META

Most conlangs, it seems to me, are languages in search of a writing system; Caber was a writing system in search of a language. I knew I wanted to go for a logography for several reasons: One, I wanted realism, and logograms are how writing tends to start out; two, I wanted to be able to do crazy stuff with borrowing and adapting the system to languages it was wholly unsuited for, creating a big mess of things (kind of like chu nom--Chinese characters adapted to write Vietnamese--on steroids); and three, few conlangers ever really attempt logographic systems, and I wanted to be one of them. To accomplish this, I needed a language to write them for; logograms don't exist in a vacuum, and the rebus principle has to have some sort of a basis in the linguistic landscape for the writing system.

Enter Common Caber. It's not the flashiest, frilliest, or most complex of languages, but it gets the job done--it gave me a basis both for a writing system and for various daughter languages, allowing me to flex my diachronic muscles as well.

I've mentioned elsewhere on this web page about how I enjoy fanfiction. Caber has prompted a few fan creations--keenir likes to make signs out of it, clawgrip straight-up made a font out of it (in addition to all the other wonderful advice he has given me), and opipik has created actual daughter languages.

IN-UNIVERSE

The Caber languages are spoken in western Matanhír. The earliest-attested of the languages is Common Caber, spoken around 2500 BC; it was written using a logography from which many writing systems descended. The languages that developed out of Common Caber can generally be categorized as belonging to one of several groups: Central, North, East (which itself is further divisible into Northeast and Southeast), South, West, and Mute (so named because their languages were almost unintelligible to the other Caber--cf. the etymology for "Germany" in some Slavic languages).

Caber dialects are spoken as a first language at the time of writing, mostly in the petty kingdoms and dictatorships in the west. There is a sizable Caber diaspora in the Tim Ar Empire as well, primarily involving Mute Caber. As for other linguistic influence on the Caber themselves, there is a notable Taltic substrate.