Fantasy languages

[Parqstu]

Have you made up your own fantasy language/s?

If you have, why not share abit with us or some tips on creating new languages.

If liniin ishi hakanpipiya akann ieing ishi shiakan akann liniin ishi ieing, wihakant ishi liniin akann wihakant ishi ieing.

Thats one language i made up a wile ago. Not as good at it as i was^^ (I didn't write it down that well).

 

[At Dusk I Reign]

No, I've never invented a fantasy language. There are a few 'fantasy' phrases in my novel, but they're exclusively based on Arabic. I can appreciate the hard work that authors put into creating new languages for their characters, but to be perfectly honest that particular aspect of world-building has never been of interest to me; as long as the story's a corker I can live without such things.

 

[Dwarven Gold]

I tried making a language once. It seemed genius at the time. But it didn't sound so good when sobered up.

 

[Meg the Healer]

I tried making a language once. It seemed genius at the time. But it didn't sound so good when sobered up.

That's hysterical!

I haven't been able to create my own language, but it is something I've been wanting to do. I tend to use Gaelic in my writings.

 

[Parqstu]

I haven't been able to create my own language, but it is something I've been wanting to do.

What's the problem Meg?

 

[Meg the Healer]

What's the problem Meg?

Not sure really. When I'm reading my chapters aloud or I'm talking dialogue thru, I feel like I can make a language for the Demons. But when I try to write it - it just doesn't look right on paper to me. I'm wondering if I've got a mental block because I think I should know more language and how dipthongs and accents and whatnot should work. Does that make sense?

 

[Ravana]

Oh, my. So much that could be said… for now, I'll limit it to two items: (1) if you're serious about having your own language, consult a linguist; and (2) my rates are very competitive. Heck, I even do basic tips for free.

 

[Meg the Healer]

Linguist.....thank you! I could not think of that word last night!

 

[Parqstu]

I feel like I can make a language for the Demons. But when I try to write it - it just doesn't look right on paper to me. I'm wondering if I've got a mental block because I think I should know more language and how dipthongs and accents and whatnot should work. Does that make sense?

I think i understand ya. I made a language up for Demons kind of, by kind of i mean who knows what being they were going to turn out as . I get mental blocks too.

Let me show you abit...

Gonoondeel lahanckof korkon ekonun more filriendeel. I dunno, you can say wether you think it sounds demon-ish?

 

[Ravana]

Well, Meg (and all)… how much you "should" know really depends on how extensively you plan on using the language. On one extreme, we have Tolkien, who made up significant portions of at least six languages I can think of off the top of my head, and probably one or two I've forgotten about… by "significant portion," I mean not just a handful of words, but a fairly extensive basic vocabulary and also grammatical rules. Then again, he was a linguist… and, as with the rest of his influences on fantasy writing, he set a high standard that subsequent authors often feel obliged to live up to.

You shouldn't.

If you do want a fairly "complete" language that will sound consistently like a language, then you probably will "need to seek professional help" (from a linguist, or from a psychiatrist, depending on whether you want to succeed or just be talked out of it ). But there are some fairly simple shortcuts you can use if all you want is a few words that sound like they're from the same language. Even there, the tips I might offer would far exceed the normal length of my posts (a topic that invariably becomes a standing joke in any forum I join…), so for now, I'll offer the most basic one, and see if it helps you out some.

Start by choosing what sounds are and are not possible as part of your language. For the moment, we'll assume you're limiting yourself to what humans can produce: demons, or any fantasy race, might have very different organs for sound production, but that will complicate matters beyond this basic step. How many sounds? Up to you: Hawaiian has the smallest inventory among human languages—thirteen: five vowels and eight consonants. I don't know what the maximum is: the International Phonetics Alphabet (IPA) includes 107 symbols, not counting diacritics, but no one language will use all or even most of these sounds.

