whatever it is worth, I think that the voiceless labial fricative and the voiceless velar fricative respecively are okay enough analogues to make it somewhat compatible).

But at least in my opinion, the bilabial trill isn't the hardest consonant to learn, so if we take that out of account then English becomes mostly compatible (/t͡s/ can be approximated by the consonant cluster /ts/, and many english speakers already approximate /ɲ/ with /nj/ in words like "pinata" and "jalapeno"). Mandarin still wouldn't be compatible, and neither would Hindi, Spanish, or French. But thankfully, Remdym is a fictional language and not an IAL, so widespread compatibility is not a primary concern. I mean, there's no way a massively praised IAL would be incompatible with four of the five most commonly spoken languages out there.

Remdym's vowels are:

This is, objectively, too many vowels. The five-vowel system is fine and there was no reason to add another vowel. The (in my opinion) close distinction between e-ɪ-i is particularly egregious. But it is how it is.

In terms of dipthongs, Remdym doesn't technically have a restriction on how you pair them, at least when it comes to loanwords; but generally, the only dipthongs commonly used are /ai/, /ao/, /au/, and /ei/.

Phonotactics

Remdym's syllable structure is CV(C), although a single vowel or dipthong is allowed to start a word.

Here is a table of the allowed consonant clusters that can form:

That's a lot!

Romanization

Remdym's official romanization is as follows:

b /b/, m /m/, bb /ʙ/, v /v/, th /θ/, t /t/, s /s/, ts /t͡s/, d /d/,
n /n/, r /ɾ ~ r/, l /l/, j /ʒ ~ d͡ʒ/, k /k/, g /g/, (ñ/nn)¹ /ɲ/, ' /ʔ/,
u /u/, o /o/, a /a/, e /e/, y /ɪ/, i /i/

As an optional stylistic choice, the letters "i" and "e" may be written with an acute accent (í/é) if that syllable of the word is stressed (although the word "Remdym" is usually not written with an é despite that syllable being the one stressed).

This romanization will be used later in this... document? page? I'm not sure what to call this thing actually. But i'll be using the romanization in it.

Orthography

Up until now I have avoided pictures for futureproofing's sake, but they are necessary from here on out.

Remdym has two writing systems: the formal script, used in most contexts; and the shortscript, used in informal contexts and with computers. The shortscript is derived from the formal script, but is relatively young historically speaking and thus looks a little bit awkward.

Formal Script

I'm bad at describing things with words, but hopefully the attached images will make things more clear. It's a lot simpler that I make it sound.

The formal script is an alphabet that is written top-to-bottom and then left-to-right. Sentences are written as unbroken lines, like cursive but extended to the full sentence. Individual letters are represented by different curves, loops, and etc in the line, and at the end of the sentence the line wraps back up, crossing through the main line at word boundaries and connecting back to the top. Then, any other stray marks are added, like for two of the vowels, some ligatures, and in one other word.

A picture will hopefully make this more clear; here's the phrase "Remdym ísmol jé" ("Remdym is fun") written in formal script (my handwriting is awful but this should convey the idea):

Most letters come in pairs, except the one for /ʔ/ which is symmetrical. If you read that last sentence and were hoping for something cool and functional or something, I am sincerely sorry for the disappointment you are about to feel. Instead, the pairings are basically arbitrary. Here is every letter in the formal script, along with some punctuation:

Numbers in both formal script and shortscript are the same, and will be discussed in the shortscript section. In the formal script, the number start symbol stops the line, then the number is written, and then the line is restarted afterwards. This is, notably, clunky.

There are also some common ligatures and alternate forms. Most of these are more common in older writings and became less common as time went on, but here they are:

Shortscript

The shortscript is also an alphabet, written left-to-right and then top-to-bottom on the page (kind of like you rotated the page 90 degrees clockwise). The characters in shortscript are derived from simplifying the formal script characters, and are written individually, with spaces in between words. Here's the phrase "Remdym ísmol jé" ("Remdym is fun") written in shortscript (once again, apologies for my handwriting):

And here's a chart of all the letters, plus punctuation:

Other than that, it's relatively straightforward.

Numbers

Remdym uses a seximal (base-6) numbering system. Digits come in the same order as english and many other LTR languages; that is, the opposite order to arabic and many other RTL languages; which means readers of both will think it's backwards. Yay!

