• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Language, runes and other such things.

Ophiucha

Auror
I've got a decent linguistics background (I both took linguistics and have taken a year in about six languages), so - tedious though it is - I do have a good base for conlanging, and I'm not as reluctant to do it as I am other worldbuilding endeavours. Like economies. Never ask me about my world's economy, because the answer is and always will be "I've got a name for the money, what more do you need?", followed by a bit of crying in the corner. And on that note, I will say that I think a conlang is as important as an economy, which is to say, it depends on the story. More than just about anything, I think we can blame this one on Tolkien. Not that he did it poorly - he created a pretty great language - but it's one of those things we expect because Lord of the Rings codified fantasy. Of course, it also depends on how thoroughly you create your language. If you want about a third of your book to be Elvish poetry, or your story is about decoding ancient, dwarfish runes, then you may need to create a rather thorough conlang. If you want to name your characters and your cities, that's basically the functional equivalent of coming up with a vague coinage and leaving your economy at that. And that's fine.


For my current projects, in particular, one just uses Welsh because I don't care that much. The other one has a few naming languages, but I am working on a fully developed music language. The world has four or five sapient species - one which is vaguely humanoid, one vaguely rodent-esque, one vaguely cephalopod-esque, and one which is a spider of some sort. It is the only way the species can communicate, since they cannot speak or understand each other's languages, but they can all hear (or, at least, feel vibrations and decipher them accordingly). It's more about pitch and rhythm than anything, so the concerns are pretty different than that of most Earth languages. And the naming languages aren't based on any one Earth culture, either.
 

Kevlar

Troubadour
I have some very basic words developed in quite a few different languages for my world, but I downloaded a program called WeSay (I think that's what its called anyway) and started fleshing out one of my languages in that. I plan on changing a lot of names of a lot of things as soons as I get a decent dictionary up, though I already have some of it developed and need to search for these notes. Some are kind of hard to forget, like that one character's name, Talinos, means courageous/valorous. Others simply stuck in my head, such as, through suffixes, arwé zothanûl means 'anger to consume me.' I forget what the word for 'the' is, or if I even decided to have one. Need to find the notes. I also have anglicized versions of some of my words. For instance, théa, meaning existence/Earth etc. Can also be spelled theä or théä, or perhaps thea, though usually only in the form Althea (east-earth) referring to the continent my story takes place on.

I actually really like linguistics exercises, though I'm not trained in the field. I love creating systems that aren't based on real ones, though this is extremely tough, and I do not yet believe I've fully succeeded. Most of all I just love the freedom, the experimentation and the creation, and then finally being able to use that syntax and lexicon you've worked so hard on. Unfortunately most of the languages I've made have been marred by cancerous mistakes and inconsistencies, eventually falling apart. None have also ever went above 2 - 300 words, and most haven't even hit 100. I hope to break the record this time.

Also, a final note: I do NOT believe my story absolutely needs all the conlangs I have small bases for, or even just one conlang. I do believe that would add something huge to my work, but that is not why I do it. For some reason I simply love doing it.

Call me crazy and throw rocks at me if you wish.
 

Ravana

Istar
I love creating systems that aren't based on real ones, though this is extremely tough

Some linguists, at least, would tell you it's impossible: you're human, and your brain is hardwired to treat linguistic data in certain ways. I'm not among them; on the other hand, given the vast variety of human languages, it would be difficult not to duplicate something that exists somewhere, even if only accidentally.

Unfortunately most of the languages I've made have been marred by cancerous mistakes and inconsistencies, eventually falling apart. None have also ever went above 2 - 300 words, and most haven't even hit 100.

Right–see my "tutorials" on how to start out. (Which may someday get expanded with higher-level categories. When I have time. :rolleyes: ) It's far more important to establish basic process rules at the outset than to start making up words. The words, in fact, should be the last thing you do, if you're serious about creating a full language. Phonology and phonotactics, morphology, syntax… then words. (Which, of course, is why most people never do this.)

For some reason I simply love doing it.

Call me crazy and throw rocks at me if you wish.

Good on you. Yes, you're crazy. No rocks from this quarter, though. ;)

-

UnionJane: For good examples of how to make "easy" dialectal variations, look up some English-based pidgins–Tok Pisin being the one you're most likely to find extensive documentation on (and in!), as it is no longer a "pidgin": it's now the national language of Papua New Guinea. They provide intriguing hints of what's most likely to get changed, and how, and you get to see it in the context of a full language. It may look completely foreign at first, but with a bit of practice you can read it off the page easier than you can read Chaucer. For instance: how long does it take you to recognize this?

Papa bilong mipela
Yu stap long heven.
Nem bilong yu i mas i stap holi.
Kingdom bilong yu i mas i kam. …

Probably, you aren't going to want to make quite as extensive changes, nor identical ones: the point here is to see where variations are most likely to occur, and in what directions (simplification, retasking of function words, changes in word order, etc.). Pidgins are, by definition, blends of two languages, borrowing vocabulary from both and in general using the underlying syntax of the "contact" language (that is, the local one, in this case the non-English one); what's interesting about the above is that there isn't a single (originally) non-English word in it. (A couple show up in the balance of the text.) Some aren't immediately obvious… but I'll bet you can figure out what most of the originals were.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Kevlar

Troubadour
Ravana said:
Right—see my "tutorials" on how to start out. (Which may someday get expanded with higher-level categories. When I have time. :rolleyes: ) It's far more important to establish basic process rules at the outset than to start making up words. The words, in fact, should be the last thing you do, if you're serious about creating a full language. Phonology and phonotactics, morphology, syntax… then words. (Which, of course, is why most people never do this.)

Actually, for the past year or two I've always developed phonology, then syntax, then sort of put morphology and lexicon in together. Never really considered phonotactics, though I guess I really should. I might just work on that when I get home.

My early attempts were atrocious. And then I started putting together some methods and doing research, and lo and behold, some of what I was doing had names, like phonology and syntax instead of sounds and grammar.

I'll check in on your earlier post. You majored in lingustics, so I'd be a bit of an idiot to ignore your advice.
 

Ravana

Istar
Actually, for the past year or two I've always developed phonology, then syntax, then sort of put morphology and lexicon in together. Never really considered phonotactics, though I guess I really should. I might just work on that when I get home.

Phonotactics is primarily important for three things: (1) keeping the words consistent by making advance decisions on which sounds are allowed to be adjacent to one another and which aren't; (2) figuring out how foreign words will be reanalyzed into your language; and (3) providing a guide to what happens when you start using your morphology. (An example of the last is the English prefix "in-", which becomes "im-" when placed in front of a labial (p, b, or m). I think the others have sufficient examples in the other post, but I can't remember if that one did or not.)

Sounds like you're well along the right track, at any rate.
 

Emeria

Scribe
I don't have much experience with languages (took a few years of Spanish in secondary school, Latin in university, picked up a little Japanese, Hebrew and Greek from more "practical" endeavours), but I've been working a little on a language for the world I'm working on and writing from. Mostly, it is for names of places and things that do not translate well into English. One of my characters narrates and tends to use native words to describe certain ideas and given that words are spelled differently in English just about every time I write them, I'm pretty sure that their language has a written form where the sounds are important, not the individual letters. The little bit that I've dabbled has proven to be both interesting and challenging.
 

Elishimar

Dreamer
I have drawn up a set of runes, that I regularly write in. They are the equivalent to English letters but look different. I had a plan drawn out where every English vowel and consonant were separated from the alphabet and I switched their values around, but this got confusing for a bit. I am not sure how I want to move forward from here, but for now I am just making up nonsense words and writing their English equivalent in my rune system.
 
Top