What is Nalheárlu
Nalheárlu is a language spoken on a remote archipelago in the Pacific Ocean. The language was described by a French researcher J.-P. Embobin, of whom nobody knew when he had been alive and no-one gave a flying fuck about when he died, and all his few works have remained undiscovered until now.
And so on.
The idea of Nalheárlu
The idea to construct a language came to me first as an idea of a teaching aid. The language was supposed to be an a priori speakable language (Richard Harrison's term - 2.1.2 according to his classification http://www.invisiblelighthouse.com/langlab/l-types.html), with the most primitive but untypical grammar, no irregualr verbs, so to say an Abracadabra Esperanto - the easiest to learn though completely inrecognisable.
That idea evolved quickly into a plan of a complicated language with some grammatical features that could be existing in a culture with the most primitive social organisation and religion, but evolved in communicative aspect, keeping the poorest vocabulary. It's no teaching aid any more, of course, but nevertheless interesting.
Nalheárlu speakers worship Ancestors. As these are much powerful, their names could not be pronounced. As a result, there is the IVth person of verb, expressing the action performed by Ancestors (or one Ancestor). Grammatically this person has mostly the features of singular, however, several of them idicate clearly that it should be regarded as plural. If you ask a Nalheárlu speaker "how many are there", he'll definitely reply that they're incountable, even if he talks of one.
The Ancestors perform all the impersonal acts and the acts that don't have a definite subject.
For example, French il fait froid, on dit, il faut etc in Nalheárlu becomes kisu rlexo, nalarisu, toepisu ([the Ancestors] make "cold weather", [the Ancestors] say, [the Ancestors] want).
This was where I started.
Then I came once with the idea of "movable" and "immovable consonants" - that concerned the phonetics and the spelling - and I designed the alphabet. I didn't want to invent a comletely new one, so I added some letters resembling Greek to Latin script and enjoyed the result.
The queer auxiliaries for past and future tense were among the first ideas, too.
Hi ho.