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 ...

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...