Make A Lang

I was working on my fonts for my conlang again and I starting thinking about alphabets in general, and I thought it would be fun to do a post on Tolkien's Middle Earth alphabets, Cirth and Tengwar. First, let's take a look at Cirth , which was used to write Khuzdul, the dwarvish language, as well as Quenya and Sindarin, the elvish languages. It was based on the Norse & Anglo-Saxon Futhark runes. There's nothing very fancy about this alphabet, it functions much the same as our own; each glyph represent one character. But note that the different letters correspond to each other in certain ways: letters that are phonetically close to each other look similar. P and B, for example. B is pretty much the "voiced" form of P (voiced means that your vocal chords are engaged and vibrating). B looks just like P but its got that extra little stroke sticking out there, making it look like an R. Same thing for T and D, and K and G. And those are just the plosives; lo...

Today I wanted to talk about vowels. More specifically, how vowel sounds combine. Combining vowel sounds creates diphthongs; thats the basic definition of a diphthong . But, there is another category, and its used a lot in English. Its called a "semi-vowel" and it includes letters like r, w, and y. This took me a second to wrap my head around, because I'd always thought of w and r, and, to a lesser extent, y, as consonants. But think about it- a consonant is a sound we make by impeding the flow of air through our mouths (p, m, s, b, z, even h , a little), but you're not really putting your tongue anywhere when you make an r. You could argue that you use your lips to shape a "w" sound, but when you sound it out, its pretty obvious that w is pretty much an "oo" sound combined with whatever is before or after it (row, water, coward). So my amateur-linguist definition of a semi-vowel is: a diphthong or vowel sound that is used as a consonant. This ...

I just got a nice comment from another conlanging blogger that has nudged me back into action! I was just working on translating random phrases I thought of or saw around the house this past weekend so I thought it would be fun to post some translations and explain more about how Pitak works (for now, at least). I'm doing it in the same format Arne Duering posts to her blogs (check out his blogs for some interesting conlangs!), because I think its more interesting than posting sentences and then translated sentences, and helps you understand the mechanics of a conlang better. It can also help you make devastatingly accurate and, hopefully, helpful, criticism, so be kind . ;) A pasu fe wiki so napaku sa A= the pasu= past (descriptive case) fe= two (or few) wiki= weeks (plural case) so= were (is; past tense case) na-= most paku= packed (descriptive case) sa= being (is; present tense case) The past few weeks have been completely packed. Mi waf i li tasu muvo, en papu pol lafa lu f...