history of Viesa

Viesa was originally inspired by another cipherlang named Uasi, which has much in common with the modern form of Viesa. In Uasi, the main rule was that each vowel letter would be shifted to the one following it in alphabetical order (a → e → i → o → u → a). Uasi also had many other rules, including its own grammatical suffixes in the form of click sounds and phonemic gulping. I discovered Uasi in March 2018, as a 13-year-old being dragged through a Walmart against my will and viewing the Wikpedia article on language games on my phone. (Honestly it probably shouldn't be mentioned there in the first place, but I won't snitch.) Perhaps out of dissatisfaction with some of its finer ideosyncracies, I quickly had the urge to create my own version.

Viesa 1.0

The first version of Viesa was created on March 31, 2018. Rather than shifting each vowel forwards, Viesa did the opposite and shifted each vowel backwards in alphabetical order (u → o → i → e → a → u). In addition, there were a few smaller rules to make words easier to pronounce (which were similar to those of Uasi). However, there were no grammatical modifications of any kind; at this point, Viesa was a cipher based entirely on simple letter substitutions, and therefore one could easily write a computer program to translate English to Viesa (although due to the slight lossiness of these substitutions, accurately translating Viesa to English is more difficult).

Since it just so happened that tomorrow was April Fools' Day, I decided I would wait until the next day to publish the language, and jokingly present it as an international auxilliary language despite it just being a cipher of English. This was another bit of inspiration from Uasi, as the Uasi website had a subtle mention of its aspirations of being adopted as a universal language. Before it was published, the language was originally called "Lungo" (a clipping of "lungouga", meaning "language"); the name was changed to "Viesa", which means "voice", after I realized that it sounded much nicer (but little did I know how often it would be confused with the far more admirable conlang project Viossa).

Viesa 1.0 was published on April 1, 2018. At this stage, the only rules in the entire language were:

These rules set the baseline for Viesa's word transformation process, which are still present in the language to this day. This early form of the language lacked any grammatical modifications, and the orthography still spelled consonants almost exactly the same way as in English, carrying over the many attrocities of English spelling.

Viesa 2.0 - 2.6

On June 20, 2018, while bored at school and stuck with only a piece of paper and a pen, I suddenly decided to create Viesa 2.0. This was the version of Viesa that would introduce the language's grammatical modifications. On that single piece of paper, I wrote down a list of grammatical suffixes inspired by those of Uasi, along with a regularized system of personal pronouns, plus a few other rules.

This era of Viesa saw many smaller changes being incrementally made to the language over the next few months, with each of these versions being labelled with a version number from 2.0 to 2.6, and being documented in this changelog. In this section I will primarily be describing the latest of these versions, Viesa 2.6, and noting changes from earlier versions of Viesa 2.x where applicable.

Viesa 2.6 had 6 sounds which I referred to as "weird sounds". All of them were written with capital letters (the rest of the language is written in all lowercase in order to make room for this), and most of them were used as grammatical suffixes:

That's right, Viesa at this point in time had phonemic clapping and facepalming. Good luck trying to speak Viesa while riding a bike or carrying groceries. This set of "weird sounds" saw some changes over the course of Viesa 2.x. Originally, there was a letter 'B' which represented a voiceless bilabial trill /ʙ̥/ and replaced all instances of the letter 'p'. I removed it in Viesa 2.2, probably because I always kept forgetting to use it. In addition, the facepalm negative suffix 'G' wasn't originally in the language, however someone else had made their own modification of Viesa which included this suffix, and I decided I liked it, so I added it in Viesa 2.1.

