mgúkènámgúkèná ndé ndéngwé 7indé kâte ndéngwé ndé
At the beginning, there was Ká, and he was the ocean ...
Old Ataman is the first real conlang I've ever made. I started creating it in July 2018, and alas, I've stopped working on it in late 2019. Therefore, it's not the most developed and most usable conlang of mine, that place goes to Hapi. It is often said that your first conlang is your worst, and I agree with that. My other conlangs might be not that polished — besides Hapi, which is the most elaborate language of mine – but I'm way more proud of them than I ever would be of Old Ataman.
It features a minimal phonology with a high degree of allophony, a quite agglutinating morphology featuring an extensive noun class system, SVCs and a split-S morphosyntactic alignment with fluid elements.
In the eight months since its creation, the language has undergone many changes, some of them smaller, some bigger. The only thing left untouched that has been preserved from day one - with only very minor changes - is the minimal phonology. Especially the degree of synthesis has changed immensely, being reduced with every major update since. I refer to the different stages of Old Ataman as versions, which might seem odd, but is actually really useful in documenting the changes and comparing older with newer versions. The current version is Old Ataman V5.0, commonly abbreviated as OA5.0. All pages describing the language are using this version.
Thanks for reading,
Fiat Lingua!