Hilinqwo is a constructed language that I have developed over the course of nearly a decade. I did not decide that the world needed yet another constructed language (and it probably doesn't); it just "happened" from my interest in French verb conjugations and my discovery of the Indo-Europoean roots that link together most of the languages that contributed to English.
Hilinqwo is an element-based language inspired by those ancient roots. The basic objectives of the language are as follows:
- Strict rules, no exceptions, and would-be exceptions are codified as new rules.
- A vast body of elements that can be used to create words either explicitly or through common usage.
- A phonetic alphabet.
As I write this, my work is stored in a wiki on a personal web hosting account. The wiki contains over 7800 pages. Only I have the password. I have guarded this work very closely, revealing few details to only close friends and family members. However, I have started the process of making this work public. I believe that this work, which will never be "complete," will eventually be the one of the largest, if not the largest, wiki-based constructed languages.
Features of Hilinqwo
Regularity: The grammar is completely regular, with the simplest possible rules, and no exceptions. In the cases where exceptions might be needed, the exception is codified as a rule.
Elemental structure: Hilinqwo words are built from a collection of elements of varying types. Raw Hilinqwo elements are not allowed in Hilinqwo text. All wildcards must be replaced with the appropriate endings, and raw suffixes (replacing the hash mark with nothing) are meaningless.
Alphabet and glyphs: The phonetic system of Hilinqwo uses the entire 26-letter Roman alphabet plus the letters ash (æ) and thorn (þ). Every letter has its own rules for pronunciation, and there are ways that certain letters work together. Diacritics are not used; there are letter combinations for phonemes that are diacritics in other languages.
Etymology: Hilinqwo features a vast library of elements based largely on the proto-Indo-European roots. This proto-language split and evolved into Latin, Greek, Germanic languages, Sanskrit and others. Hilinqwo also makes use of the Semetic roots. A small but relevant number of elements come from other sources. If a word of any language can make it into English, odds are it can easily be the inspiration for a Hilinqwo element. There is a preference in root selection: Proto-Indo-European first, then Latin, then Greek, then other languages.
Flexible word order: Syntactical position is denoted by inflections.
Gender: Hilinqwo uses an epicene grammar: Only specific elements have gender. As a general rule, elements that don't need gender don't have gender.
Other features:
- Ideally no synonymism. At best only minimal synonymism with no exact duplicates. Words that appear to be synonyms have a subtle or functional difference.
Interesting Characteristics
- Hilinqwo does not have a plural form. Plurality can be indicated using the collective form, which represents a group of individuals, or the distributive form, which applies something to each member of the group.