Fun game even though it's short. I really liked that you actually used a different grammar with verb-final word order and affixes, instead of just doing English with different words.
Is this an actual conlang you made or just a few words made specifically for the game? Also what's the phonology of the language, if there is one? I was just using 'ng' /ŋ/ or /ŋg/, 'th' /θ/, 'tz' /ts/, 'q' /tʃ/ and direct IPA values for everything else when pronouncing words in my head.
I didn't think too much about the phonology. I'd say your interpretation was reasonably close to what I had in mind, except I imagined <q> as /kw/ (can't do the superscript here but labialized k) because english. i'd like to incorporate more phonology if I redid this concept, i was just worried in a 48hr jam it'd be hard to tune the difficulty of it so i just went the easy route and didn't implement e.g. sound changes.
if you're interested i actually put together a short inventory of themengi's lexicon and (very minimal) grammar, which i could send you if you want. it's like 20 words just about, most of them used in some way or another in the game. it's very far from a full conlang -- i've never made a conlang before and dont really know much about them beyond poking at sindarin a bit. i am a ling student, which helped, but i definitely want to learn more about conlanging if i was to redo this.
No need to send the whole language if it's covered in the game already, I just have a question about one word. Is "jigu" an adjective, an adverb, or both? It seemed to be used as both, meaning something akin to "up", but I wasn't sure.
It's a nice attempt at a conlang, especially with the time constraint you had. Conlanging for games like what you did is something I'm very interested in, and I'm hoping to one day develop a simple text input system like Themengi's but able to accept arbitrary grammars and lexicons, in order to have procedurally generated languages used by NPCs that you have to learn in an adventure game.
yeah my goal also is to be able to procedurally generate new grammars and form equivalent sentences between them and get to play with that aspect in a game :)
jigu was meant to be an adjective meaning 'up' in the same paradigm as bang/dang. you could probably analyze it as an adverb if you wanted though :)
