Ahoi lu! Hello!
I created Seoina as my entry to the Spring 2020 Speedlang Challenge, just as the COVID-19 lockdowns were starting in my country. For a long time, I avoided features that struck me as being European or even broadly Indo-European, because I thought they weren’t interesting and that I’d just end up relexing languages I already spoke. Turns out there’s a lot of really interesting things going on in European languages! All languages are complex and interesting and beautiful, so I didn’t want to over-exoticize languages I didn’t speak while ignoring interesting bits from ones more familiar to me. I made Seoina as a repository for interesting things I wanted to explore, but didn’t work with the typologies of Mwaneḷe or Anroo. It takes some inspiration from the noun phrases and extraction in some Slavic languages, copula constructions in Irish, agreement attraction in Slovene, clitics in Romance and South Slavic, complementizer agreement in Frisian, free relatives in German, and correlatives in Hungarian. Further afield, it also takes some inspiration from the conditional in (questionably European) Turkish, phonological agreement in Guébie, and classifiers in Southeast Asian languages, especially Burmese.
Check out below for more Seoina Content!
Where can I find Seoina?
- Seoina Sketch Grammar and Lexicon
- Relative Clauses in Seoina (Maybe): I wrote a Reddit post analyzing a bit of Seoina from the perspective of a linguist in-world.
Haufa l’uo souda! Thanks for reading!