Oh boy where do I start...
(If you want to skip to the part on how Kisska came to be just ctrl+f and type in [Kisska Part])
(First off I should warn you I am a nerd and specifically a nerd who is into linguistics and more specifically the conlanging side of things. A conlang is short for constructed language which is just a fancy term for a made up language which is made by a sole person or a small group of people as opposed to a language naturally and unconsciously arising from people as a whole. I also may use a bit of fancy terminology here and there so I'll put it in links if you want to know more.)
So some years ago (roughly 3 I believe) I made a language known as Fleki. In a nutshell, the whole point of the language was to create incredibly flexible
Word Order via a versatile
particle system. Now I also had this weird itch about me. For some reason I felt that there should be some objective efficient method of how many words Fleki should need or should have. This sort of was resolved by designing Fleki so that it could be placed over other languages and use their semantics but I wanted a something more native and efficient. This is what started the "Minimalism trend" as I attempted to figure out how to reduce the amount of words needed while also retaining fairly clear and crisp communication. Eventually, I gave up doing this for Fleki for a while and moved the idea into a new language--or really a glorified dictionary known as "Svendia's Semantic Language Base"
This Language base was designed in a similar way. The idea was to create the vocabulary and words necessary to speak as clearly as you would in English but to reduce the amount of words needed to learn. The base was made in the case that if I made multiple other languages, they can just borrow from the base either very directly with the spelling and pronunciation of words in tact or borrow from it a bit more liberally and use it as a soft guide. Either way, the point was that it would potentially speed up make the necessary lexicon for any future endeavors. Although, for whatever reason, I stopped working on it and the development of Fleki subsided as well.
And then, there came the first biggest endeavor on this "minimalism" thing and that is Abigeno. Abigeno uses a base word system where there are a very small and fixed number of words which are then combined in many and various ways to re-create all the words needed for a perceivably functional system. Abigeno took a very literalist and blunt approach as I believed that if words were very transparent and followed a specific and precise logic, you'd be able to accurately guess what various words would be in the language without even knowing them yet which would hopefully make it a lot faster to learn the language. There are some other details and quirks about Abigeno but if you want to know more, just go to these links and then ask me questions because things are messy:
nethood.boards.net/thread/764/abigeno-sectionsnethood.boards.net/thread/775/abigeno-section-iiiAnyways, this carried on until late 2017 when I found someone else's conlang known as Earth Language. I won't go into details what Earth Language but you can check it out here.
earthlanguage.org/english/ehome.htmAnyway, I was curious one day about it and after doing some research I was amazed at what I found. Basically, Earth Language was doing a similar thing where it also had a very small amount of base characters/words which were then used to make every single word and it made me realize what I was doing so wrong. Basically, I was being too blunt or literal and this literalness was stifling the growth and completion of Abigeno. And so, seeing as I my homework seemed to have been done for me, I dumped the old system of Abigeno and jumped into created an Abigeno and Earth Language fusion language known as Ebileno.
Ebileno specifically is a fusion between the grammar and suffix system of Abigeno and the semantics (a fancy way to say "the meaning of things or words") of Earth Language with some other small modifications to Earth Language here and there. After spending nearly 24 hours straight copying every single word into Ebileno's dictionary, I finally was overjoyed as I for once in my entire conlanging I got a fairly functional language. Most languages I made to this point had like roughly 10-100 words but this one had roughly under 3000. Not fully functional but definitely better than most languages prior. If you are curious about the Ebileno topic, here it is:
nethood.boards.net/thread/844/ebileno-beta-topicThings were going pretty swell for Ebileno but then I grew tired of keeping up with the grammar for the word order, the extra rules for the grammar, and overall the language felt very rough and unpalatable to pronounce so I made a variation of Ebileno known as Ebiku which I
announced:
NEW EXTREME EXPERIMENT:
Soon, there will be yet another conlang and probably the last conlang made out of this crazy 2 year conlang explosion I've been having (there's actually tons more conlangs unrevealed that I've made but most of them don't really deserve the spotlight or attention.)
Now, I do like Ebileno and all, it pretty much achieves that minimalist dream I've been having but one thing that always bothered me about it is its repetition and heavy marking of words creating this sort of consonant heavy sounds that feels a little unwieldy at times to pronounce.
