Make A Lang

Don't have time for a long post today, so I thought I'd make a quick post about one of the common conlanging pitfalls I've experienced and hear others talking about a lot. I've been guilty of as this as well: throwing in TOO MUCH. Putting in too many phonemes, morphemes, and basically throwing in everything INCLUDING the kitchen sink! I think this happens because all of us speak a very developed, rich language, whatever it is. We want our conlang to be as full and rich, but this will NOT happen overnight or even in a few years. THINK SIMPLE. ESPECIALLY if you are working on your first conlang. Think about this for a few minutes. When are we most creative? When we have less to work with, because we have to be. Think of preparing a meal: you are in a huge kitchen with fully stocked cupboards and freezer. You can make ANYTHING. What do you make? You're paralyzed for a few moments as you consider the possibilities. Then maybe you start making something, but ...

After the 2nd LCC, there were two large steps that helped my proto-language for Fauleethik fall into place. The first was I began working on a conlang card game. The Glossotechnia game made my mind race. What could make language experimentation more accessible to your friends and family than a card game? Heck, what could make it more accessible to ME? I knew I needed to wrap my head around linguistic concepts better in order to experiment more and get the results I wanted. Plus, I might get some friends and family involved in my secret vice. Plus, I had an additional idea: what if this could be an easier way to codify and explain your conlang to others? Instead of having to write out a lengthy description with phonology, morphology, syntax, grammer, etc., what if you could just give a code or list of card numbers or something and they can have an almost instant picture of what your conlang is? All these ideas really got me excited to work on this. Now, a language is a fairly...

The second day started off with Jeff Burke. Now, Jeff Burke was supposed to talk at the 1st LCC, and I was really excited about his talk, but an accident befell him and he wasn't able to show! Jeff has done a lot of research on Native American languages, specifically Algonquian and Iroquoian, and has created his own conlang based on his favorite parts called Noyahtowa. He gave a talk about evolutions and changes of pronominal prefixes within some native American languages and why they were interesting for a conlanger. Good stuff! Next was John Clifford, who spoke last year about aUi and Toki Pona; conlangs with a degree of popularity. John has a Masters in Lingusitics and a PhD in Philosophy abd has been a college professor, so he knows how to teach and he's pretty fun to talk to. This year he spoke about the problems of success with your conlang; success meaning more and more people discussing and speaking your language. The main problem he spoke of was losing control o...

The Second Language Creation Conference was coming and I was feeling pretty good about the progress of my language over the past year. I had a phonology, a rough morphology, and a few grammer rules, but it really wasn't very detailed at all. But my runic script and font, aha, now there was something people could actually look at! I actually submitted a page for the LCC program for my conlang (page 55), which at this point was called Fauleethik, which literally meant sound-tongue. The original name, Peetik, I had given up shortly after the 1st LCC. I had originally chosen Peetik because I loved how the runic Futhark alphabet was so named because F, U, Th, A, R, & K are the first six letters of that alphabet, and it just happened to make a cool sounding name. P, Ee, T, I, & K were supposed to be the first five letters of my conlang alphabet, but I realized I didn't like arranging my alphabet that way after all, and the name didn't sound right. "Fauleethik" ...

Part One , Part Two , this is Part Three So by this time I had all the pieces: the basic letter shapes, the design principles, alphabets to draw more ideas from, etc. It was time to put the pieces together and really create an alphabet. At the beginning, I just wanted something simple, runes, lines that could be drawn in the dirt, or carved on wood or stone. I believed, because of the D'Ni numerals, that I could later create a flowing, cursive or italic form that would make a pretty script. But I really wanted the letters to correspond to the IPA chart in some way, so that the letters sort of proclaimed where in the mouth they were pronounced. I started seeing how many letters I could get out of similar shapes, and started grouping the phonemes, so that I could decide which shapes might go with which letters. Here you can see the first phonology, arrangement and alphabet I produced, which I was pretty happy with. The plosives all have the same basic shape; a top stroke mar...

Part One , this is Part Two, Part Three So once I had my design principles, and I had decided what alphabets to use as inspiration, I just started copying the characters that I liked, and I started playing with them. I'd flip them around, I'd change a stroke or two, and I'd improvise. I'll post a page or two of some of these ramblings. Basically, whenever I was in a meeting, going somewhere on BART, whenever I was sitting and getting bored, the notebook came out and I started to doodle. After I fooled around with the characters, I'd come back to the design principles. I liked the curves and angles of Tibetan, but if I was going to integrate the D'Ni design of combined simple strokes, Georgian was better for inspiring simple strokes that could be combined. But as I played with the characters, and tried to see how many characters I could make that I liked the look of, and that reflected the design principles... I wasn't liking the results. I didn'...

