Home

The (Abridged) Story Behind Çomyopregi

Çomyopregi is over 20 years old now, and has changed considerably in that time. It actually began as a revision of Esperanto. Pretty soon I got the idea that since the Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages ˜ all the important languages of Europe ˜ were Indo-European, Indo-European roots represented an important commonality that could be used for coining words for my language. I liked that idea better than picking a word randomly from either a Germanic, Romance, or Slavic language, so I sketched the sound-changes I wanted to occur and redid the vocabulary using reconstructed roots whenever possible. Soon I expanded the case system beyond my original nominative, accusative, and prepositional-case system. Then I added personal endings to verbs. I made a huge step finally by doing away with the principle of one ending per part of speech and dividing the nouns into three (still perfectly regular) declensions. By that time I wanted to make a language that could be suited for international but was more natural-seeming as well as, and every natural language had at least a couple different endings for each part of speech. I could have nouns with final vowels -a, -e, and -u and still have regular, logical plural and case forms. That didn't last long. I still had a system with case affixes that were separate from, and added on after, the plural formation, but then I developed a declension system with fused endings combining the concepts of number and case. At that point I realized my language was becoming too complicated and varied in its forms to serve well as an auxlang. What was I to do? Ah hell, I thought, and starting making irregular verbs. Since then, I have abandoned any intent of creating an auxlang and have just been designing it to be personally pleasing. (And I really don't like auxlangs anymore anyhow...too...dead.) There are still some ways in which it seems a bit too perfect for a real language, but it's greatly improved. My tongue now is so different in structure and style from Esperanto that had I not explained all this, you probably never would have guessed what it started out as.

By the way, Çomyopregi is looking for a home. I think it would be interesting to know the history of the tongue's speakers, and how they fit into the general historical schema with everything else. I don't have much of a scenario for these people set up yet (basically they're in Central and Eastern Europe), and I doubt I'll have time to put something together (at least for now) in addition to developing the language. So if any of you out there have an alternative history of Europe of your own that you think Çomyopregi might fit into, feel free to email me. I might also be able help you out creating a couple other languages to fill it out. A satem language might be nice.

As for the languages of Sopih...that will have to wait...

Reguándóy domum
© 2005 by Damátir Ando