Apropos of which: I would also strongly recommend that you decide early on what letters represent each of these sounds, and stick with your decisions; if you make changes later, make them systematically throughout your work, so that you (and your readers) don't get confused. (Keep in mind that, for most languages, one letter stands for one sound: English is a notorious exception. If we did that, we'd need as many as 48 letters, depending on your dialect. For a good display of just how bad it gets, check the Wikipedia article on English orthography; just scroll down to the tables that begin a third of the way down… then keep scrolling. It'll make you wonder how anybody ever learns to read and write in this language.…) Here I will use letters as they're commonly pronounced in Romance languages, for the sake of simplicity, along with a couple combinations of letters that you don't necessarily see written that way, but which allow me to avoid introducing non-standard symbols. Your needs may vary. I will use technical terms only so that I can talk about sounds in groups: you don't need to know these (there's no quiz at the end of class…), but it's a lot faster to be able to say "fricative" than it is to list them every time, just as it's faster to say "adverb" than to say "word that modifies a verb, adjective or adverb" over and over. (Besides, that definition is recursive, since you'd need to substitute it in again for "adverb".… )

Vowel sounds should generally include at least the five "cardinal" ones found in almost any human language: a (father), e (fate), i (feet), o (foal), u (food). (If you ever took Spanish, these are the sounds you learned on the first day of class as the "only" ones in the language.) Most languages will include a few others, but I'm not familiar with any that omit any of these.

Consonants are best handled in groups: stops (p, b, t, d, k, g), fricatives (f, v, th (thin), dh (this), s, z, sh, zh, h), affricates (ts, dz, ch, j), nasals (m, n, ng), liquids (l, r) and glides (y, w). Note that this doesn't even exhaust the English inventory. (I left out glottal stops, for instance… we don't use a separate letter for those. The sound occurs in the middle of the word cotton: you don't actually say “t” here, no matter what you might think you're saying.) Also, these can be classed as voiced or voiceless (voiced sounds are b, d, g, v, z, zh, dz, j, plus all nasals, liquids and glides). You'll note, as you sound your way through them, that most of these appear in pairs: p and b are made the same way with your mouth, the only difference between them being that p is voiceless, b voiced.

So what you do is choose some of these groups as possible for your language, others forbidden. Want it smooth and flowing? Lots of liquids, glides and nasals, minimal stops and affricates, possibly only voiced ones. Want it harsh and grating? Reverse this: lots of stops, fricatives and affricates, emphasis on voiceless ones. Your species has no lips? Then you need a different grouping—labials: p, b, f, v, m, all of which get dropped. No tongue? You'd lose just about everything except those letters, plus h and a glottal stop; it would also become difficult to explain how different vowel sounds were created… you might still have a and o, but not much else, assuming the rest of the anatomy mirrored human.

Set up your sound inventory and you're halfway to having something in which whatever word you make up will at least sound like it came from the same language as all the other words you've made up. The other half, as you might guess, is rules on how these sounds combine: consonant clusters, dipthongs, and so forth… but we'll save that for the second lecture. That'll give you time to experiment; you'll probably come up with a few such rules yourself, without any help. For now, forget about grammar completely: it’ll only matter if you’re going to be using the language extensively.

 

[Ravana]

Part II, as promised (threatened ): Phonotactics.

"Phonotactics" is a term referring to how languages put sounds together: which combinations are allowed or prohibited. Can consonants occur next to one another? If so, how many? What about vowels? Do these form diphthongs (new vowel sounds), or are they pronounced separately? Are beginnings or endings of words limited to certain sounds? What is considered "pronounceable" in that language, and what isn't?

For instance, in Spanish word endings, it's the vowels plus d, l, m, n, r, s and z (which is pronounced as th in European Spanish, as s in American Spanish: it is never pronounced as z); d, l, m and z are all uncommon. Any word you see in Spanish that ends in any other sound is "borrowed" from another language—and will probably only appear in proper nouns, e.g. the a name like "Sharif." Japanese allows only six sounds to appear at the end of a word: the five "cardinal" vowels, plus n… and any word borrowed into Japanese will be altered to fit these rules.

