Author's notes and thoughts

While this site is also the home for plenty of material on the cultural and environmental dimension, those topics might not be covered in as much depth as I'd like to, and I got myself fearing that, being just as important as the grammar itself as a part of Dundulanyä, some things might be overlooked this way.

Using the most commonly used ways to describe conlangs referencing their influences and goals, Dundulanyä should easily be called an “artlang”, like its spiritual ancestors such as Chlouvānem and all of those that came before it, all the way back to, at the very least, 2012-13^[1]. For quite some time, somewhat absentmindedly, I used to think that the “heartlang” label was also fitting to Dundulanyä, albeit not in the way I used to apply it to Chlouvānem years ago, for I was using it (albeit very rarely) to write personal diary-like fragments. But what is a “heartlang”, and is it even different from an “artlang” at all? I'd say, no. Being a work of art, Dundulanyä is a way to express something very deep within myself, what comes natural to me — just as all art is. It is personal, it is intimate, it exists in and within myself — the very act of documenting it and making it public as I'm doing by creating this website and filling pages and pages is just sharing these feelings.
To get back to those descriptors, Dundulanyä, just like all other conlangs I've ever made and likely will ever make, is definitely not a IAL, not an engineered language — but I don't really think anymore that there's a difference between “artlangs” and “heartlangs”. It's just art.

Anyway, for those who might have stumbled across Chlouvānem through the years – and, indeed, I did share a lot of it on conlanging communities and groups on the blue “f” social network from its inception until early 2020 – that conlang reflected a conculture which was definitely and purposefully not utopical or idealistic. While there were some idealistic elements of 22-to-23-year-ish-old mine, in some ways – some would say many – it was more of a deranged utopia with ideals extremized and distorted to the point of creating a dystopia. Alas, nothing different from our most recent past.

Dundulanyä is also not utopical, to the extent that its speakers are not perfect beings: just like Eventoa, and Calémere before it, is astronomically, geologically, geographically, climatologically and biologically an Earthlike world, Eventoan humans are humanlike, with all of our pros and cons. Still, Dundulanyä is a more mature œuvre and I'd argue the Dundulanyä conculture is more on the positive side of humankind, as I've been striving to make their worldview one that reflects thoughts that'd make our own society one that I think we'd all live better in.

It's a personal strife for kindness, tenderness, and happiness.

Perhaps it's also a sign of the times and back in 2018-19 a deranged utopia was a fresher idea and less of an existential angst than in 2024: we seem collectively to be pretty damn good at creating dystopias, and not only on paper. That's in fact one of the reasons why I have been reluctant to work on a posteriori conlangs, especially set in the present day Earth, as it means moving through topics too sensitive when it comes to culture and environment. Somehow, the worse it gets, the less inclined I am to work on conlangs set in the very same world of ours. But I'll talk more about the cultural aspect of Dundulanyä later.

The influences on the language and its aesthetics are pretty much self-evident and recognizable enough from the grammar descriptions and examples given throughout this site, and I think it's not fair to the conlang itself in its nature as a work of art to even list them. The less noticeable things are the cultural and especially environmental influences. Aside from myself being a huge geography nerd, which leads me to spend days on crafting a world map that is excessively detailed for its purpose, with lots of thoughts on orography and wind patterns to justify the placement of climate zones and their biomes, the specific environment of the Dundulanyä heartlands of Lusaṃrīte and Jūhma (see, as an example, the page on the Confederation of the United Dundulanyä Republics) is heavily influenced by Precolumbian Mesoamerica, ancient India and Southeast Asia, and the Amazon basin. Speaking about cultural aspects, on the other hand, in crafting Dundulanyä I was thoroughly influenced by matriarchal studies, Niki de Saint Phalle, Alexander Dubček, the Prague Spring, countercultures in the Soviet Union, and by Mayan religion and mythology.
Reading, in 2023, about matriarchal societies of the Upper Paleolithic was, in fact, the single greatest inspiration that led me to craft Dundulanyä as it is now.

The examples found throughout the grammar will be as environmentally and culturally coherent as possible, so that there will be environmental terms such as flora and fauna resembling those of Meso- and South America: when there is a common enough English word which describes something similar, I use it as the translation, otherwise I leave it in Dundulanyä. So the śiloma is a fruit similar enough to a papaya to be translated as “papaya”, while the kaṇḍaru fruit, which resembles a jabuticaba but is generally yellow, is still a kaṇḍaru in translation, or the dūtare is still a dūtare instead of a large reptile whale whose most similar Earth analogue, the Platycarpus, lived over 80 million years ago.

