thoughts opinion and gunieu pigs needed for language.

[ascanius]

In my opinion I enjoy made up languages in fantasy, provided a few standards apply. I don't mind the few snippets of a made up language, a few words here and there. Nor do I mind the full blown attempts at an entire language so long as adequate time is invested in such an endeavor to supply the language with it's own feel. What I do not like are the gnarled attempts to just make a language look foreign and interesting or using existing languages as a sound template producing something that seems original yet is not.

Now because I am having a horrific time keeping names for everything consistent to location, culture and race I have started working on a protolanguage to eventually get where I need to be naming wise, that was my intention at least. Now this first language has become the building block for four other languages and has also lain the ground work for a lot of very early history. It's neat because with just this one thing I can trace how I want this one culture to change through time and change other cultures if I follow through that far.

Thus fare I have done phonology and a good deal else, still have everything to do grammar wise though. I'm not gonna use this in the story but I am just curious about people's perception/reception.

Ri ŏernarmi lni ieta ie marmeŏe. Tharen nalĭ edathati lńeĭŏ tĭta rmeta! Tholion re iemare iuvu dein thira nĭthe rnutŏ nethenda ronequi.

Just looking at that what are your thoughts? opinions? etc. What do you dislike about it? like? hell any criticism works.

What are some of the things you like about reading made up languages, how do they work for you. At what point does it become laborious to read. When do you not like made up languages, why? What changes how you like a made up language, the words, the entire structure? Does the level of complexity of a made up language determine how you feel towards it. Such as the example above, to bizarre, strange, complex, or too little?

Lastly I am interested in if anyone else has created a language and any thoughts they might have on the subject and/or advice.

 

[ScipioSmith]

Well I've no idea how to start pronouncing it but it looks cool.

Does the character being addressed understand this? Because if he/she doesn't then reading that would certainly put me in the chracter's shoes as some elf (it looks rather elvish) yells angry incomprehensible verbisage at them.

My opinion on constructed languages is that if the viewpoint character can understand what is being said it should be rendered in english, with a note that they are speaking in X tongue, because that way the reader can understand without having to flip to the translations at the back. Variations on Poirot speak are acceptable in a pinch. If, on the other hand, the character can't understand then I don't think any translation should be provided as it adds to the sense of a locked room, yet another thing working to exclude the outsider.

 

[Zophos]

I've dropped in a foreign (made-up) phrase or two in some of my short stories. I use made-up words quite often. Both of those things perplex me the further along I get for exactly the reasons you enumerate above. Are they consistent? Do they share the same qualities of grammar and syntax? Did I just throw a lot of vowels at it to make it sound elfish? Did I just throw a bunch of ugghs and grunts at it to make it sound dwarfish?

I've been kicking around the use of actual foreign languages (Arabic, French, Spanish, Persian, Hebrew) and classic languages (Latin, Greek, Old English) in the actual text in place of a contrived language. I don't know if it works and obviously, I don't throw out whole paragraphs in Gaelic or Tagalog. Still, I'm experimenting with tossing in an Arabic idiom or Spanish sentence and not translating it, directly. I use other vehicles like a third party translator (some dude in the book that says, "He said, 'Go screw yourself, Whitey'"), a broken translation ("I think she wants to take your gloves, but she may have said fingers") or just flat don't translate it in some cases (POV character has no clue what the wilderkin said, but is pretty sure it's pissed off).

Either way, question remains, do readers like that kind of stuff? I imagine it's a matter of taste, but I think too much of it would turn off a great many. Then again, if you're the next Tolkein or Roddenburry, you may have whole websites dedicated to cracking your code.

 

[Zophos]

Agree it looks cool, BTW. There are some pretty tricky phonetic structures in there and some of those vowel/consonant ligatures leave me wondering about pronunciation.

 

[ALB2012]

I tend to use So and So said "xxxxx" in Elvish but there are a few actual made up words and names. I have tried tomake up names for the forest elves at least. Often they are something like Dii'Athella, or Giz'Ellah which would have direct translations, however some elves have just one name, it depends on family origins or even they simply dropped the usage.

