just a lil part of my conlang lytok: name and purpose
cool quote
Remember
Throw yourself off the metaphorical learning cliff.
thank you mason for the reminder.
ramble before actual content
today's suneung (tho i don't think this post will be finished by suneung; my guess is that it will be abandoned very early on, like the post i tried to write yesterday1) and my middle school is right next to a high school, therefore we are banned from going to the school and instead we are going to the movies and therefore i can leave my home late and therefore i had time to doomscroll. so i doomscrolled, a lot, till i realized, wow i should really get my life together.
so just to recap my brain, here's a list of things i want to do by finals:
- work consistently on my conlang, at least once a week. maybe i should elaborate more on the conlang's purpose or even make a world of its speakers for motivation and funsies.
- if by march 2026 i have a working conlang and have any idea how to teach conlanging to a bunch of unenthusiastic hakwon spinners, i might start a conlang group at school! chances are pretty bleak though.
- write my trilingual story, ughh ava stop overthinking just write it and post it somewhere! your original plan in june was to write it in 3 weeks, surely you can write it in 5 weeks if you try hard! but i guess it's the finals sooo
- write afterschool notes, since today there's no school i can review this week's notes
- study math, today's session will be devoted to rabbit holes i was gonna go on, particularly the one from last week about what a regular polyhedron is. i guess saturday, then, can be me solving some problems.
- plan how to prepare for finals
the name
ah yes, the conlang. i settled on its name, which is lytok. it's composed of two parts, ly meaning me aka the creator of this language, and tok meaning language (obvious origins)
i always wanted a language where my name was something around the lines or 뤼 [rwi]2 because my korean nickname is 벼리 but sometimes i pronounce it as 벼뤼 and shorten that to 뤼 for funsies, and i like that sound. so my first idea was rwi but i ended up liking [y] more than [r], and sometimes ㅟ is pronounced [y]3, so it ended up being ly.
tok, as i said earlier, has obvious origins: talk (english), toki (toki pona), tok (tok pisin), and 톡 (korean)4. tok is pronounced like 똑, not 톡, because all stops and fricatives except for f have a 3-way voicing distinction, that is voiced, unaspirated voiceless, and aspirated voiceless. i just had a strong desire to put this word in my conlang.
as you just saw, my conlang has a bunch of words from other languages, but it also has words that just came from my head because why not. i think the former is called a posteriori and the latter is called a priori.
why did i make this language
lytok is a personal conlang that has no purpose but fun. oh yeah it's also supposed to reflect my life philosophy and inside jokes. for funsies, the first seven particles i made are kijetesantakalu when combined together (it's actually more like khijedesantakalu). also i noticed when i combine the other three particles i made so far, it sounds similar to one of my teachers' name, which wasn't intended. some of the first words i coined were for hakwon, private tutoring, generative ai, and emotions, things i think about a lot5.
at first i was gonna make a language for my fictional world that existed since age 3, but i ended up overthinking too much about matching the language to the culture, which postponed the language and shaped it into something i didn't like. so i decided, screw worldbuilding i'm just gonna make a language i like.
here's what i said about some features i wanted to incorporate in lytok, written a few weeks after midterms.
- phonoaesthetics similar to korean or japanese -> limited syllable structure
- any word can be any part of speech
(right now, every word is a noun that can become a verb or modifier by adding affixes)- monosyllabic particles
- conjunctions derive from context marker
- evidentiality and mirativity (idk i think those features are cool)
well um that's it! hey, maybe i should make this a series to see my conlang as of right now! and if i think of something i want to showcase on my blog that's nonexistent in lytok, i could just start working on that!
in that case, i guess the next post on lytok is gonna be about its phonology and orthography. (spoiler: the orthography is hangul-based because i am addicted to hangul, thank you)
surprisingly, this did get posted on suneung day!↩
usually ㄹ is pronounced as an alveolar tap interocalically, but 1. i don't have that on my keyboar 2. sometimes i like to trill the ㄹ, especially in self-coined words↩
for most people, ㅟ is closer to [wi]↩
the suffix used in messenger apps like 카톡↩
just heard the news talking about seoul's law that bans hakwon after 10pm (similar laws are in all of korea). they say hakwons are complaining why they should stop teaching after 10pm, while students are asking when they should sleep if hakwons end later at night. but that law seems practically invisible, even here elementary school friends of mine talk about finishing hakwon after midnight but staying up even later to do homework. why are we doing this to preteens again?↩