Make A Lang

Today I want to start talking about morphology , which means how words are structured. If you've been reading MakeALang for awhile, I posted last year about phonotactics a little. Phonotactics = phon ( sound) + tact (touch). Phonotactics is about what sounds can touch other sounds in a language. Example: in English, s and r cannot be next to each other. Sri Lanka is obviously a foreign name to us because we just know that s and r aren't supposed to be together. Morphology is different. Morphology is not about the sounds that make up words, but about the structure of words. Its about what a word is in your conlang, and how it works to convey meaning. This is actually a huge subject (for me, at least) and I've been struggling for MONTHS to try and break it down to a point where its digestible. Well that, and my wife and I had a baby boy end of September. :D I won't be covering all morphology concepts in this post, but there will probably be a Morphology 202 po...

Here's another conundrum I spent many hours figuring out. How can I generate a vocabulary, or lexicon , without it taking YEARS? There are a few different schools of thought on this. Some people feel that each word needs to sound like what it is, within the confines of their phonology. Meaning, you think about and create each word. This is very abstract, but you just might come out of it actually being able to remember a lot of your words, maybe even be able to speak your conlang (Remember, VERY few conlangers are fluent in their language, and the ones that claim to be are suspect, because who can really judge them?). Plus, you're guaranteed to get a conlang that sounds the way you want it to. The opposite extreme is to randomly generate your vocabulary, after keying in your phonology to a word generator program . The advantage is you get a big vocabulary quickly, the down side is that you won't know any of the words off the top of your head until after some st...

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...

I was thinking about my conlanging today, and specifically about how Yes and No are said in Reformed Pitak and Old Fauleethik, which is simply Sa and Ne, or Sau and Nei (or Saw and Nay to make pronunciation a little more clear). Now the interesting thing I was reflecting on was that I came up with these words a LONG time ago, way before I knew much about phonology, morphology, grammer, etc. But these words have survived through the various iterations and changes I've made over the years. I thought it might be interesting to recount to myself and for you how I've continually made changes and how these words have managed to remain unchanged. First of all, my phonology has never changed to a point where these sounds would not be allowed, but if it had, I could have just changed a vowel or a consonant and moved on. Second, as I began developing my morphology for words, I had decided that, in Pitak, words ending in -a are generally verbs in the present tense. But, verbs usually...

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...