Make A Lang

Generating Vocabulary

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 16:57:00 +0000

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 studying, and some of the words may not be to your taste.

I started out wanting to randomly generate my lexicon, but found LangMaker and word generators like the one linked above to be inadequate, at least at first. I had quite a time figuring out a good word list to use; I started with Ogden's Basic English, which has about 850 words. However, it is a list generated for teaching basic English, not for creating a conlang. Some words in the Basic English list might be "covered" differently in the word list of another language.

But I found another list that I thought was better, mostly because it was much shorter: the Swadesh List. Only about 200 words there!

In the second Language Creation Conference, John Clifford spoke a little about semantic primes, which aren't "words" so much as they are blocks of meaning. Its a different way of thinking, but a little reading here can also help you develop a word list of your own. I found a word list, called the Universal Language Dictionary, that groups words together according to concepts, which may help you if you want to create a derivational morphology or something. The ULD at least partially embraces the semantic prime idea, and can be another good resource for developing/building/copying a word list for lexicon generation.

So, with a short list, you CAN use the first abstract method, or you can randomly generate, and then change words as you determine better sounding ones, and add to the lexicon as you translate phrases. Long lists may be more cumbersome, but can be worth the time and headache if you plan on doing a lot of translating, as you won't have to stop to create a lot of new words each time.

What Kind of Conlanger Are You? 25th Post!

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:52:00 +0000

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 find it fascinating.

Thats it! I must have cumulatively spent at least a handful of days, if not a week or two of my life puzzling over linguistic concepts and agonizing over details of my conlang. And, to wax a bit patriotic after our Independence Day holiday, I think thats the glory of freedom. I don't have to have a reason for conlanging, and thats just cool. Digression over.

The History of Your Conlang

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 16:42:00 +0000

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 have a CVC- structure with an e, a, or o on the end to identify future, present, or past tense. But as I was translating sentences, I liked just using "se, sa, so" for all the tenses of is/be. It took me awhile to remember that I had originally used "sa" for yes. When I did remember, I kind of harumphed and scratched my head for a minute, because I really liked using "sa" for yes, but I also really liked using a short, one-syllable word for the is/be verb. In a flash, I kind of put something together in my head an realized that I didn't need to change anything. "Sa," as a verb, literally meant "it is being." "Yes," in another language, could also mean "it is so" which is pretty close to "it is being." So "sa" would be okay without any changes. This is kind of minor, but it excited me cuz I realized I was "thinking" in my language!

And then, I started thinking, well, this is probably a progression, a shortening, of something from the old days of Pitak. "It is being" is more properly said as "la sa," or maybe "wa sa" for "this is being" (which, in question form, is the same as saying What is being? or, heh, WHASSSUUUP?). So just saying "sa" is basically a shortened form; people came to understand that just saying sa was enough to convey a yes. And so it wasn't hard to jump to "la nesa"being shortened to just "ne!"

Although these insights aren't HUGE, I thought they conveyed a few ways anyone can begin building a history into their conlang.

Tolkien's Alphabets

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Sun, 11 May 2008 05:52:00 +0000

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; look at F and V, S and Z, and Sh and Zh. But it goes even further than this. Some consonants are combinations of sounds, especially ch and j (t and sh make ch and d and zh, the voiced versions of t and sh, make j), and you can see the relation between these letters too. Ch looks like a combination of T and Sh, and J looks like a voiced version of Ch, having an extra stroke. Another thing I like about the alphabet is that the vowels look different from the consonants; they have different angles or combinations of strokes. I don't understand why M and N are not similar, but I don't care that much. The alphabet works as a runic, archaic form of writing. By the way, the sample at the bottom of the picture says "Balin, son of Fundin, Lord of Moria."

A few more notes about how this alphabet relates to language: its written the same as English, written left to right, AND the phonetic values of the letters vary for different languages in Middle Earth, just as English does, to the frustration of many people struggling to learn and speak it! Also, although it is not shown this way in the sample, words are often separated with dots.