Eventually, an "alternate version" of the language was introduced in Viesa 2.6 which replaced the "weird sounds" with much more familiar consonants. Each of the grammatical suffixes were replaced with a consonant based on the letter that was used to write the corresponding "weird sound"; in particular, the transformation of 'C' into 'sh' was influenced by various conlangs which use the letter 'c' for the sound /ʃ/, such as Lojban and Vötgil. An epenthic vowel 'e' is inserted into a suffix whenever the word ends in a consonant. This "alternate version" of the language coexisted with the regular version of Viesa 2.6, however the modifications made by this alternate version would later become standard in modern Viesa. The list of changes was as follows:

Viesa 2.6 had its own pronoun system separate from that of English, which Viesa still retains to this day. Pronouns no longer have any separate nominative and accusative forms, possessive pronouns are formed with the normal genitive suffix '-K', and reflexive pronouns are formed simply by suffixing '-salf' to the pronoun. In addition, the third person pronoun does not distinguish gender or animacy, and there are separate singular and plural second person pronouns.

Pronouns Singular Plural
First ma (I/me) va (we/us)
Second ya (you) ga (you all)
Third na (he/him/she/her/it) da (they/them)

Each of these pronouns follows a clear pattern: one consonant followed by 'a'. Each of these pronouns has its own etymology:

Other things added to the language during the Viesa 2.x era included: the introduction of /ɾ/ as the rhotic, the conversion of verbs into their bare form, and the altered question syntax.

Unlike Viesa 1.0, I actually used this version of the language rather extensively, speaking it to myself frequently to the point where I became relatively fluent in it. (And yes, the phonemic clapping and facepalming certainly drew weird looks from those around me.) For a while, I was working on a translation of "Nate the Snake", also known as "the longest joke in the world", into this version of Viesa. Funnily enough, this incomplete translation still remains the longest thing I have ever written in Viesa.

Viesa 3.0

Sometime between September and November 2018, I discovered an adaptation of the Cyrillic alphabet for English, based on the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet, on the website Omniglot. This then prompted me to play around with writing Viesa in the Cyrillic alphabet, using an orthography based on this adaptation. If you've ever wondered where the strange usage of the letters 'ћ' and 'ђ' for dental fricatives came from, this is where. This adapatation does also use 'ң' for /ŋ/, however motivated by a desire to be able to type the orthography using a Serbian Cyrillic keyboard layout, I chose to use the digraph 'нг' instead. Some people would later point out that I could have easily just used the letter 'њ' instead... and yeah, perhaps they're right. Maybe I did consider it at the time, but decided I didn't like the way it looked.

This experimentation was what led to the final major update to the Viesa language, "Viesa 3.0". The "weird sounds" were abolished once and for all, with the "alternate version" introduced in Viesa 2.6 becoming the sole official form of the language. The new Cyrillic orthography was made the sole official orthography of the language. Up until this point, Viesa had been written using the Latin alphabet in a way which kept the spellings of consonants from the original English words completely intact. The new Cyrillic orthography, on the other hand, now wrote the consonants entirely phonemically and consistently. The Cyrillic orthography also had the bonus of obfuscating the written language and making it much less intelligible to English speakers unfamiliar with the Cyrillic alphabet.

Viesa 3.0 is the only version of the language that has seen substantial usage from people other than myself. Somehow my annoying teenage self's incessant promotion of the language was successful in garnering a small community of Viesa speakers for a little while, from around 2019 to 2021. Many of these people happened to be members of the Agma Schwa Discord server, which I suspect is how Viesa ended up in that Agma Schwa conlang iceberg video. Viesa is also included as a dedicated option in the "Do you speak any other conlangs?" section of the Toki Pona Census, and I have absolutely no idea why, but I think it's really funny. According to this census, the number of Tokiponists who speak Viesa was 6 in 2021, 4 in 2022, and 0 in 2024 (so sad).

Viesa has now been in a stabilized state for a long time, and has undergone virtually no changes since the introduction of 3.0 in late 2018. The only real "update" to the language since then has been the introduction of a standard Latin orthography in October 2024. That being said, I did occasionally experiment with additional modifications to the language for a little while. During 2021 I started haphazardly applying sound changes to Viesa entirely in my head, such as vowel nasalisation akin to French, vowel hiatus turning into diphthongs, word final '-a' reducing to schwa, and so on. I never did get around to documenting or standardizing this version of the language though. If you want to see what this so called "vyese fyor" ("viesa four") looked like, look at this page or this page.