Munder Nüjersdag 2025 fram Altidisk!
In case you couldn’t tell, I’ve gotten back on the conlang train over the past year, and I want to use 2025 to ride that train to its next destination. So that’s the big project for the new year, and I’m going to use this post to talk a bit about Altidisk: what it is, why it’s interesting, and why it’s the first time I’m constructing a language explicitly for other people to speak.
Communication and community
Languages are a part of culture. In a very real sense, those who speak a certain language have a shared bond that comes from it, a group distinction that separates them, gives them a way to communicate that recognizes their commonality.
English, being the major language of the world now, lacks that common bond. Because everyone is expected to speak English, or at least know someone who does, those of us who have it as our native language don’t see it as part of our heritage or community. English, alone among the living languages of the world, no longer has an established culture. In that, it’s like Latin after the fall of the Roman Empire, or even Sumerian in ancient times. Long gone are the days where speaking English meant you had some connection to England.
Our native tongue’s closest living relatives don’t have that problem. The other Germanic languages are, by and large, spoken in their traditional homelands and by a small group of expats and colonists, most of whom still remember and respect their ancestry. Germans know they’re German, even in Argentina. Swedes know they’re Swedish, whether they’re in Stockholm or St. Paul. Only English, by virtue of the British Empire’s storied history, has lost what it means to be itself.
That was my first motivation behind Altidisk. Because every Germanic language, while different in many ways, has a lot in common. For that matter, every Germanic culture has a lot in common. We all share a deep instinct, almost like genetic memory, that recalls the way of life our ancestors had 2000 years ago. To be Germanic is to descend from a people who prized courage, family, and honor. Three things, coincidentally enough, that are considered disgraceful or even "toxic" in modern times.
The people’s speech
There are other "auxiliary" languages out there. Indeed, the most well-known conlang of them all, Esperanto, is one such. Add in Ido, Interlingua, and a few less-notable cases, and the space is pretty crowded already. The difference is that Altidisk, unlike Esperanto, isn’t intended to be a world language. Its goal is not to replace English. Instead, I want it to augment the Germanic linguistic cultures, to help rebuild that shared bond.
To that end, the words are derived from Proto-Germanic, the common ancestor of English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and so on. Grammar is derived from the same source, though with a lot more variation due to the way the individual languages evolved. If you speak any of those languages, you’ll be able to get a good idea of what’s being said without even learning…or that’s one of the goals. I don’t know how well it’ll work in practice.
But the other goal, restoring the cohesion of the Germanic peoples, is just as important. That’s why the language is called "Altidisk" in the first place. Tidisk is its own word for "of the people"—cognate to Deutsch and Teutonic, as a matter of fact—and al is just "all". Thus, "language of all peoples", but specifically all the Germanic peoples. (It also self-identifies as the Viterens Folkspaka: "white folks’ speech", with "white" here used to refer specifically to the people around the shores of the North Sea.)
Resolution
As of today, Altidisk has a lexicon of over 4000 words, and over 5000 semantic meanings; there’s a great deal of homophony in the "core" vocabulary, owing to the way words were derived from Proto-Germanic. I also have translations of a few "classic" conlang texts: the Babel Text (Genesis 11:1-9), the Lord’s Prayer (Matthew 6:9-13), and the entirety of McGuffey’s First Eclectic Reader, which has become a kind of exhibition for a budding language.
All told, the corpus is somewhere around 8000 words in total, and I hope to at least double that in the coming year. I also want to do a few more translations, mostly to pin down some of the more obscure corners of the grammar. And then I want to compile that grammar in a format others can use, along with vocabulary lists, lessons, and the like. In short, I’m starting 2025 with the goal that, by the end of it, people—specifically Germanic-descended people—can start communicating in Altidisk.
Then we speakers of English and its cousins can, I hope, find our culture again. And that is a good resolution for the new year.