# Want to build your own language?



## Ankari (Jul 29, 2012)

I see a lot of people needing to create their own language for their fantasy universe.  While using dictionary.com today, I stumbled upon an article talking about Loglan (supposedly the perfect invent language).  Reading it introduced me to The Language Construction Kit

Enjoy


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## Ireth (Jul 29, 2012)

I stumbled upon the Language Construction Kit myself a few days ago and bookmarked it. Should come in VERY handy. ^^


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## Ravana (Jul 29, 2012)

They have the order wrong. You should construct your grammar before your lexicon, since morphology comes under grammar, and that can go a long way toward building the lexicon. A _very_ long way, in some cases. I'd have to take an actual look at their content before passing judgment on it, however. Don't have time right now; maybe later.

As for Loglan: it's like most other artificial languages… that is to say, "artificial." (Also, the (seriously misnamed) hypothesis it was created to test has long since been discredited, should that matter to anyone.)


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## Ghost (Jul 29, 2012)

If anyone wants more links along those lines, we had some in the Conlangers group. It seems a couple of the links are already dead. 

Guides:
How to create a language
The Quick and Dirty Guide
(The next two are courtesy of the Wayback Machine)
Essays on Language Design
A Naming Language

References to real languages:
International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA)
World Atlas of Language Structures
Ethnologue
Omniglot
Ancient Scripts

Software:
LexiquePro software

All I have so far is two sound systems and a smattering of ideas for grammars. I've gone deeper twice, and both times my computer failed. (Two different computers, mind you.) The first time was fortunate. The second time? Not so much. Any work I do now will be on paper because I can't deal with that again.


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## dannYves (Jul 29, 2012)

Creating a language is rather difficult unless you are doing a quickie language. 
You have to take stress,  verbs, syllables into account,  pronunciation. .. 
I suggest to model it after a real language like Japanese and change the pronunciation or use Spanish verbs instead of Japanese and of course alter everything into your own version .. this is exactly how I've created my own languages. It's not as easy as you think.


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## StorytellerGrl (Jul 30, 2012)

Great links in all these posts.  I will be needing to create a language for one of my fantasy stories; so far I have a few words here and there, but nothing like an actual language structure yet.

Also, doing some research on Tolkien and his Elven languages can be a good resource.


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## Nihilium 7th (Nov 4, 2012)

Thank you for those links I'm going to have to make multiple languages for the book I'm currently writing and its been hell.


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## TermiteWriter (Nov 4, 2012)

I've written two conlangs (constructed languages) for my books.  I would suggest anyone interested in making a language for their books visit the Language Creation Society's website, Language Creation Society | welcome to conlang.org, and get in touch with people there.  David Peterson, its president, wrote Dothraki for the TV series of Game of Thrones.  There are people at LCS who will actually write a language for your book (for a fee, of course), but they are always willing to give free advice through a number of lively discussion groups.


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## SeverinR (Nov 8, 2012)

TermiteWriter said:


> I've written two conlangs (constructed languages) for my books.  I would suggest anyone interested in making a language for their books visit the Language Creation Society's website, Language Creation Society | welcome to conlang.org, and get in touch with people there.  David Peterson, its president, wrote Dothraki for the TV series of Game of Thrones.  There are people at LCS who will actually write a language for your book (for a fee, of course), but they are always willing to give free advice through a number of lively discussion groups.



I love Game of Thrones, the Doth people practice their lines in english and then in Dothraki until it flows out as if it was said in Doth, using the body language/emotion to match the words.  Imagine learning a script in English then in a fictional language.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhWpNJgT9DI

See my post in "What do you listen to" for Game of thrones music that will not get out of your head. (Game of thrones-cat)
http://mythicscribes.com/forums/chit-chat/1524-what-do-you-listen-19.html#post75865
You have been warned


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## JCFarnham (Nov 8, 2012)

I'm really interested in strange forms of communication. Mainly because I tend to create languages solely for Scifi. Some stem from human languages and some are supposed to be totally alien hence:

I'm currently attempting to integrate a gestural syntax into a conlang of mine. These are aliens who have four arms, and tend you use vocalisation to only indicate things like tense and so on, leaving a sort of "sign language" to convey the meat of meaning.