In fact, any word borrowed into any language will ultimately be changed to fit the language's phonotactic rules: that's precisely what phonotactics is. So the Japanese word for "baseball" is besuboru… because the rules for Japanese require that (1) the word end in a vowel, (2) that most consonant clusters are forbidden, so the s and b need to be broken up, (3) that the sound most often used to do these things is u, and (4) that our l sound does not exist in the language, so it is replaced by the sound closest to it in pronunciation, in this case represented by r (though it is not pronounced the same way English r is… in fact, as far as I know, English is the only language that uses exactly the sound we do).

So much for specific examples. Here's a basic set of decisions you can make to govern your own language:

Consonant clusters: can two (or more) consonants occur next to one another? If not, you will have single consonants alternating with one or more vowels. If yes, is it limited to certain ones? (Probably: this is the best way to avoid unpronounceable clusters.) Note that things such as ch, sh, and th are not consonant clusters: they are single sounds represented by two letters. Most instances of ng in English are similar: you do not pronounce the g at the end of "sing"… nor do you pronounce the final sound as n. If you did, you'd say "sin" instead. For an example of the difference between the sound normally represented by ng (called "engma," if anyone cares) and actually pronouncing two consonants in sequence, consider the difference between "singer" and "single"—and note that, even there, you are pronouncing an engma, not an n, as the first sound.

Vowel clusters: same question. If the answer to both of these is "no," you will have a regular alternation of one consonant, one vowel. Possibly a bit dull, but very easy to pronounce.

Diphthongs: these are where two vowels adjacent to one another change in pronunciation: "sour" is not pronounced "so-ur." There is no reason you need to use diphthongs at all, but they will broaden the number of available sounds, if you want some extras. Other examples include "long I" (as in "sign": slow it down enough and you'll hear you're moving from "ah" to "ee") and oi ("foil"). Note that unless you develop a systematic way to symbolize each sound (i.e. "ou" is always pronounced as a diphthong, never as two separate vowels), your reader may not end up pronouncing things the same way you do… if that matters to you.

Beginnings: which sounds can begin a word? The ng sound never appears at the front of a word in English… but it's quite common in Vietnamese.

Endings: again, same question. Examples above.

Intonation: some languages use multiple "tones" to make what otherwise involves the same sounds have different meanings. In English, the only significant example is the rising tone at the end of a question: this makes the difference between "That's yours?" and "That's yours." Mandarin Chinese, on the other hand, has four main tones, and the "same" word can be pronounced four different ways, with completely different meanings—and there are languages with more than four tones out there. (Example: my all-time favorite language mistake, my very own, no less: I was supposed to say "Mrs. Zhong knows. Let's ask her." What I actually said was "Mrs. Zhong knows. Let's kiss her." A novel method of extracting information, if I do say so myself.… ) You don't need to use tones; just mentioning the possibility.

Morphology: here, we are moving away from sounds per se, and starting to reach into grammar. Morphemes are individual units of meaning. Don't be intimidated by that description, though: you use them all the time, completely unconsciously. In English, these can be tacked on at the beginning (prefix) or end (suffix) of words—for instance, "unconsciously" above as "un-," meaning "not," tacked on to the word "conscious"; "-ly" is added at the end to turn the noun into an adverb. You could do this with absolutely any noun and create a new word that would be understood by another English speaker, though some uses will seem more "natural" than others: take the word "speaker" (itself already assembled from "speak" plus a suffix turning the verb into a noun); you would be able to figure out for yourself what "unspeakerly" would mean from your knowledge of the individual pieces.

What matters here is that as you tack on pieces, the resulting word must also obey the phonotactic rules you've created—in fact, this is the place where a language's phonotactics become most obvious, as you can see the changes being made. To go back to Japanese: the consonant clusters created at the beginning and end of "unspeakerly" need to be broken up (as does the "sp": this word would have been "supeaker" to start with… or rather "supeakeru," since r can't end a word); so in a language using such a rule, the result would have been "unusupeakeruly" instead—which becomes "-urury," thanks to that rule about the "l". (Note that the y is functioning as a vowel here, so it's a legitimate ending.)

