Chapter Nine: I go to a family reunion and learn my cousin’s kids are making their own languages

Hello there! It’s been a minute.

Please forgive the seven-month absence. After graduating last year (December 2025) my attention turned fully to finishing the school year. And after the school year wrapped up, life became focused around my July wedding. It’s been a busy year for me to say the least! I have now been happily married to my partner, Brian, for three weeks!

Shortly after the wedding, I attended an extended-family reunion. Among those present were my cousin Jen and her family. While swimming under the hot afternoon sun, I overheard Jen’s teenage daughters, Lily and Amber ¹, quizzing each other with a “Who Am I?” game. In Latin. (“Quid Sum?”)

Both girls attend a private school where Latin class is part of their schedule. Latin came to my attention last spring when I was investigating inflectional morphology, which led to learning about noun case. When nouns are grammatically marked to show their role in a phrase, this is called case and all the modifications of that noun are called its declensions. So far as I understand it, conjugation is to verbs and declension is to nouns.

Latin is a prolific user of noun cases. English, on the other hand, has almost none. The only really notable use of case in English can be found in personal pronouns, for example: “I speak to him,” but, “He speaks to me.” In these sentences “I” and “me” refer to the same entity (just like “him” and “he” are the same entity) but these words aren’t interchangeable. “I” and “he” are in the subjective case (the actors) whereas “him” and “me” are in the objective case (the acted upon). Modifying pronouns for case is required in English and native speakers do it without a second thought. Americans don’t usually learn about this sort of grammar at school, other than learning about subjects and predicates. The “subject” part of the subject-and-predicate duo is analogous to the “subjective” case.

As someone who’s never learned Latin, only read about it, I wanted Lily and Amber to tell me about their experiences. Not surprisingly, they were not fans of noun declensions! From their perspective (and I’d guess many students would echo these feelings) noun case feels unnecessarily complicated.

Picking their brains about Latin, I soon learned the girls were also working on their own languages, inspired by both Latin and the Elvish languages of Lord of the Rings, Quenya and Sindarin.² Tolkein was a keen linguist and philologist and, famously, came up with the Elvish languages first and built the world of Middle Earth around them. Amber excitedly told me that she had some of her own original language work in her notebook, which she had left in the car. I told her I’d love to see it.

(Jen, at this point, told me off to the side that I should not feel obligated to listen to the girls’ entire spiel on their home-crafted languages, but I ensured her I was indeed interested. I saw that their nerdy special interest aligned with mine, so out of genuine curiosity, I asked them all about their languages and world-building and they were more than happy to tell me all about it!)

Looking over Amber’s notebook, I was really impressed with what I saw. It feels safe to assume Amber’s pre-existing knowledge of Latin and love of Lord of the Rings lore has shaped her language-building skills; however, I also don’t doubt that the reverse is true: that a natural talent and curiosity about languages fuels her interest in Latin and Elvish. Although both girls grumbled about learning Latin grammar, they were playing “Quid Sum?” on summer vacation, which absolutely no one had forced them to do. I mean… they can’t dislike Latin that much, right?

Amber’s notes included a page full of vocabulary, organized by meaningful prefixes. In her constructed language (conlang) the prefix “nal” means “beginning” and words that start with “nal-” relate to the idea of beginnings, both literal and metaphorical. The reverse of “nal” is “lan” and words with the “lan-” prefix relate to endings, including the words she had made for “victory” and “death”.

From my perspective as an educator, I felt that this was very advanced linguistic thinking! Amber told me explicitly that her language has been influenced by Latin. That much was clear in some of the spelling patterns she used, but it also showed up in her knowledge and use of derivational affixes. Unlike inflectional morphology, where words are modified to show grammar, derivation morphology is all about constructing unique words to show a new meaning or a particular part of speech. For example, derivational morphology lets you understand that a “baker” is one who “bakes,” that the words “racist” and “antiracist” have opposite meanings, and that you can “do” something once, but you “redo” it over and over.

English is a fairly analytic language and big ideas are often broken up into words consisting of one – maybe two – morphemes. However, some of English’s bigger words – often academic vocabulary – are rich with derivational morphology influenced by Greek and Latin. For example, the idea of “democracy” can be expressed in English by the phrase “rule by the people.” “Homogenize” can be expressed as “the act of making things the same as one another.” (I realize these words have Greek, not Latin, etymologies, but they were the examples that sprang to mind.) It is not necessary to know Greek roots in order to understand these concepts. However, if one does have some knowledge of them, they might recognize the morphemes “dem-“, “-cracy”, “hom-“, and “gen-” which give clues to the meaning of the words they are nestled within.

From my own observations and experiences, as well as the literature review completed while writing my master’s capstone paper, there is no doubt in my mind that learning Greek and Latin roots will make an English-speaker more aware of how derivational affixes work in the first place. This then may become a rich area to draw from when building one’s own conlang. Would Amber have come up with “nal-” and “lan-” if she hadn’t already been exposed to “pre-” and “post-“? It’s hard to say. What is certain is that learning any language aids in understanding how languages work in general. It also boosts knowledge and skills in one’s native language(s) and any others learned later in life. Just as learning one sport or musical instrument might help you learn another, the same applies to languages.

Derivational morphology was not a topic I got around to covering for this blog while working on my master’s degree, but I had always planned on revisiting it. With this new inspiration – seeing the joy and passion my young cousins have for conlanging, using their linguistic knowledge to play and imagine and build new words – I would very much like to get back to it.

References

Footnotes

“Jen”, “Lily”, and “Amber” are pseudonyms. This post has been published with the permission of Lily and Amber’s parents. ↩︎
I only know a little about Lord of the Rings so I needed to ask some questions about this as well. I learned from my younger relatives that Quenya is High-Elvish, used archaically and for ritual, whereas Sindarin is the Elvish language of everyday conversation. From my sociolinguistics class, I remembered that this would be an example of a diglossia. ↩︎