After perusing conlang.org, I found links to about four conlangs that the author thought were pretty interesting achievements. A couple of them have weird things like no verbs, or (a much better attempt at) gestures. There's even one that attempted to construct something that is completely alien, ie, can't be spoken by us what so ever... Transcribes it looks like complete nonsense, but it was interesting anyway haha.


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## TermiteWriter (Nov 9, 2012)

I know somebody in the LCS who has invented a creature who communicates entirely by color changes, like a squid!  And of course you could communicate by gesture, but how would you convey that if you were writing a story about those creatures? - if you wanted to actually write a transcription of the language, I mean, and not just translate it into English. Would you use pictures of the gestures as logograms or syllabograms?
My intelligent termite people (the Shshi) have a non-vocal language - they project radio waves from antennae to antennae, and all the communication is done in the brain.  My book _The Termite Queen _was written partly to show how we might learn to communicate with such creatures, and for that I had to write a conlang.  While the syntax has some similarities to English, it's significantly different from any Earth language.  It's all spelled out in the novel, but you can also read about it at my conlang blog, Conlangs of a Remembrancer. You can also read about the language of my Bird people there.


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## JCFarnham (Nov 9, 2012)

My stories often take place in a time after the two races have found a good way to communicate with each other. In truth its probably a pidgin of sorts, but for the sake of saving my readers a migraine or two I translate to English. I envisage written Ch-lo as some form of script similar to Chinese, derived from pictorial notation of gestures. The complete language (vocalizations and gestures intact can simply be thought of as a unique way of pronouncing a fairly simple written language).

Of course having four arms to gesture with, they construct sentences, clauses, etc. in groups of four symbols (or particles) when writing where ever possible which then map to each arm.

I have ideas concerning the complete language, but so far I use it only as a naming lang given the limits of writing in English ;-)


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## Weaver (Nov 9, 2012)

JCFarnham said:


> I'm really interested in strange forms of communication. Mainly because I tend to create languages solely for Scifi. Some stem from human languages and some are supposed to be totally alien hence:
> 
> I'm currently attempting to integrate a gestural syntax into a conlang of mine. These are aliens who have four arms, and tend you use vocalisation to only indicate things like tense and so on, leaving a sort of "sign language" to convey the meat of meaning.
> 
> After perusing conlang.org, I found links to about four conlangs that the author thought were pretty interesting achievements. A couple of them have weird things like no verbs, or (a much better attempt at) gestures. There's even one that attempted to construct something that is completely alien, ie, can't be spoken by us what so ever... Transcribes it looks like complete nonsense, but it was interesting anyway haha.



You really, really ought to read _Hellspark_, by Janet Kagan; the plot revolves around communication - verbal and otherwise - and it's a great story.


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## TermiteWriter (Nov 10, 2012)

I can think of three ways to reproduce a language in a book.  First, you could use the actual characters of the language, such as Chinese or Hebrew characters, or the characters in which Ch-lo is actually written within the culture.  That, of course, will not be accessible to Earthers, so it's not practical except for showing examples.  
Second, you can transliterate or Romanize the language into English characters, but this is most useful for a language with an alphabet (i.e., characters that represent phonemes).   My Bird languages fit in this category, since they all have alphabets.  
Third, you can assign units that are pronounceable in English to the ideograms or logograms or whatever you're using.  Now, these could reflect the pronounciation in the original language, but if they are assigned to signs, then they would become arbitrary.  I suppose you could simply substitute the English words for these signs, but I don't favor that kind of mixture.  For one thing, the concepts might not have a clear-cut meaning in English.   A gesture could mean "I disapprove of the way this fellow flicks his tail" for example.  So it might be better to simply vocalize this sign as "hu-ta-soi" (tail-flick-disapproval).  
Since my termite language has no vocalizations, I used that last method - the linguist in the story simply assigned arbitrary sounds to the wave patterns on the spectrograph, then worked at figuring out their meaning.
Does this make any sense at all?