I have trollish too which is similar. I may end up with a glossary of terms at some point

 

[Steerpike]

Looks fine to me (not that I know anything about linguistics).

You posed this question: "At what point does it become laborious to read."

For me, the answer is "as soon as it goes beyond a word or two." If I encountered those sentences in a book, I'd skip right over them. Not because they aren't done well, but because I don't see any point in reading sentences written in a made-up language I don't understand.

 

[Philip Overby]

I like how Frank Herbert does this sort of thing. He has a ton of language that is unique to his Dune books, but they become pretty common place so you know what they mean from context. Just spurts of a made-up language in the middle of text, I have to agree with Steerpike: I'd just sort of scan over it. If it was happening a lot, it may even make me put down the book and not finish it. I like a certain degree of experimenting with language, but when it's overdone, it can be quite bothersome.

 

[Helleaven]

I've been working on my language for 5 years. Actually, before I had started to write stories, I was constructing my language just because it's hell of a fun to me!

First of all I think it would be nice if you have given us a clue about pronunciation, because o with an arch above does not ring a bell in my head

Anyway, my question is, what kind of a linguistic base are you using? I mean, the structure of the sentences. In english a simple sentence is consisted as this if I'm not wrong:

Subject + Verb + Object

German and most of the indo-european langueages are like this one. I love you, Ich liebe dich, etc.

In Japanese and Turkish (again, I might be wrong about Japanese) the structure is like this:

Subject + Object + Verb

If you know what kind of a structure you'll use, then comes the question of how it will be pronounced? I mean what will it sound like? A nordic viking-like language? An elven language like Tolkien's? An arabic language which has many gutturals? Like Chinese in which every word has tons of meaning depending on how you emphasise them?

If you decide how your language should sound like, then it's comes to the more detailed work. Is it going to be an agglutinative language? What will be the suffixes or prefixes if there are any? What will be your conjunctions, your prepositions, etc. There are many things that would blow your mind because it's not an easy job.

Let me give an example.

English: I know that you love me, but it is impossible for me to be with you.
German: Ich weiss, dass du mich liebst, aber es ist unmöglich für mich mit dir zu sein.
Turkish: Beni sevdiğini biliyorum, ama benim seninle olmam imkansız.

For my own language, I have used the grammatical structures of Turkish, German and English. I've mixed them up. I made it sound like something between Italian, Spanish and Latin which I love the way they sound.

Creating a language is one of the most amusing things that I've ever done. And yet I am still far away from finisihing it.

Now Let me show you a few example of my own creation:

Ãve sagram íre Kalíenad sagmen uta; fír num sagor. Num erebór ergatero!
Translation: The chest (which is) hiding the secret of betrayal, reveal your secrets. Your master commands!

Num áganor flutsio.
Translation: May your wounds be healed.

Haliatéru áve nam dáre, ganad Pléanaris.
Translation: Forgive my son, mighty Pléanaris.

Nam sonor áve nu, óve nim íre Pléanaris, ílatsio.
Translation: May my words bless you by the name of Pléanaris.


As you can see, there are vowels like á é ó ú ... These are supposed to be read longer than others.

áve --> a is always read like the u in up only a bit longer one... the same goes with other vowels.
Pléanaris --> é is always read like a in play...


There are many rules in a language, which can always have exceptions. If you have more spesific question I'd gladly help as I could.

"Ri ŏernarmi lni ieta ie marmeŏe. Tharen nalĭ edathati lńeĭŏ tĭta rmeta! Tholion re iemare iuvu dein thira nĭthe rnutŏ nethenda ronequi."

This looks very nice by just the look of it, in my opinion. Since I don't know how these sentences sound like, I can only comment about how they seem.

The only thing distractes me is the "rm" in "rmeta!" and "rn" in "rnuto" since they kind of exhaustive for the eye. Again, the reason for this is that I don't know if there is a spesific way to read them.

 

[Zophos]

...
First of all I think it would be nice if you have given us a clue about pronunciation, because o with an arch above does not ring a bell in my head
...
The only thing distractes me is the "rm" in "rmeta!" and "rn" in "rnuto" since they kind of exhaustive for the eye. Again, the reason for this is that I don't know if there is a spesific way to read them.

