Make A Lang

And now for something completely different. I don't know about you, but I was always intrigued by the language Boushh/Leia spoke in Return of the Jedi. There were only a few examples of it in the film: "Yatay, yatay, yotoh," supposedly meant "I have come for the bounty on this wookie." "Yotoh, yotoh" = "$50,000, no less." "Ey, yotoh" = C-3PO paraphrases this as "Because he's holding a thermal detenator!" "Yatoh, cha" = C-3PO paraphrases this as "He agrees." There is something else Boushh/Leia says after the business with Jabba is concluded but I can't really make it out. But the 'yatay yotoh' stuff is what fascinates me. After a bit of searching I discovered that it was called Ubese . After all this research into linguistics and blogging about conlangs, I thought it would be fun to explore an unknown language, and see if I can deconstruct it, and extrapolate on it. Of course, ...

Here is the handout made by John Quijada for his talk at the 2nd LCC: If you click on the image, it will take you to my Flickr account and you can see the full-size version; even print it out if you like. It seemed like such a basic idea when I first heard it, but it really is at the heart of making a language: how do you want your language to sound? And even deeper than that, what character does your language have? There was a word John showed us: sprachgefuhl . It means "the character of a language," among other things. We all know that French is a pretty soft language, the "language of love," and so forth. We know that Japanese, German, and Norwegian sound completely different from each other. These languages have a very different "feel" from each other. How will your language feel different? Or do you want it to feel different? Maybe you want your conlang to feel similar to some other language. What characteristics will your language have tha...