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## TermiteWriter (Nov 10, 2012)

Sounds interesting!  I'm always looking for books dealing with communication beging humans and extraterrestrials!  I'll put it on my list!


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## JCFarnham (Nov 14, 2012)

TermiteWriter said:


> Does this make any sense at all?



I see exactly what you're saying. However, since most of my Ch-lo speak this system-standard pidgin, I so far have no need to reproduce their language specifically. If I did however I would have to keep to the original feel of the language. I would present the vocal parts as romanized, and continue to leave the gestures described. It is complex enough after all that (most) humans wouldn't have a hope. And half the conflict comes from people not understanding the subtleties of Ch-lo language.

If I need them to be understood however (as in situations where they talk without humans around) I simply bracket their dialogue. I want to make it easy for readers who don't care as much about the language as I do after all


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## Phoenix8CEO (Nov 14, 2012)

I have been working on my own high fantasy world. And the creation of languages is a very important aspect in my own opinion. I am a Tolkienist at heart and appreciate conlangs. Up to 2 and a half languages created for my world. With dialects coming soon afterwords.


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## TermiteWriter (Nov 15, 2012)

That's a very sensible approach.  After all, you're writing a story which will be read (you hope!) by people who aren't conlangers, so they need to understand what's going on without a lot of work.  Some of my conculture friends like to see an appendix with some discussion of the language and a glossary.  I didn't put that in "The Termite Queen" because part of the plot is revolves around deciphering the termite language (Shshi), so you learn all you need to know about it right in the book.  In later sections, when Kaitrin Oliva is making her first attempts at communication with the Shshi people, I show the same scene twice, first from the human point of view and then from the Shshi point of view.  It allows the display of a lot of humorous misunderstandings.  Later, when regular conversations are taking place, I put the translated Shshi parts of the dialogue in italics.  And when the Shshi talk among themselves, I use a dramatic script form, like a Shakespearean play - all dialogue and minimal stage directions.  This is because two-thirds of the termite people are blind, so I wanted only minimal visual description.


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## TermiteWriter (Nov 23, 2012)

I decided to write a post on one of my blogs about how a beginner might go about constructing a language for his or her fantasy or SF tale.  See Conlanging for Beginners: Building a Naming Language for Your Fantasy Novel. My intent is to show that just making a created language "look alien" is not enough; the realism will be significantly enhanced if your names and tidbits of strange speech are given logical structure and meaning.  Please leave comments on the post - I love opinions and questions!


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## TermiteWriter (Nov 25, 2012)

I'm astonished - my post, Conlanging for Beginners,  has received a total of 647 page views since I put it up on Friday morning! The most hits I've ever received on a blog post to this point is something over 200 on How to Format Books with Createspace, but that's been over a period of maybe 8 months. Of course, I did just join the Facebook Conlang group, which has over 800 members. That might have something to do with it. But those people aren't particularly neophytes when it comes to conlangs. Anyway, I hope some of the followers from Mythic Scribes are among those viewers - if they are, I thank you, and I hope you find the post useful!


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## TermiteWriter (Dec 5, 2012)

That post has now had over 1000 page views and I discovered that was because somebody put it on Reddit.  Now I've learned about the "Reddit effect"!
I've now written a second post on Conlanging for Beginners; it's at The Labors of Ki'shto'ba Huge-Head: Conlanging for Beginners: Some Things to Avoid and deals with certain things you need to avoid in creating a naming language.  I also comment on some less than felicitous names and words used in Stargate:SG1 and Farscape.


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