​The Adrrixan Language

(from my Patreon)

I'm working on the language of a big expansionist empire for an epic fantasy story. It's supposed to be light and fun (sigh). The conceit of the worldbuilding is that ghosts exist. The conceit of the storytelling is that not only is the language of the main character translated into English, but the other related languages are "translated" into conlangs that are more or less different from English (weee!)

So: Adrrixan is an Indo-European language about as closely related to English as Persian or Russian. It was rather conservative until about five hundred years ago, when its speakers got fed up with the ghosts of their ancestors interfering in their lives and created a cant to fool them. The rule of the cant is: for any word C1V1C2V1, make it V1C2C1V2. If you have an odd number of syllables, extend the final syllable with -ha, -wo, or -yi, depending on the preceding vowel. For  example the pre-Adrrixan *drama (soil) became amdra ( is a single consonant /d͡ʑ~ʑ/). A lexicon developed: adrrásma ("earthworms" contracted from adra-awra-asma < *rada +*waramasa) andi ("they eat" contracted from anda-iyti) anámdri ("soil-acc" contracted from ana-amdra-iyi, from "in"+"soil-dat"). So far so good, but those letters are actually schwas, and are easily elided. The sentence "earthworms eat soil" becomes Adrrásm'andi'námdri (I say it aʑrás.mandi.námdri).

With free word order, you can have:
Adrrásma'námdri'ndi (earthworms soil eat)
Anámdri'drrásm'andi (soil earthworms eat)
Anámdri'ndi'drrásma (soil eat earthworms)
Andi'námdridrrásma (eat soil earthworms)
Andi'drrásma'námdri (eat earthworms soil)

Thus, I have achieved the aesthetic dream of fantasy conglangs: apostraphes, acute accents, and unreasonably long strings of letters. My only problem is when I go back to English. The citation forms are all sort of same-y looking ("The city of Adrrixa lies between the Fields of Atrrába and the Apquasa Mountains"). I keep feeling the temptation to slice off the first to letters ("The city of Rixa lies between the Fields of Rába and the Apqus Mountains") but that is that arbitrary? Boring? What do you think?