Make A Lang

So I wanted to pick up where I left off on the last post before Christmas, and talk about syntax and grammer a bit. " Fa meshsak sosha o kulntht to tisiks afshra pefsi. " This pancake is going from zero to sixty within five seconds. Or, more literally, This pancake is going from stop until sixty within five. We're going to break this sentence down and figure out how you can construct grammer and syntax. Syntax could be defined simply as how words are ordered in a sentence. In English, we describe nouns with adjectives, or tell what the noun is, like so: "the bright room," "the room was bright," "the smooth, round ball," "the ball was smooth and round." In the case of "the room was bright," the room is the subject, was is the verb, and the brightness is the object. English is a SVO language, meaning that the ordering of the subject, verb and object are respectively, first, second, and third. In an SOV language, the sen...

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...

I stated in a previous post that there were two main things I did after the second LCC that helped me really firm up my first conlang. The first was digging into the conlang card game. The second was I decided to try and make things REALLY simple. I thought, " I don't really want it to be this simple, but I'm just going to experiment and see what happens ." Here's a few other things that lead me in the direction I took: I had previously found this page on Huttese , the language of Jabba the Hutt and Tatooine from Star Wars. I liked the sound of it. I wondered how I might make my conlang sound more like it, but with my phonology (the one that had TONS of phonemes, remember?). I realized after studying it for a week or two that what I really liked about it was the open syllable structure. "Tolpa da ponki nu puti cha naga." It just sounded right; it sounded good to my ears. So I started pulling out phonemes and making sure that I had mostly open s...

With it being the holiday season, I've been pretty busy, so I'm sorry about the lack of posts recently. But wow, I got a lot of response to the card game post, so I wanted to post more about it! I thought that today I would write some more about the additional functionality I am building into the game. I am designing the game to be playable with a group but also for solo play. With solo play, I figured you could use it to generate a random language, or you could put up the cards that would mostly describe your own conlang, and then be able to play around with the language by substituting, adding, or taking away some of the cards. Also, you could more easily understand other conlangs by putting up the cards that create that conlang. After doing this a few times, you would sense patterns between the cards for how certain languages sound and behave. If you an amateur linguist (like me), developing a recognition for these patterns could be really helpful to wrapping your head ...

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...

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...