So, I decided to create what will be temporarily called "Ebiku" which is a variation of a dead Abigeno variation known as "Aniku". Basically it's fairly similar to Ebileno but the most important purpose is that its supposed to reduce the amount of affixes and inflection, sound nicer/cleaner, and be a bit more lax in terms of ambiguity. Funny enough, while doing this project I ended up having even less base words that needed to be used than in Ebileno which is pretty cool actually.
Assuming Ebiku reaches beta stage, Ebileno will still live and be worked on mainly because it has succeeded already and will work as a nice variant of the same minimalism concept. I also may add new phonetical rules to Ebileno to help clean up its phonology as well so it flows better but that's still in debate.
on December 6th. To summarize, Ebiku basically was smoother and did away with the suffixes leading to a tighter and stricter word order in order to properly express the appropriate part of a speech for words. At the time, Ebiku didn't have its own dictionary as it just mooched off of Ebileno's with some changes here and there. Ebiku also had its own topic:
nethood.boards.net/thread/874/ebiku-alpha-topicEventually, the names Ebileno and Ebiku switched to Lespi and Lezhi. This is because when I made these languages, everything has to be made via the base words and names like Ebileno and Ebiku would have to be considered base words since they came out of thin air as opposed to coming from the system internally. Luckily, past me was nice enough to make a topic that links both Lespi and Lezhi together in one topic:
nethood.boards.net/thread/896/lespi-lezhi-leshin-beta-topicAnd apparently another known as Leshin. Leshin didn't last long but it was basically me becoming a bit bothered with how word-making in Lespi/Lezhi worked. Basically due to the small word base, Lespi/Lezhi relied off of
collocations or convention in order to prevent the created words from meaning too many things as each base word can mean all sorts of things when you make new words with other words. I felt that words that simply deserved their own concept should be their own word as that is what Leshin set out to do although I became displeased with how it worked at the time so I gave it up. However, my unrest definitely wouldn't end there as soon, there would be three more attempts to overthrow the current system. Neo-Lezhi, Jeska, and Kisska.
At this point in time, I believe I swapped over to Lezhi over Lespi since I preferred its grammar and pronunciation over the previous language. But I was, as I said, displeased with how the word building worked and how inconsistent things were. Neo-Lezhi was meant to be a big change to fundamentally change how the system worked but alas, I was not pleased so Lezhi stayed the way it was with some slight modifications inspired from the potential new design. At that point, I gave up and accepted Lezhi as it is for now...
[Kisska Part]
So, one day I was making a new conlang without a particular direction to it except maybe some subconscious things and maybe some minimalist things to it. I just did as I do basically with vague parameters. The language at this point was called Skaina (Pronounced as Sky-Nah) as I imagined blue skinned humanoid beings which lived in the clouds. It slowly turned into another minimalist project with an intention similar to Leshin. The big importance different however was the significant shift in grammar and a much higher level of part of speech changing suffixes and even allowing deviation via verb gerund+nouns and etc. At first, it didn't seem like it would amount to much or replace Lezhi but I became very fascinated and eventually Kisska showed great potential and promise. It's name was eventually changed to Kisska (literally: joining language) following the no arbitrary names rule and it constantly became a competitor towards Lezhi.
At some point, I really wanted to keep Lezhi so I made various redesigns, I made and put much time into theorizing attempts and stuff that it became very tiring and annoying. Jeska was basically as language which attempted to combine the best of Lezhi and Kisska together which is also fittingly reflected in its name (Je = joining/combining from Lezhi and Ska = language from Kisska). It was truly a joining of two separate languages. But alas, I was still displeased and afterwards, banned myself from making anymore redesigned as it was becoming a huge waste of time.
I did make one final exception and that exception was to give Lezhi one last big update which actually would have nearly finished the language if it went through. The deal was, if I was pleased with the update, then Lezhi gets updated and I push Kisska to the way side. However, if I was displeased, then Lezhi gets pushed to the wayside and Kisska reigns supreme. And the final verdict was...
Kisska. Which leads us to today's times where I seek to bring Kisska back to the level of Lezhi in terms of its word count and ability to express many things but in its own particular way.