Language

In the height of COVID lockdown during summer 2020, I became curious about the Russian alphabet. Some of the letters look like ours in English, others look more Greek, and some look completely unique. What's the deal with that? How do I actually pronounce these letters? And so I went down what became a rabbit hole of not just the Cyrillic alphabet, but the Greek alphabet, Chinese hanzi, Japanese kana, the Arabic/Semitic abjads, Hindi's devanagari script, and countless other writing systems that I'd never heard of before. I spent my downtime at work learning about the different classes of writing systems and their histories, enamoured at how diverse and beautiful human writing could be. Naturally this evolved into a fascination with language in general, and the various rules and systems that comprised it. Eventually, I wondered if it were possible for someone to construct their own language from this knowledge (unaware that there was a whole online community for it), and so I revived an old writing system I had made (originally to encode English words) and began making up words. Thus, the Ámmro language was born, although it was called "Moro" at the time. Since then, I've been continuously updating and working on the language, allowing it to evolve in a way similar to natural human languages. I even made it my senior project at the end of high school! I've also tried to utilize my linguistic knowledge towards learning spoken languages like Korean and Japanese, along with coding languages like JavaScript and C++. Over time, I've thought about creating other language and even replacing Ámmro with something new. And while one day I may add more conlangs to my repertoire, I feel like at this point Ámmro is inherently connected to the Memory Channel project and to my creative self, and will be maintained for the forseeable future. I'm currently working on a simple bilingual English-Ámmro dictionary app, which should hopefully be up and running in the near(ish) future. I also plan on using Ámmro as a base for my creative writing and worldbuilding pursuits (as was most famously done by J.R.R. Tolkien, but I promise there'll be no Hobbits in this one). If you want to know more about the Ámmro language, then read further!

The Ámmro Language

Overview

Ámmro has been described by some as sounding very "Indo-European," with one person saying it sounds a bit like Armenian. I'm sure everyone will interpret it differently, but I mainly took phonetic inspiration from Russian (and the Slavic languages in general) along with Japanese and Arabic. I didn't have much specific inspiration in terms of grammar or syntax, only really going off of my linguistic research and the fact that I wanted it to be different from English.

Ámmro has gone through three main phases: Old, Middle, and Neo (alternatively known as Moro, Amomoro, and Ámmro). While we'll only be covering the Neo-Ámmro variant, it's worth knowing about these phases since they correspond with the language's real-world development and mirror the general ways in which real-world languages are historically analyzed (such as "Old" and "Middle" English). The history of Ámmro is also relevant to its writing systems, which we'll talk about now.

Writing Systems

Ámmro has three different writing systems. I know, I know, that sounds like a lot, and all the Japanese speakers are panicking right now. But their use depends on what purpose you have writing, and they're never used together, only one at a time. Let me explain. The first system worth knowing about is the Ámmro Standard Romanization, or ASR. Like the name suggests, ASR is a romanization, which means taking a language written in some other script and "translating" it to the Latin script, which is the alphabet we use in English, Spanish, Polish, Yoruba, etc. ASR is what you read when I write the word "Ámmro." See that accent above the A? Here's the whole alphabet: It's more letters than the English alphabet, 30 to be exact (or 35 if you count the accented vowels)! And Old Moro had even more letters