This is Part One, Part Two , Part Three The idea of making up my own alphabet was probably the first thing that attracted me to conlanging. After I learned Bulgarian, I made up a code that was based on Cirth and Bulgarian . I sent my brother the code and would mail him letters using it, just for fun. I started thinking about developing a new alphabet later, when I was playing the Myst games, and I saw the flowing script of D'Ni  (D'Ni is a conlang Cyan/Richard Watson developed for their games and books). First things to consider as you start developing your alphabet - What do you want? a phonetic alphabet a non-phonetic alphabet (like English) or a syllable-based alphabet (meaning one character per syllable, like po, kee, ot, or kel, would be represented by one character/Tibetan is syllabic) or an abjad, which would be a consonant-only-alphabet, and all vowels would be represented by diacritic marks (Hebrew and Arabic are examples) A little research on Omniglot will...

If you don't know a second language, please don't learn one just for the sake of creating your own language, unless you are a genius like that guy Jared in The Pretender . But do learn one to enrich your mind, broaden your understanding of another culture, and to stave off dementia. I happen to speak pretty fluent Bulgarian and it has definitely helped me with Conlanging in a few ways. 'Pretty fluent' because i lived there for a couple years and spoke it well, but haven't had many opportunities since I've been back to speak it. Can't remember all the vocabulary words so well anymore. But being able to think in another language and knowing the grammer can free up your thinking as to what is possible for your conlang. It could be argued that knowing a language or two might also limit your vision as to what you will and won't attempt, but my experience has taught me that this is NOT a bad thing. When I was reading through conlang websites, I was bombar...

Alrighty, I pulled out my conlang binder and looked up the random Language Kits I found and printed up over the years. Unfortunately, the only one that I have a link for is the Zompist Language Construction Kit , but it is one of the best. I might scan the others and post a PDF file or something later. Initially, none of these did me much good, because I didn't really know how to experiment with language fully. I mostly played with word generators, plugging in slightly different sets of phonemes, giving different morpheme rules, to see what I got. You can do this yourself very quickly at the Fantasist link in the corner up there. But because I didn't push forward I really limited my own progress. All I was doing was looking at words. Once I had a phonology and morphology, I should have tried grammer, developing cases and so on. I was stuck! BUT, something got me unstuck and catapulted me ahead in ways I wouldn't even guess. One time while I was visiting Langmaker.com , I sa...

So Phonology is what sounds are included or allowed in a language. For example, larple could be an English word, but zhangkonn doesn't look like an English word by a long shot (maybe more of a Chinese/German hybrid word?). Phonotactics is also related to this, because the morphology of your language dictates how the sounds can be put together. CVC, consonant-vowel-consonant, could be one way to make a simple word. This would be a "closed syllable," meaning there is a consonant on each end of the vowel sound. In the morphology of your language, do you want to allow consonant clusters? (CC) St, sht, lmthk? Or maybe you want to allow clusters at the end of words or syllables, but never at the beginning? Will your morphology allow for vowel sounds to be put together? (CVVC) Lion, poet, joey? Or do you want lots of open syllables? Once you step into morphology there is a LOT to consider. The thing that made it simple for me again though was simply reflecting on what ...

Phonology is basically the inventory of sounds that can exist in your language. All the conlanging resources I found said that you need to start by developing a phonology for your conlang first. When I began, I just made a complete list of the sounds in English and Bulgarian, the two languages I speak, and came up with something like this: p b m, f v th d l s z sh zh t d, k g r. I didn't yet realize there is a voiced th and an unvoiced th, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to include a trilled r or not. I grouped them into vague classes of front of the mouth, middle of mouth, and back of the mouth. I also included ten vowel sounds that I thought were important and not diphthongs (i as in bit, e as in bet, a as in bat, u as in butt, o as in boat, ey as in beet, ay as in bait, iy as in bite, aw as in bought, oo as in boot). Yeah, in retrospect, iy is pretty much a diphthong of aw and ey, but I liked the vowel and I didn't know better yet. I kind of started playing a...

For a few years, my conlanging stumbled around in a big dark room. The only thing that kept me going on my conlang were a Middle Earth Encyclopedia book I had, that got me excited about language creating whenever I leafed through it and looked at the interesting names Tolkien had created for various things through out Middle Earth. Occasionally I would look up stuff on other languages, to get ideas for stuff I might integrate into my language, but it wasn't much help. The first resources I found that started me going in any direction some sort of a semblance of a direction, were the Ardalambion and Langmaker websites. I was able to learn a great deal about Quenya, Sindarin, and Tolkien's other languages, and I was able to start playing around with creating words out of sounds using the langmaker word generator. Here is an online version to play with. Something that I loved and really got me moving in the right directions, were these newsletters I found on langmaker.com....