Now, moving on to Tengwar! The first thing that I love about Tengwar is that it has different "modes." Just as the phonetic values of Cirth vary for different languages, the same thing happens in Tengwar's different modes. But the biggest difference between the modes is how the vowels are written, and here's the kicker: the vowels are indicated with diacritic marks. Look here:

No, those marks above the letters aren't just to be flashy, those are the vowels! Now the difference between Quenya and Sindarin is where the vowels are written; in Quenya, the vowel coming BEFORE the consonant is marked above the consonant. In Sindarin, the vowel coming AFTER the consonant is marked above the consonant, and here's an example of that:

Here's the alphabet:

First off, let me say MUCH PRETTIER than Cirth, with all the swirls and curves. But again, notice how letters are related to each other phonetically: p, t, and k look very similar, and mb, nd, and ng (the Quenya equivalents of b, d, and g) look just like them with an extra mark showing that they're voiced. M and n look similar this time, and h and y look very different from the rest because they are sounds made in a different way from the others. Notice another interesting difference between Quenya and Sindarin (alphabet shown below):

Sindarin does not have as many of the funky consonant cluster letters that Quenya has; there's actual b, d, and g sounds, for instance.
The letter names are the same, they just have a different "phonetic value."

Take all this in, digest it, and start thinking about your conlang, and how you want it to look on a page, computer screen, carved in wood or stone, or whatever. It can be a good idea to have a proto-language or an archaic form of your language, to give it some history and make it feel more natural, since the language you speak certainly has history! If you're making up a con-culture or con-world, along with your conlang, different people might use different modes of the language, or write the letters differently, or assign different phonetic values to the letters. Maybe some people use diacritics, and another people use new letters to represent vowels. Let your imagination roam and don't be afraid to take inspiration from the great conlangers that have come before you. :)

Vowels, Diphthongs, & Semi-Vowels

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Sun, 11 May 2008 00:28:00 +0000

Today I wanted to talk about vowels. More specifically, how vowel sounds combine. Combining vowel sounds creates diphthongs; thats kind of the definition of a diphthong. But, there is another category, and its used a lot in this language right here, 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), 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 way, the semi-vowel can technically break some of your phonology rules for vowel combination, and make the conlang feel more natural and real.

So the conlang question is, do you want to make special rules about how vowels combine or don't combine in your language? No vowel combinations? Or every syllable must have at least one consonant and vowel? I originally built Pitak to not have any diphthongs or semi-vowels, but then I was looking at Tolkien's Sindarin language and Toki Pona, and realized I'd really like to have at least one semi-vowel in there, so I added w. As far as what languages seem to have which, I'd say that more primitive languages seem to have less combined vowel sounds, and established, evolved languages seem to have more diphthongs or semi-vowels mixed in. And further, think about whether the vowel combinations denote certain cases. Diphthongs or semi-vowels could show that a word is past tense, a command, or plural. Cool stuff.

Some Translations of Pitak

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:54:00 +0000

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 fano, i tok mu lis lu fana la sipuku so
Mi waf i li= my wife and I
tasu muvo= recently (descriptive case) moved (past tense case)
en papu pol= a boy (descriptive case) baby
lafa= were having (have, current tense case)
lu fano= we found/discovered (past tense case)
i tok= and then
mu lis= our home
lu fana= we were finding (present tense case)
la si-= it in/into (prefix)
puku= broken (descriptive case)
so= was (is; past tense)
My wife and I just moved, found out we were having a baby boy, and then found out our house had been broken into!

No lu sikimosonu so ke lu nekewo
No= but
lu= we
si-= in (prefix)
ki-= high up (prefix)
mosonu= emotional (descriptive case)
so= were (past tense case)
ke= that
ne-= no/not, negating prefix
kewo= care (past tense case)
But we were on such an emotional high that we didn't care.

I highly recommend this exercise to any and all conlangers; it can really help you to figure out how your conlang works (or how you think it works), and you can change things or add things in your conlang, once you better understand it.
It can also help you figure out how it might sound, as you sound out sentences. I thought I had a nice phonology at one point with Fauleethik, then I started sounding out sentences and I didn't like it very much at all. Doing this excercise will help you figure things out much more quickly than overthinking the parts of your conlang.
If you haven't put together a lexicon/dictionary of a bunch of words WHO CARES. If you've worked on your phonology or phonotactics, you know what a word should look like, more or less, and you can just make words up until you come up with the "real words" for your fake language. ;) Here's a secret, if you didn't already figure this out from looking at the translated words above: almost every word I wrote is merely the English word changed into sounds that are pronouncable in Pitak and then conjugated appropriately.

Numbers in your Conlang

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 17:53:00 +0000

This topic comes up every once in awhile on the conlang forums. 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 generally 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.