You might also decide at this point whether your language permits prefixes, suffixes, both, or neither—or even infixes, morphemes added in the middle of the word (this is fairly uncommon in real-world languages). There are languages that do all of these. The ones that don't allow any affixes to words will handle the grammar with separate words instead: one would say "not conscious" rather than "unconscious," and "not in a conscious manner" rather than "unconsciously." You do not need to create whole lists of affixes, unless you are determined to work up a complete language; on the other hand, having a few of them can make it possible to create plausible, easily understood words that don't need to be explained as they show up. If at some point you used the word "bugshei" (whatever that means), then later used "bugsheidoz" to mean "not bugshei," then you can use "agzalodoz" at some other point with a fair amount of confidence that your reader can figure out that this means "not agzal." (Why isn't it "agzaldoz"? I decided the language doesn't allow a liquid—l or r—to be followed by another consonant. )

So… probably more than you needed to know, quite possibly more than you wanted to. (And far, far from everything I could have said on the subject.…) But if you make these choices at the outset—which sounds are allowed, and how they're allowed to go together—you can easily come up with new words, names, etc. whenever you need them; as long as they follow the rules, they'll at least sound like they're from the same language.

 

[Ophiucha]

I wrote a short blog post about how to create a very simple language, mostly for creating names, that ends with me discouraging anyone without a linguistics degree from going any further, and on this note: "you don't need a constructed language for your fantasy world to seem real. You're writing the story in English, and we accept that any English dialogue likely is an implied translation. Generally, the reader doesn't want to have to skim a twenty page lexicon at the back of the book just to follow along. If you think that your story needs a language, then go ahead and make one. But don't feel like you have to."

 

[Kittenmay]

I personally have made three languages so far, but don't think its necessary. Its an immense amount of work that is completely useless, since you will not be writing your book in that language, at least if you want others to read it

 

[Ophiucha]

My post 'poofed' into thin air, it appears, but basically, I agree with kitten. Even if you have the talent needed to create a truly functional conlanguage (which, odds are, you don't), it doesn't tend to add much to a story without being obtrusive. You either spend all your time creating a language only to include a couple of tavern signs worth of language, or you have to have a dictionary take up the second half of your book, and not many people can read when they have to constantly cross-reference the back of the book.

I've created a 'naming' language before, which is only functional to the point of being able to make up words, but that still takes a lot of time and effort if you want to do it right.

 

[JCFarnham]

Thank you Ravana for posting those two "lectures" as you called them. I've been hanging around linguistics forums for months with out so much as anyone telling me simply what some of these terms meant. You're a life saver.

While I do really have any naming languages as such, I've basically decided that place names and such in my setting are unlikely to have /o/ in them unless of course the person/nation in question are from an area whos language has never really modernified like the rest of the world. Or maybe its the other way round... I haven't really decided yet. But I do know that the inclusion of /o/ in the vowels is an indication of "something" in my setting haha. I'll get there one day

 

[Ravana]

Thank you Ravana for posting those two "lectures" as you called them. I've been hanging around linguistics forums for months with out so much as anyone telling me simply what some of these terms meant. You're a life saver.

You're quite welcome, and thank you. Actually, I was a bit surprised anyone bothered to read through those, based on my experiences elsewhere (which is why I engage in so much self-deprecating humor)… though I guess I should have expected better from a group whose purpose is centered on writing and reading.

There is, as mentioned, much more that could be said–but as has also been mentioned, unless you're really into the task of designing a language for its own sake, there's no reason to go to the trouble… and if you really are bent on it, you should "seek professional help." Klingon and Na'vi, to take two of the best-developed fictional languages, were both created by linguists. And, yes, I do have a graduate degree in linguistics: would it surprise anyone here to learn that one of the things that inspired me to pursue it–that brought the field to my awareness in the first place–was Tolkien?

