Primal

From WikiFur, the furry encyclopedia.

Primal dictionary cover

Primal is a conlang created by were and furry artist, Trickster. It is spoken by some furries as a common tongue in the furry, therian, and otherkin communities. She has compiled and transcribed this artificial language on an online dictionary and tutorial reference site.

[edit] Description

Primal is richly detailed for a conlang, with around 3000 words (mostly nouns), more than some language constructs, such as Klingon or Quenya. Primal is an analytic (syntax-based) language in subject-verb-object order with no grammatical gender.

In this sense, its grammar is very similar to Chinese. Primal's grammatical structure and its use of general-purpose affixes as modifiers and linguistic markers allows very complicated concepts to be expressed succinctly and unambiguously.

[edit] Speech and sound

Primal is nearly invariantly phonetic, with contextually predictable substitutions occurring for only one letter of its alphabet. The alphabet consists of 24 vowels, 23 consonants, and one punctuation mark. Primal is spoken slowly, and all of its letters are English familiar, so the spoken language sounds similar to English.

Primal has its own script and font. The script is useful for representing Primal's large number of phonemes.

[edit] Example

The following text in Primal says, "I can speak Primal fairly well." It is pronounced "wee lur-ma-mee wih k'lulf".

A TrueType font (PC/Mac) can be downloaded and installed to allow users to write, or display text written, in Primal.

[edit] History

June, 2007: After three years of work, the new version of the Primal website is launched. It includes a brand new Tutorial.
August, 2006: The E-Primal mailing list moves to Google groups.
August, 2004: Plans to redesign the Tutorial are announced, including the removal of sound files in favor of a written pronunciation script.
February, 2003: The Primalfont font is created to replace the older Primalscript font. Primalfont features thicker lines and better ability to handle the unusual spacing of Primal's "L" glyph.
April, 2002: Font and sound files are added to the tutorial.
February, 2002: The Primalscript font is created.
October, 2001: A Tutorial is added to the website.
August, 2001: The E-Primal mailing list founded at Yahoo! groups.
July, 2001: Primal, the Furry Language (1st ed.) is published. The website is launched.