You're going to have to do some dividing. Get out a piece of paper and pencil. Lets start with something simple: let's turn 100 into base 12. Make three columns by drawing four vertical lines. In the right-most column, write 120 at the top. Right underneath that, write 1. In the next column, write 121 at the top, and underneath it, 12. In the next column, write 122 at the top, and underneath it, 144. These three columns represent the "places" of numbers in base 10. 1, 10, 100; in each of these columns we will write how many times the number goes into it, starting at the left-most column. 100 is too small for this column, so we go to the next column. 100 goes into 12 eight times, so write an 8 in this column. Eight times 12 is 96, and in long division we then subtract 96 from 100, leaving a remainder of 4. Aha, 100 in base 12 is 84! 12 in base 12 is 10, and 24 is 20. 2,345 is 1,435. Catching on? (For a four digit number, you have to add a fourth column, 12 with a little 3, and write 1,728 underneath it, for 12x12x12) If you want more examples, comment me.

This brings up another point: at some point, you need to have names for your numbers in your conlang. The fist numbers I made for Fauleethik I really liked, and I generated them by going through the vowels and going through, and then back through the fricatives:
on (0), een(1), fei(2), thai(3), sau(4), shooau(5), ish(6), es(7), ath(8), aiuf(9), and eenton(10). Now that I 've established the phonology of proto-Fauleethik, which is Pitak, I think I'll have to change the numbers. Also, I decided to make the orthography for the numbers slanted opposite from the letters. After making all those letters for your alphabet, coming up with as many numbers as are in in your base system should be easy.

Syntax 101

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 23:25:00 +0000

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 sentence would be, "The room bright was." And its not hard to rearrange the syntax into all six possible combinations and see how the sentence changes. A fine article is here, by Rick Murneau, goes into many of the finer points here, and I highly recommend it.

This sentence is SVO, just like English. If it was SOV, it would be more like:
"Fa meshsak o kulntht to tisiks afshra pefsi sosha."
This pancake from zero to sixty within five seconds is going.

Also, this has a modifier-head format, where the modifiers come before what they are modifying, also, just like English. Lets change the SOV example into a head-modifer format:
"Meshsakfa kulntht to tisiks o pefsi afshra sosha."
Pancake(the) zero to sixty from five seconds within is going.

Now, I don't know about you, but the "is going" part of that last sentence doesn't sound right to me. It sounds like it should say "will go," or "will be going." And here is another issue to think about: tenses and cases. Tenses and cases DROVE ME CRAZY the first 100 times I thought about them, but again, the solution was just to simplify. For this mock-up lang we are playing with, lets create three tenses and three cases: future tense, present tense, past tense, and the tense case (which we just divided into three tenses), the descriptive case (adjectives, adverbs, etc.) and the plural case. We'll show what case or tense a word by adding a vowel sound to the end of a word: future tense= e (ey), present tense=a(au), past tense=o, plural case=i(ee), descriptive case=u(oo). So if we wanted to change sosha from "is going" (present tense) to "will go" (future tense), it would become soshe. What if we pluralized it? Soshi: what would that mean? Goings-on? Walks? Journeys? You decide in the end; whatever makes the most sense for you, and fits into the pattern of your conlang best.

So, our sentence has changed quite a bit from the beginning of the post.
From: "Fa meshsak sosha o kulntht to tisiks afshra pefsi."
To: "Meshsakfa kulntht to tisiks o pefsi afshra soshe."

Take a moment and just play. Look at my previous post called "Phonotactics," create your own SIMPLE phonotactics system, and create a few words and a simple sentence. Then play with your syntax and grammer.

Phonotactics

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 23:48:00 +0000

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, morphology. Lets keep explanations, and this morphology, simple. The morphology should include how consonants, vowels, semi-vowels, diphthongs and clusters can or cannot be ordered within a word. C= p, t, k, f, th, s, sh, m, n, r, l. V= i, e, a, u, o (but pronounced the way I spelled them above). S= ... hmm, we didn't specify any semi-vowels in our phonology did we? Let's say that r is a consonant but ALSO a semi-vowel. S= r. As for diphthongs, in some morphologies, you might be limited as to which vowels can be put next to which others, but to keep things simple and neat, we'll just say any of our vowels can be paired to form a diphthong; D= V1V2 (subscript added to show that a diphthong is not two of the same vowel). Now, what types of clusters do we want? I'm going to say that we are having only ending clusters in this morphology, but we'll make them moderately complex for fun: K=[L][N][F]. The brackets mean there may or may not be one of the indicated phoneme, and L means liquid, N means nasal, F means fricative, and P means plosive. So an ending cluster will have either a liquid, a nasal, a fricative, or combinations of these, but not a plosive.

