site/blog/reconlangmo-8-storytelling.markdown

---
title: "ReConLangMo 8: Storytelling"
date: 2020-05-29
series: reconlangmo
tags:
 - conlang
 - lewa
---

# ReConLangMo 8: Storytelling

In the [last episode][rclm7] of [ReConLangMo][reconlangmo], we covered
conversational discourse as well as formality and other grammatical moods. I
also covered my goals for the gender system of L'ewa. Here I will cover the
closest thing L'ewa has to culture, the storytelling and poetry norms. L'ewa is
also a language designed for [spellcraft][spellcraft] and [sigil
magick][sigils], so those norms will be covered too. This is a response to [this
prompt][rclm8].

[rclm7]: /blog/reconlangmo-7-discourse-2020-05-25
[rclm8]: https://www.reddit.com/r/conlangs/comments/gszhy9/reconlangmo_7_storytelling_and_poetry/
[reconlangmo]: /blog/series/reconlangmo
[spellcraft]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incantation
[sigils]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigil

## Stories

Stories are told as statements that happened in the past. Stories are structured
in the same way that you would structure them in English. There is a scenario, a
call to action, a refusal of the call, then the story goes on in the standard
way. Casual retelling of events is done without a narrative, and the events are
just relayed using casual sentences.

The particle `qu` can be repeated at the beginning of a story to enable the
"story time" flag. Story time sentences can be figurative. Each sentence in the
story progressively builds up the narrative to explain the themes and lessons
that are trying to be conveyed.

Stories are told using the narrative present tense. Speakers also relay
secondhand information directly. 

## Poetry

One of the morphological side effect of L'ewa root words is that only the first
four letters of each word are unique. As a side effect of this, you can make any
word rhyme with any other word if you want it to. L'ewa can become l'ewi, l'ewo,
le'we or l'ewu if the poetry demands it. Poetry can be done in any meter or
rhythm depending on the mood of the speaker. Poetry can also be formatted using
fixed-width text. Here are a few examples:

```
le l'ewa de kirta
xi firga to renma

The language of Creators
is beneficial to all people
```

```
a'o ro zimpu ti
e'o so vorto

I hope you understand this
How many words?
```

I don't think I have enough vocabulary to make any more yet.

## Spellcraft

These poems are worked into sigils by interlocking the words together into a
larger figure. Here is an example based on the first poem:

![](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/707952638813143051/716075404405768202/dotgrid-20K10-824701.png)

Ideally this would would include the letters spiraling around things, but my
current tools are limited in what they can do. Sigils don't need to follow
normal grammar rules. They can bend and break them as much as they want or need
in order to flow nicer. If they need to, they can also make up words that don't
normally exist in the dictionary. These words should be documented in the
dictionary at some point, but there is no big rush.

## Gender and Third Person Pronouns

Previously, I haven't gone into details about the third person pronouns in
L'ewa. This was done very, very intentionally. One of the goals of L'ewa's
handling of gender is to abolish the gender binary as much as possible. This
means that any content word can end up being used as a pronoun. In order to
avoid ambiguity, only part of the content word is used to form something
matching the particle rules I was vaguely gesturing about in the post that had
details about colors. To recap:

> Compound words still need to be fleshed out, but generally all CVCCV words
> will have wordparts made out of the first, second and fifth letter, unless the
> vowel pair is illegal and all CCVCV words are the first, third and fifth
> letter unless this otherwise violates the morphology rules.

Let's say that your gender is the word for "is meat", or `dextu`. This would
mean the third person pronoun form would be `de'u` (`eu` isn't a valid vowel
pair so the glottal stop is used to break it). 

```
de'u qu tulpa lo l'ewa
They (de'u) built a language.

mao qu madsa lo spalo
They (mao) ate an apple.
```

If you want to declare your gender, you can declare it with the word `zedra`:

```
lo spalo xi zedra
An apple is (my) gender.
```

This would then make their pronoun `sao`.

You can ask someone what their gender is with the gender question particle
`zei`:

```
<Mai> xoi
<Cadey> xoi ro zei
<Mai> lo mlato xi zedra
<Mai> zei
<Cadey> lo 'orka xi zedra
```

From then Mai would be referred to using the pronoun `mao` and Cadey would be
referred to using the pronoun `'ka`.

If you need a generic third person pronoun, use `ke'o`.

---

This seems to be the end of the ReConLangMo series in /r/conlangs, but I will
definitely continue to develop this on my own and post about it as I make larger
accomplishments. This has been a fun series and I hope it gave people a high
level overview of what is needed to make a speakable language from nothing.

Be well.