As my first completed conlang, Rhapsodaic holds a close place in my heart. It's the product of several ideas and systems that are close to my heart, taken through many iterations of grammar, orthography, and semantic spaces. In a sense, it's been several years longer in the making than the actual time spent on the language itself, given the many other creations that have informed and made possible its creation. It's for that reason that, in the past, I've been reluctant to share details about Rhapsodaic. But that's changed over time; I've now shared those details with a number of friends, and to my surprise, I couldn't be happier with seeing how they've interpreted differently than me.
The reference grammar for Rhapsodaic, complete with color-coded tables and .svg renditions of the orthography, is currently being hosted by my friend Vega on OPGuides. This page, then, will outline the history and development of Rhapsodaic.
Rhapsodaic started as an English cypher, based on a symbol or two I enjoyed doodling. Consonants were these vertical stems connected by wavy diagonal lines, and vowels were marked as diacritics on those wavy lines. It looked neat, it was fairly easy to write with, and sometimes a name would look like a cat. Very fun.
Around the time I made this as-of-yet-unnamed neography, I was getting really into engelangs. It was Tolkien's work that got me into conlanging, and most of my initial langs at least feigned naturalism to some degree, but the more I kept at it and the more I learned, the more the idea of making a systematic, minimalist, experimental language appealed to me. I've taken a number of shots at this—a distribution of verbs based on Sefer Yetzirah's letter correspondences designed to be written on blank astrological charts, a musical language with semantic domains centered around scales rather than notes, a script with only five base morphemes and copious amounts of intentional ambiguity, a vaguely circuit-looking script inspired partly by Laban Movement Analysis and partly by Homestuck (yes, you read that correctly.)
I love well-designed systems, and I love forging and exploring the connections that build up those systems. And somewhere along this line, that urge to make a fun and functional engelang connected up with this script.
After some refinement, I landed on a base set of 27 symbols—24 with the height/direction/flourish shape combinations I'd been using to sort consonant sounds already, and 3 non-flourished lines of differing height and directionality. Much more promising than the 5 I'd been finagling to create Ennoic (which is now getting a total revamp in grammar and semantics), and not as daunting as the 360 I'd have needed for the still-unnamed and -unfinished astrological language.
After testing out a few different mappings of concepts onto these symbols, I landed on the perfect combination: A set of 8 personal archetypes I'd developed and written about for personal creative and self-exploratory usage, and a set of 3 noun classes that were my favorite feature of another language I'd been working on at the time. That covered the main 24, and the extra 3 could be put to some other peripheral or grammatical purpose.
The two systems meshed well, and steered this script into the next form it'd come to take—a means of creating symbols to represent emotional experiences. Each archetype-class combo highlighted a particular concept, experience, or emotion, and by combining them in pairs or triplets, more emotions could be specified. The 3 extra lines, in this stage of development, came to represent different levels of intensity or valence (the positivity or negativity of the emotion).
So far, so good.
But in the first form of this script, all the line forms I've been focusing on were just the consonants. I still had vowel markers I was no longer using. Could they also serve a purpose?
As it turned out, they were what took this system from mere symbol generator to full-on language.
What had once marked vowels now functioned as a noun class of their own. Each symbol stood for an emotion in its default form, but a diaeresis above the symbol would change its class to "action." Moved to below, to "experience." With one dot removed, "time/event." Replaced with a dash, "2nd person." And now I had my hook—this language could describe things that aren't emotions, but only in terms of the emotions they elicit or represent. A garden isn't "green place" or "place of food," but it might be "place of [insert the way a particularly impactful memory involving a garden made the author feel]." The act of falling may reference the feeling of falling from out of favor, or in love, or any other such metaphorical falling, depending on the mood or context of the sentence. A person's name necessarily reflects the attitude of the speaker towards that person. Multiple 1st persons can be utilized to reference the self at various points in time, or differing aspects of the self.
One final change to the orthography—expanding the single connecting line, allowing new line directions and shapes to indicate noun case and verb tense—and some adjustment of the semantic spaces, and Rhapsodaic as it currently stands was born.