The great metropolis of Gherdun- jewel of the Empire- sits at the mouth of the Golden River, where it flows into the Pelagic Ocean. The city’s built on marshy, swampy land in the subtropics, and surrounded by overgrown ruins and paddy fields.
More importantly than this geographic description: Gherdun is ancient, extravagant. Gherdun is the axis about which the world revolves- or so goes the all-encompassing Gherdunnic weltanshauung, anyway. For over four millennia its gleaming spires have soared higher and higher- it’s less of a city at this point, and more of an excessively gilded termite mound for humans.
And as you’ve likely guessed, it doesn’t exist. It’s part of a collaborative fantasy project, largely hosted on SporeWiki (since it was originally the reboot of the Fantasy Universe, or Fantasyverse for short). And like any self-respecting (yeah, right) hack fantasy author, I need a conlang, and preferably several. The Gherdunnic Empire was originally the creation of my friend Shiz, but all he had were some vague ideas (and as a bio major, he’s been kept quite busy). Most of the extant lore is mine, and much more exists in the non-digital realm, either on pages of my notebooks or in my head.
I’ve extrapolated quite a bit. As a full disclosure, I’ve shamelessly cribbed from one Michael Kirkbride’s work on Cyrodiil prior to Todd Almighty seeing “The Fellowship of the Ring” (dir. Peter Jackson, 2001, adapting the first volume of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings”, pub. 1954). However, I’ve seen fit to add my own inspirations; a friend of mine joked that the city was “just Istanbul” after looking at some rough concepts.
Byzantine and early modern Islamic inspirations aside, I need a conlang yeah? Well, as mentioned before I aksully need a few, but right now, I’m gonna set out to formalize my ideas as to classical Gherdunnic, so that I can build upon it for the national tongues of each Gherdunnic realm. The ultra-abridged idea is to modify Classical Latin (how cliche, I know) in accord with Ancient Greek phonology. As we’ll later see, there’s more to it than that. Maybe I’ll be able to crank out another of these entries tonight, but for now I want to get this up and on the site.
Sierpinski Tetrahedron 