One of the elements which I cherish the most in Dundulanyä and which does not have a dedicated section in the grammar – which focuses on a synchronic description – is etymology and word derivation (which at least for the first says as much about myself as about the concultural mindset of the Dundulanyä), so I'll spend a few words on that now. Creative etymologies are, in my opinion, one of the most intimate aspects of conlanging and, being myself a geek for interesting etymologies in natural languages, I find creating a clever and culturally significant etymology to be one of the most satisfactory moments of the art of language creation.

The link between etymology and culture, keeping in mind everything I've said above on the topic of reflections on humankind and a positive worldview, surfaces in a few themes I'm eager to highlight:

1. the matricentric society of the Dundulanyä and its more religious and ritual aspect, which surfaces in the clan-centric (traditional) societal organization and in the cult of birth, of women as creators of life and the inherent female characterization of every creator and creative force in Dundulanyä cosmogony, as well as the conceptualization, both abstract and reflected in religious architecture, of the female body as a temple^[2]. This is seen for example in the root sauka (womb, uterus) which most notably is the root also of the synonyms vaisauka and sisauka, meaning “sacred, saint, holy, blessed”, with the prefix vai-/si- (the latter a variant of se-) meaning “with”. Then, the root √yon- (to create, procreate, beget, sire) forms nouns such as yunya (a word hard to fully translate, but generally glossed as “creator force, nature, goddess, demiurge, creator spirit”), yunitya (a synonym for “woman”, singulative of yunya, hence “a single creator spirit”), yunitiyāna (femininity), but also yunyāmita (physical science), vājñunna (culture, civilization) and udhiyunya (menstrual cycle) — which could be analyzed as “the creator force within”.
   Tellingly, a formal synonym for “mother” is alārvura (the well-wished, the respected), from the same root √lārv-, whence also lāropa (temple, place of gathering, place of praise and prayer) and lāruta (respect).

   Meanwhile, the Dundulanyä calendar consists in two concurrent reckonings, a 418-day solar year and a 216-day cycle, the juñsätanä (forming the basis of what are, roughly, our weeks), which corresponds to the average length of Eventoan human gestation counted starting from the first missed menstrual period. This 216-day cycle, furthermore, has a certain significance inside clans, as unlike in general society cousins are grouped – with specific terms – depending on the juñsätanä of their birth instead of the solar year.

2. the clan-centric society is well reflected in Dundulanyä kinship terminology, which is conceptually a variation of the Iroquois system that gives more importance to female relatives on both the mother and the father's side of the family tree, establishing the mother's clan as primary and the father's clan (i.e. the one continued by the father's sisters) as secondary for Ego; the children of either parent's brothers are considered to belong to their respective mothers' clans, without any relationship to Ego. Kinship terminology is described in a specific section among thematic wordlists.

3. a field of vocabulary that mirrors how people see the world and other people is what insults they use, for it immediately shows what is taboo and what a given societal order disapproves. In contrast to patriarchal societies and their languages, where female sexual promiscuity (even when insulting men) and any deviation from male-centric standards are central to slurs, Dundulanyä profanity and insults center on violence, rage and lack of empathy, seen as the biggest threats to the common well-being of society. “Cold-hearted” in English is hardly a compliment, but viṣoṣū, in Dundulanyä, which describes the same kind of person, is among the worst slurs one can hear.

4. meanwhile, the root √del- “to cry” not only forms words such as dila “tears” (sg. tantum), diltya “a tear”, but also delta “emotion”, dailāmita “honesty”, delna “truth”, vaidilal “confidant”, dinūloba “honest person”. as well as having intensive forms with the meaning of “to be honest” (e.g. aidelah “I am honest”).

5. some interesting etymologies concern the extension to the human sphere of concepts more concretely related to nature. A prime example is the word saṃlulya, meaning “hero/heroine” – which has a broader meaning of "wunderkind", a child which exhibits a particular talent from an early age^[3] –, which literally means “that who blooms forth”, ultimately from the same root √loly- “to bloom, blossom, flourish” as lulya “flower”. Other examples are the word ṇīṭah, which means “skin” in humans and animals and “bark” for trees, or compound words for body parts through parallels in the floral world, such as hindnūlya “ear”, literally “hearing leaf”.

6. anthroponyms show all of the above features, even if many of the most common ones are not of strict Dundulanyä origin but borrowed from other ancient languages. Both female and male given names often have meanings related to taking care of others, kindness, cleverness and happiness, or natural objects and phenomena such as the sun, the two Eventoan moons, dawn and sunset, the stars. Many epicene names, especially those which are not ultimately borrowings, are names of animals, especially birds. Dundulanyä given names have their own dedicated page.