Make A Lang

I know this is very out of character for this blog, but thought some of you might get a kick out of this. Have a great weekend! ~Matt

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....

I've posted about this before and made more progress, so this is an updated report about how my orthography has evolved since I made three posts about it at the end of '07, and things you might consider as you develop your own orthography. I just couldn't leave well enough alone. I had my orthography, it worked, but each time I looked at it, there was still something that bothered me - ome little nagging itch in the back of my brain somewhere. So one day as I was sitting in a meeting, I starting listening to my itch to see what where it lead. Now these are little things, but maybe something I learned will benefit you, too. So here is the alphabet I had settled on previously: This font, you might notice, is extremely light compared to the English letters. I realized quickly that I should make the letters thicker, but this change could wait. An item of interest: the Pitak characters have thicker horizontal strokes than vertical strokes. I thought it would be interest...

I posted awhile back about word lists you can use to guide you on creating a vocabulary for your conlang. I was recently looking at this again and I decided to look closer at the Universal Language Dictionary ( click here for a good description of what this is). I found some great new stuff! I downloaded the XML file from Rick Harrison's Universal Language Dictionary website and found that they added "levels" to the words! Now, in each category of words, a level is assigned to the words, from 0 to 3, in order of complexity. There are about 30 0 level words, and about 170 1 level words, so the first two levels is only about 200 words. You could use this as a guide - creating all the level 0 words first, then the level 1 words, and so on. You might disagree with the level assignments, or you might be working on a conlang that emphasizes certain concepts or objects (for example, that old factoid about how eskimos have nine different words for snow) - so you can reassig...

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 ...

I recently got a request to expand on the Ubese language I deconstructed previously, and I had so much fun working on this the first time around, I just had to oblige (Thanks Libra!). Okay, so I previously established a phonology and morphology; here they are again with a few changes: Consonants- t, sh, ch, k, n, l, hh Semi-vowels- y Vowels- ee, ay, i, a, u, o Morphology- CICV (I for Inflection) Plus, some syntax and grammar rules: Subject Verb Object, first vowel sound of word denotes inflection (i=I, a=you, o=he/she/it, ay=we, u=they), stress is commonly on second syllable of word - if first syllable is stressed this means something, based on the context (while holding a thermal detonator it means you're getting crazy up in there, so be careful with this!) In the first post I did a lot with just the two-word-phrase that was pretty much all that was used in the clip from Return of the Jedi. Towards the end of the post I started trying to use more than two words in a ...