Aeniith Languages

Welcome to Aeniith

The constructed world of Aeniith is an ongoing project by me, Margaret Ransdell-Green. The site was designed by my husband, Eric Barker. On this site you can read about the humanoid species that inhabit this world, their cultures and histories, and their languages. The language aspect of the site is one of the most prominent, as linguistics is something I have been studying extensively for the past few years. I’ve been creating conlangs (constructed languages) since around 1998-9 and this is one of my primary passions. I’ve also been doing conlanging professionally in recent times as well.

I began creating artificial languages the age of eight, when I started writing lists of words in a language I called “Rhymish”. In this language, the word “rhyme” was [gotεvi]. The language became Gotevian, or in the language itself, Gotevinur. Then I created a people to speak this language. The first individual was Inacaporia, the queen of the nation of Gotêvi. Soon after, this led to the creation of Lomilin, Gotevi's sister nation. From there, the Ei lands took form, and the Bayë, and Orikrindians. Then came Elta, the eastern continents, and the Ríli and Tosi and their history. Sometimes slowly and sometimes rapidly (I wrote the Rilin morphosyntax in three days over winter break!), over the last twenty years, this world of Aeniith has developed into a multi-faceted planet with its own biology, ecology, cultures, histories, and languages.

As my hobby of language creation and world building grew, I started getting interested in real-world languages. At thirteen I taught myself Latin. The next year I discovered Welsh and studied that for a while. Two years later was the beginning of college where I learned Italian and French. Around this time, I started studying modern linguistics on my own from textbooks that I picked up in used bookstores. I decided that I should take linguistics classes at the university and immediately afterward decided that I wanted this to be my major. I’m now pursuing my passion for linguistics by doing to a PhD in language documentation at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

The construction of Aeniith has been the culminating project that combines my love of structured systems and linguistics. I have tried to make the languages linguistically plausible while still being diverse and varied enough to be interesting). With the ecology and biology, I have attempted to mix some more logically plausible aspects with some more bizarre elements. Aeniith as a genre setting probably falls somewhere between science fiction and fantasy, being described more accurately as speculative fiction.