Primal (language)

Primal is a constructed language created by were and furry artist, Trickster, and intended to be spoken as a common tongue in the furry, therian, and otherkin communities. The language has lost significant traction among the above communities since 2012.

History

 * July 2001 - Primal, the Furry Language (1st ed.) is published. The website is launched.
 * August 2001 - The E-Primal mailing list is founded at Yahoo! groups.
 * October 2001 - A tutorial is added to the website.
 * February 2002 - The Primalscript font is created.
 * April 200 -: Font and sound files are added to the tutorial.
 * February 2003 - A new Primalfont font is created to replace the "Primalscript font". Primalfont features thicker lines and better ability to handle the unusual spacing of Primal's "L" glyph.
 * August 2004 - Plans to redesign the tutorial are announced, including the removal of sound files in favor of a written pronunciation script.
 * August 2006 - The E-Primal mailing list moves to Google Groups.
 * June 2007 - A newer version of the Primal website is launched, including a brand new tutorial.
 * June 2009 - Added a new flashcard pack (Common Words) to Primal Flashcards. Ten verbs have been added to the Common Words lesson (in Vocabulary). A small error in Essential Words lesson (in Vocabulary) has been corrected.
 * July 2014 - An update to the Primal dictionary, including conversion from Pidgin to the current system of orthographies, is started by Sean Skyhawk.

Description and use
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.

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.

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.