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...