(Note: I originally chose seximal because in-universe the number 6 has lots of cultural significance, and also because I thought it was a pretty nice base that had less digits than decimal. I have since watched jan Misali's excellent video where I learned about all the great things about seximal, which made me very happy to learn that I made the right choice. If you'd like to learn more about seximal and why it's great, I'd suggest visiting seximal.net to learn more about it; I'm going to use their vocabulary in this, so i'd suggest reading it anyways so you know what the words I use mean).

The six digits used are written as follows:

Generally for large numbers, digits are grouped into groups of 4 digits, with a comma (that dash-like character from earlier) separating the groups. The seximal point is represented with a semicolon (that dash-like character with the vertical line in the middle).

I'm generally going to try to limit the amount of vocabulary I reveal, since figuring out what words mean is part of the fun; but since it's not very likely that number names will come up at all i've decided it's okay to just say them here:

"vath" = 0
"di" = 1
"ma" = 2
"no" = 3
"jo" = 4
"ga" = 5
"tsim" = six (SXL 10, DEC 6)
"thon" = nif (SXL 100, DEC 36)
"dam" = unexian (SXL 1 0000, DEC 1,296)
"goth" = biexian (SXL 1 0000 0000, DEC 1,679,616)
"kuri" = triexian (SXL 1 0000 0000 0000, DEC 2,176,782,336)

(It is of note that saying the numbers 1-5 in a row ("di ma no jo ga") is really fun and I sometimes do it from time to time when nobody is around).

Numbers are said out loud in (almost) an englishy sort of way. Digits are paired and said individually, except six which has its own name just for it (two is just "ma" six is just "tsim", and eleven is "di ga").

Numbers greater than nif (but less than unexian) are said by saying the greater group, then "thon", then the lesser group (dozen three nif threesy five is "ma no thon no ga", six nif dozen one is "tsim thon ma di", fifsy two nif is "ga ma thon", and nif dozen is "thon ma vath").

For numbers greater than unexian, you split it up at boundaries between powers of unexian, followed by the large place name. For example, unexian dozen two is "dam ma ma", foursy five nif dozen five unexian six nif eleven is "jo ga thon di ga dam tsim thon di ga", two biexian one unexian fifsy three is "ma goth dam ga no", and fifsy five nif fifsy five triexian fifsy five nif fifsy five biexian fifsy five nif fifsy five unexian fifsy five nif fifsy five is "ga ga thon ga ga kuri ga ga thon ga ga goth ga ga thon ga ga dam ga ga thon ga ga").

Finally, for digits past the seximal point, the digits are simply said aloud in order just like in english.

And don't forget that point from earlier about the direction, that being it looks "backwards" to a large amount of people. So eight nif foursy two (DEC 413) is actually written as:

Nice.

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According to some evidence, back in times ancient to even the ancients themselves, there was some sort of additional hex system used for something else, although for what exactly is unknown. But it shows up in some very old and very complicated spells, seemingly at random, and nobody really knows why. The words for these numbers are completely different too, with the digits 0-F respectively being named "nol, so, set, 'et, net, 'en, 'ak, bel, bas, ta, nel, di, ma, no, jo, ga". The exact specifics of how this system works are both unimportant and beyond our scope anyways.

Some very old, barely intact artifacts seem to imply the existence of a decimal system even older than that, but these are simply old rumors passed down through time.

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Grammar

I'd rather not get too deep into Remdym's grammar - again, part of the fun is figuring stuff out - but I also feel like making people go in blind is definitely kind of unfair, so here's some simple starting-off points:

Remdym uses SOV word order. It is pretty english-y in general. There is no grammatical gender. The first-person singular pronoun is "by", the second-person pronoun is "si", and the general third-person pronoun is "the"; there's also another third-person pronoun, "tso", used for when you want to talk about a second third-person without having to restate or clarify who or what you're talking about.

The end part

Remdym is, technically, a language, and my first one I've ever made at that. Lots of aspects of it were probably definitely inspired by english, whether I actually meant it to be or not. It's definitely nowhere near amazing, but I hope it's at least somewhat alright, and at least okay for my first attempt at making a language. I do not have a conclusion sentence for this.