Vro Brunzgyhof

Vro Brunzgyhof Is the principal language of Ahm Brunof on Earth-946.

Design

Vro Brunzgyhof originated in a roleplaying and conlanging challenge to myself. I had decided to play a barbarian swordswoman from another dimension on Champions MUSH. She would arrive, exiled from her homeworld by a sorcerer, not knowing a word of English or any other known language, but only her native tongue.

Inspiration for the language struck while I was playing about with sounds and letters searching for a name for the character. I was aiming for a typical fantasy barbarian name, and ended up juggling k, z and r (I was not consciously mimicking Ka-Zar, a character only knew vaguely; I suspect rather that name was hit upon by essentially the same method). I noted that Kiizar would be taken as a man's name by English speaker, but Kiizra was clearly female‒and so I had both my character's name and the first feature of the language: there would be two genders, a masculine and a feminine, where all masculine nouns ended in a consonant and all feminine nouns in a vowel. To make this fun, there would be suffixes, so that repair strategies would be needed to keep this the case, and there would be masculine and feminine pairs for more reasons for the obvious biological ones.

I didn't have long to work on the language, because I wanted to introduce the character as soon after it was approved as possible. To cope with the sometimes rather complex phonological changes on the fly, I wrote a script to apply these for me, so I could enter text in citation form (generally a good idea, though it tended to mean typos were more problematic than normal). I used lots of productive morphology to get the most out of only a few roots. In the few days I had, I made a list of likely vocabulary items and pre-translated about twenty sentences that I anticipated I might need in the first scene, in which the character finds herself thrown into another world, such as "What sorcery is this?", "Where am I?", "What the hell is that?" and basic greetings. My aim, which I more or less achieved, was that I should have to make up no more than one new morpheme per sentence on the one play started, since I did not want this to slow down the game at all. I tried to memorise as much of the initial vocabulary as I could; to this end many of the words are suggestive of words from natlangs.

The whole effort was broadly successful.