Make A Lang

I wanted to test out the 6 Key Phrases on the Ubese (Star Wars) conlang I have played with in the past. Oh by the way, in a previous post I remarked that it seemed silly to not have the B sound in a language called "Ubese," but these kind of things happen all the time in the real world. Germany vs. Deutschland vs. Allemagne - all names for the same country! Ubese could have been said to some explorers as "Uhheesh" but those explorers, due to their own phonology, could only say it as "Oobeez(and spell it as Ubese)." Maybe Ubes means "quiet" or "few words" in their language, and this attribute becomes the name of the people? Or the person that discovered them might have been called Ub? There are definitely some ways you can have some fun with this, as you pick names in your con. In order to speak this correctly, keep your jaw closed but part your lips. Do not move your lips! Phonology: t, sh, ch, k, n, l, hh (a harsh H sound made b...

He doesn't want dem apples. I got some cool ideas last week from Tim Ferriss . For any readers who haven't heard of him, look him up - he is an amazing guy who likes to find ways to beat the game, rather than play the game. I was watching this video and I wondered if I could apply any of his ideas to conlanging. Hestarts talking at the 6:35 mark about learning languages and he mentioned that using the following phrases helped one better understand the grammar and mechanics of a language (10:02 mark): The apple is red. It is John's apple. I give John the apple. We want to give him the apple. He gives it to John. She gives it to him. I thought that it makes sense that the reverse must be true as well - that you should be able to use these as a way of testing out/creating the grammar and mechanics of your conlang! I wanted to try this out in a couple of simple ways to illustrate the concept, but we'll just do one per post. First, let's use the ...

This topic comes up every once in awhile on the conlang forums - numbers in your conlang. This post goes out to you, Janko Gorenc. ;) Usually the biggest issue of these threads is simply, what base do you want for your number system and why? The base for your number system basically means, how many numbers are there, before you go up to the next "place" in the numeral system? Now, most of the world uses a base 10 number system, and its probably because people have 10 fingers. But we could have had a base 5 number system, and a lot of conlangers play with this. Or, you might be developing a language and culture for an alien culture that has 12 fingers, or six limbs, or nine tentacles! Whatever base you want, for whatever reason, I wanted to provide a brief tutorial on how to calculate or translate base 10 numbers into another base, or vice versa. If you want to know more about number systems before diving into this, read these Wikipedia articles on number systems....

Ok.  My experience has been that some conlangers out there do not like it when your conlang is too... Englishey . This generally means your conlang has basically the same syntax and grammar as English, and the same sounds, too.  There might be a few twists in there - an extra case, some extra phonemes, a different alphabet, but overall, pretty close to English. And really, who can blame them?  For those that take the time to learn and understand linguistics and all the concepts behind it, it looks and feels lazy and uninspired. For the record, I do not encourage conlanging snobbery, I'm just saying that I understand where it comes from. But... if you DON'T know lots of linguistics, and don't care to study all the principles and so forth, what else can you do?  If you know a second language you can mash up the two languages you know.  But aside from that, how else can you build a language? Being the conlang contrarian I am, I think you can transform English...

Kam le elefant wape? How you elephant(singular) will be eating? How do you eat an elephant? In wip siled in wip! One bite after one bite One bite at a time. I was just thinking about the work I would still have to do on my conlang in order to get to a point where I felt like it was finished, and I was just feeling like I would NEVER get there.  Too many other more important things to take care of in the mean time, too many little details to wrestle with, too technical to understand, etc. Anyone who's been reading my blog knows that I constantly cry SIMPLIFY and I realized I needed to take some of my own advice again.  When I first began getting into conlanging, so much of it was over my head (and there are a lot of things that still are!), but I just kept with it, taking in what I could, and utilizing what I did know as best I could.  Its good advice for beginners as well as higher-level conlangers. I stopped myself and thought that instead of thinking of it ...

This is kind of a special post, cuz I realized it is my 25th post, so I wanted to digress a bit and post about conlangers, not conlanging, just for fun. This post is a little bit self-serving, but I won't do this often, I promise. Conlanging is something I do that I can honestly say I have no good reason for doing. It would make more sense for me to learn a third language than to make one up, wouldn't it? There are other hobbies I have that are kind of pointless, but have at least some merit to them. For example, I like to study and practice medieval sword fighting and martial arts. Now, sword fighting is not exactly a crucial skill to master, but I started it and have kept at it because 1) it helps keep me in good shape 2) I learn some history as I study it 3) I learn a martial art as I study it. Conlanging, I guess you might say that it is keeping my mind active and I'm learning some linguistic stuff... but really, I have no reason to do any of this stuff. I just...

After reading Rick Morneau 's wonderful summary of morphology for the umpteenth time, I thought I should write a post, in my words, about the relationship between phonology and morphology, or phonotactics. I think once this relationship is understood better, it makes your conlanging more enjoyable and quicker. A quick and dirty definition of phonology is that it is the sounds permitted in your conlang. Anything not in your phonology, speakers of that language would have a hard time saying (kind of like how Japanese are famous for speaking Ls like Rs). Lets break down the phonemes of your language into a few categories: consonants, clusters, vowels and semi-vowels. Just these four categories, for now. In fact, lets make up a phonology for the purposes of this post. P, t, k, f, th, s, sh, m, n, r and l for consonants. Ee, ei, au, oo, and o for vowels. 11 consonants, 5 vowels. Now, phonotactics. Lets keep explanations, and these phonotactic rules, simple. The phonology shoul...

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....

Back in 2001, after "The Fellowship of the Ring" had come out, I was randomly doing a bit of research on good ol' JRR Tolkien. I think I was looking for what his inspiration was in writing a story with such depth, but I went off on a tangent because I wanted to know why he wrote those poems and lyrics and where he got the Elvish and other language stuff. I had known that he was a professor of English at Oxford, but I discovered something I had never guessed. Tolkien actually created a an Elvish language, and part of the reason why he wrote of Middle Earth was to have a place where his languages would be spoken. The realization that the Elvish was not just gibberish, or some existing language adapted for use in the book, or English switched and substituted in some way (like Pig Latin), was AMAZING to me. That someone could make up a language for fun seemed... impossible and difficult. I had always wanted to write a sci-fi novel and I had the thought that, if I ever wanted...