That's why I confined myself to sound systems for the above posts, though: most people, for the most part, are only going to be needing a few names, along with possibly a couple brief utterances–ones they may not even bother translating, just throwing them in there to emphasize a "foreignness" or "alienness" of the speaker (think Lovecraft's unpronounceable eldritch chants, for instance). Set up a sound system, and you'll have words that sound like they could have come from the same language (or same set of speech organs, at least); perhaps as importantly, you can then set up another system and have words that will consistently sound like they come from a different language. (And if you've got your phonotactics completely worked up, you'll even be able to know how speakers of each will mispronounce words from the other, if you want.)

I am quite willing to answer further questions, should anyone be brave enough to wade through additional posts. For anyone who'd like an introduction to linguistics that's fairly "gentle"–without being at all condescending–look up Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. I can assure you that all the rest of us linguists are jealous at his having written what will probably be the only "best-seller" ever produced in our field.…

I've basically decided that place names and such in my setting are unlikely to have /o/ in them… I do know that the inclusion of /o/ in the vowels is an indication of "something" in my setting haha. I'll get there one day

And maybe some day you'll decide what that is. (Perhaps /o/ only ever occurred in names for living things, at some point in the language's past… which means that it may show up in places named after persons or animals. Or maybe it only appears in words borrowed from other languages… in which case it might be quite common in place-names in another part of the world. Or maybe it was only ever used as part of verb endings.) In the meantime, at least you won't have to backtrack in order to do so, if you ever do.

 

[Hans]

I've only yet created some very basic languages. For the purpose, as already has been said above, to name persons and places. But also to give some characters a consistent accent. Even if one character has a stronger and another a weaker accent, it should be recognizeable be the same. Such things as knowing what sounds are hard to pronounce from a speaker of that language helps a lot. Also a basic grammar outline helps to decide where word swaps occur or where extra words are added or needed words left away.

When creating a language it helps a lot to look at different existing languages. Of course you don't have to learn all these languages. Just a look at different grammar books (try to include some non indo european languages) can get you a lot of different ideas.

The how does a language sound question has been nicely covered before in this thread. You only need more if you really want to go deep into it.

At the momen't I'm trying my hands on a language without explicit negation. Everybody I talk to tells me that's not possible, but let's see how far I can take it.

 

[Ravana]

At the momen't I'm trying my hands on a language without explicit negation. Everybody I talk to tells me that's not possible, but let's see how far I can take it.

Don't see why it should be a problem. They can always get around it with periphrasis, worst case. Given the relative wealth of mutually-exclusive word pairings–a person who is standing is not sitting, for instance–I doubt they'd even need that much. But just dropping negation is no biggie. (Q: "Is that Bob?" A: "That is Ted" or "That is someone other than Bob." Or perhaps they don't give direct answers to questions at all, positive or negative.)

It would do some fascinating things to formal logic systems, though: excluded middle would no longer be expressible.

 

[Hans]

Don't see why it should be a problem. They can always get around it with periphrasis, worst case. Given the relative wealth of mutually-exclusive word pairings—a person who is standing is not sitting, for instance—I doubt they'd even need that much. But just dropping negation is no biggie.

Problems arise with such simple things as yes/no questions. Even if you say "That is false" is not a negation ("That is not true" would be one) why not shorten this statement to just one word? And then why not say "false <Statement>" or "<Statement> false" and there - that's what makes a negation.
I have to create a complete different mindset where saying something "not true" is not just bad style, it has to be completely alien to the speakers.
Which is not to say they wouldn't lie. You can always have a "true" statement that actually is not the truth.

 

[Imperialis]

I have a language based on Shona and Romany (better known as the Gypsy tongue) but these people were so tricksy by nature that no one said anything was wrong, ever. If you asked "Tabaky sooja Boba" meaning Is that Bob? (language is all open syllables, following Bantu phonotactics, therefore a is added to Bob to open it, as a is their general letter to add, while Romany sounds were often used, language not fully developed) and he wasn't, you'd reply, "Chika oxtoty Teda" meaning Yes, that is Ted, both covering for their mistake and passive aggressively correcting them. Not the most charming race.