Can't speak for the author, but that arch above it is a breve symbol and is generally taken to be a short form of a vowel. Could mean anything you want it to mean, however, as it's simply a diacritic.

I'd interpret the rm, rn as a glottal, r-color or a long consonant. The problem with stringing consonants together is that romance language speakers tend to choke on them.

Correct about SVO v. SOV languages. Which of those two is more rudimentary or initially obvious in philology is an interesting discussion.

 

[ascanius]

So it would seem a few tidbits of a language are fine, a name here, or a word there. It becomes bothersome when entire sentences are encountered?

Ri ŏernarmi lni ieta ie marmeŏe. Tharen nalĭ edathati lńeĭŏ tĭta rmeta! Tholion re iemare iuvu dein thira nĭthe rnutŏ nethenda ronequi

Pronunciation. unvoiced stops are never aspirated, p, t, k. p as in tape, not pot. t as in bet not ten. k as in take.
Palatal: ń. ń is palatal= Italian ng, as in gniocchi it's similar to the Spanish ñ. Don't know how to describe this any other way.
g as in get.
c=s like sea. never z.
s=sh
th is always unvoiced as in thin, never th in the.
qu=qw
r is trilled at the beginning of a word or next to a consonant. between two vowels it is a tap like in Spanish r in caro.

I as in enough (tense); Ĭ as in pit (lax); E as in Italian sella; O as in Italian cosa or O'clock.(tense); A as in father; U as in too.(tense); Ŏ as in sot, mother (lax) it's more on the o side than a.
Diphthongs: Ie= I + e; Iu= I + yu, the y sound is very quick (took this from latin); Ŏe= ŏ=sot lax + e tense; Ĭŏ= ĭ in pit lax + ŏ in mother lax; Ae= aisle; Oi= oil

rm in rmeta would be pronounced with a trilled r that flows into the nasalized m sound. rn in rnuto does the same, trilled r that flows into the nasalized n sound.

Anyway, my question is, what kind of a linguistic base are you using? I mean, the structure of the sentences. In English a simple sentence is consisted as this if I'm not wrong:

so far I have decided upon the use of inflections with use of suffixes. So verb ending will change depending on the person and number. same with nouns, the ending will change to reflect gender, number and case (nominative, accusative etc.) I can change the arraignment of the words in the sentence any way I want

If you know what kind of a structure you'll use, then comes the question of how it will be pronounced? I mean what will it sound like? A nordic viking-like language? An elven language like Tolkien's? An arabic language which has many gutturals? Like Chinese in which every word has tons of meaning depending on how you emphasise them?

If I were to guess, I would say it would lean more to the elven side of things but I have consonant clusters; ll, tt, mn, nm, rn, rm, rl, tr, nt, br, pl, pn, ld, lm, ln, lq, lt, lv, rt, tth, rw, rr, nq, rq, bl, vl, rv, that change the overall sound. like ĭcavliu, etthĭlque (et+thĭlque) or itrilquelna, amĭlniu, irval, ulquot, evlern, or relquĭvlir

The one thing I have noticed is that coming up with suffix depending on what I do can really change to overall sound of the word. Bŏlŏer latrae inalqualn amnaet--> boy gives roses to girl (no articles yet). I'm struggling to keep suffix endings in a systematic rational. Like nominative feminine singular has no ending, then plural has i, then accusative has e, pl et; vocative sing el, pl ele; genitive sing aet, pl aete.

My question is should I go through all noun tables and make suffixes for all the cases of all three genders and do the same for verbs with person and number. Or should I work from the lexicon of the words that have definitions for and from there attempt translations through the creation of suffixes basically using what I like. I really like the systematic approach, much simpler. I have tried this and well get some combinations that just don't work well and really slaughters the sound. I'm kinda wondering if I make up the suffixes as I go on a word by word basis will I get a more natural spontaneity to the words allowing for exceptions to specific rules, or creating more that one noun declension for the three genders. I know Latin has what six declensions, it seems more realistic to have multiple variations, or irregulars. Italian is a nightmare with irregulars. What do you think? go with a systematic approach or allow the words to form based on translation attempts. What worked for you guys?