Tersamic Language Family
The Tersamic language family is a classification of all languages descended from Old Tersamian, spoken in the First Tersamian Empire.
Family Tree
See the Skomi family tree.
Notes
Tersamian (s̩qx n̲s̲̍ṛnxbx̣pm) was the first conlang I ever created (heck, I think I started developing it in 2017) and remains the flagship conlang I have today.
In 2016, I started learning German and the new phonemes like /x/ and grammar paradigms really fascinated my tiny young brain, inspiring me to develop Tersamian. This original revision (let’s call it version 0) of Tersamian was heavily inspired by German and had extremely similar noun declensions and vocabulary; even the phonology was stolen from German. At some point I realised copying German wasn’t the brightest idea and out version 0 went.
So I created a so-called version 1 of Tersamian in 2018. This time, I integrated features from other languages instead of copying them wholesale. For example, the phonology gained tenuis and palatalised forms, borrowed from Russian and the Celtic languages. Adjectives typically ended with a palatal consonant and an instrumental case was added. The noun classes system with 2 animacy classes and 5 “sentiency” tiers and their corresponding inflection and vowel harmony rules emerged around this time, which survives to the current version of Tersamian. In addition, the vocabulary was overhauled to rely less on existing languages.
However, version 1 was incredibly regular. It just felt so unnatural that all of the inflections had such regularity in them in a supposedly “natural” conlang. Instead of throwing out all of this work, I declared version 1 as Middle Tersamian of sorts and “evolved” the language a thousand years by applying sound changes (similar to those in English’s own Great Vowel Shift), collapsed the tenuis-palatal consonant system, getting rid of long vowels and creating irregular inflections to create Modern Standard Tersamian. If you click the link above, it should take you to the documentation for Modern Standard Tersamian, or as the speakers call it, Z’óm Ŕáncöem’.
I also created a constructed featural alphabet for Tersamian in 2020 for the Middle Tersamian phonological system and was inspired by Indic scripts, especially Burmese. This “older” alphabet eventually gave way to a Latin-looking script which speakers use in the modern era.