So, Gɫuuk was the first language I've ever constructed. It started with my fascination with symbols. I was going in-depth into the origin and significance of symbols and characters from around the world. And in my own language. Like, did you know, that the letter 'A' started in ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics as a pictogram of an ox's head? Somehow, through Greek, it got flipped turned upside down! The legs at the bottom are really supposed to be horns.
My curiosity was piqued by Mesrop Mashtots. Not only did he invent the Armenian and Georgian alphabets, he unified the Armenian people under shared literature and is venerated as a saint because of it. Basically Armenian literature wouldn't exist without him — a critical piece of Armenian culture was invented by one man. Gɫuuk includes symbols from Greek, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian alphabets in homage to his genius.
| Symbol | Name / script | Gɫuuk | History |
|---|---|---|---|
| Θ | Theta, Greek | /b/ | From Phoenician ṭēt, a wheel. Athenians used it as shorthand for θάνατος, "death" — the theta nigrum, inked beside names on casualty rolls. |
| Δ | Delta, Greek | /u/ | From Phoenician dālet, "door." Herodotus thought the Nile's mouth looked like one, which is why every river has a delta. |
| Ω | Omega, Greek | /ŋ/ | Not inherited from anyone — the Ionian Greeks invented it and bolted it onto the end of the alphabet. The name is Byzantine: ō mega, "big O." |
| Ա | Ayb, Armenian | /s/ | The first letter Mashtots made, 405 CE. |
| Բ | Ben, Armenian | /ʃ/ | The second — and Armenian's word for its alphabet, aybuben, is just these two letters said in order, exactly as "alphabet" is alpha plus beta. |
| ა | An, Georgian | /e/ | First letter of Mkhedruli, the "cavalry" script that displaced the priestly ones. UNESCO listed Georgia's three alphabets as intangible cultural heritage in 2016. |
| Ⲱ | Oou, Coptic | /ɞ/ | Coptic is Egyptian in Greek clothing. The final form of the Egyptian language, as it was consumed by Greek letters plus a few Demotic ones for sounds Greek couldn't spell. |
The Georgian word, გლუკი (gluk-i), is slang for a glitch or bug in a computer system. This proved prescient when, after spending several hours building the language, I discovered a fundamental glitch in my conlang caused by a bug in Glossikon. When adding to the lexicon, Glossikon was consistently failing to promote existing morphemes. This left the language top heavy. Most of the lexicon was not based on the fundamental parts of Gɫuuk. Each lexicon entry was floating on its own. Just a word with semantic meaning but no relation to the rest of the words!
I did eventually fix Glossikon and Gɫuuk and the language is shared for anyone to use (see the shared language gallery in Glossikon) but it took several days. I ultimately decided to start another language completely from scratch using the new morpheme promotion way, Greelock, also shared in the language gallery. The story of Greelock and its development is a story for a different blog post...