So how can these phonemes be combined? Again, let's keep it simple: a basic word will be [C][S]V[K][C]. So you can have a word be simply a vowel, like "o" (let's say that o means "from"), or basic like "sosh" (lets say sosh means "go"), all the way up to "kulntht" (and lets say that kulntht means "stop"), where we have an ending cluster with a plosive at the end! Ok, I just think thats outrageous and hard to pronounce, but fun. A few more examples: frith (remember, its pronounced "freeth" and lets says that is means "bird") is a word this morphology could make, but wriths is not. A) because w is not part of the phonology, and B) because an ending cluster cannot be just a fricative (th) and a fricative (s). If we had spelled wriths like the English word, wreaths (you know, those things everyone puts on their doors at Christmas), it would also be unacceptable because, although we technically allowed any vowel to be next to any other vowel to make a diphthong, we didn't include any diphthongs in the morphology we defined above. In order to allow a word like wriths, or wreaths, we could redefine the morphology to include FF clusters, and perhaps redefine the phonology to include w, although we might just forego that and spell it riths instead, OR we could say that some words follow another, separate morphology from the one we already created, and it looks like this: [C]V[K2], and define the second cluster type as being FF. With this second morphology defined, we can work out words like "afs" (means "in") or "meshth" (means "flat"), which we couldn't with only the first morphology.

Lets throw in one more twist before this post is done: prefixes and suffixes. In your morphology you can also make special definitions for how these are constructed, or adapted out of existing words. So lets define that, in this limited conlang, we can have ONLY prefixes (SF= 00), and that there are two morphologies for them: CV-, or you can take a [C]V[K2] word and shave off the last F in the cluster to make it a prefix. Not sure how I would notate that, like I've been trying to make short notation on everything else, but maybe something like this: [C]V[K2]-/[K2]=F1F2/=F1. I dunno. But lets say we want to make the word "pancake" and decide to translate it as "flatcake;" the word for "cake" is sak, so "flat-cake" would be meshsak, because we shave off the th at the end of meshth.

A CV prefix could be something like "po-" (means "more") or "she-" (means "without") so that when the prefix is added to a word, it changes the meaning. Pososh could change the meaning of "go" into a command form, like "Go!" Or it could mean "go quickly." But if pososh meant "go quickly," what would pokulntht mean? Stop quickly? Maybe the prefix could mean both things, and its just defined by the context. This is starting to overlap the arena of grammer at this point, so I'm going to back off for now. You ultimately decide if you like how it flows, how it sounds. If you don't like it, try tweaking the structure some more. Remember, if you're having trouble, keep it simple, at least at first, to get a good handle on how all these have an effect on each other. Oh, and just for kicks, here's a sentence using most of the words we defined, even though we haven't talked about syntax or grammer:
"Fa meshsak sosha o kulntht to tisiks afshra pefsi."

"This pancake is going from stop to sixty within five seconds." And I'll end on this note, because I don't think this post can get much better than this today!

Simplicity In My Conlang

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 00:09:00 +0000

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 syllables, meaning CVCV (consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel) and not CVCCVC. Or, an even better example might be to contrast the Huttese phrase above with something, say, in English: "I walked down the road to the Seven Eleven." A lot of closed syllables there. Let's change them to open syllables and see how it sounds; I'll just change the morphology around a bit: "I walko downu roada to SevenElevena." A little better. Then I tried it with a much smaller phonology, shifting the now-extinct phonemes into nearby still-existing phonemes: "Ee waulko taunoo rota to Seifein Eileifeinau." Ooo... Now THAT sounded cool to me.

And that's basically how I developed the basic rules for Pitak, the proto-language to Fauleethik. A very SMALL AND SIMPLE phonology and morphology. There are (so far) only five cases: future, present, and past tense, plural, and "descriptive" case, good for adjectives and adverbs. Each means a different vowel sound tacked onto the end of the syllable. So, the truth is, the syllables by themselves are generally CVC, or CVCVC, or sometimes CVCCVC, in the case of some compounded words, which means they are closed, BUT with the addition of the case markers, it becomes a very open syllable language. Only singular nouns have no vowel at the end.

I felt like I had finally, truly wrapped my head around a lot of the linguistic principles at this point. And I did it by getting REALLY simple; by stripping out a lot of stuff I kind of wanted in there to get something that was simple, but worked. I think a lot of conlangers should try this and make something functional, then start building on it. Instead of 30 phonemes, use half that, to start with at least, then a basic but functional morphology, then add in simple syntax, grammer, develop a basic lexicon, and then start adding in more stuff. Work on the different layers of the language, seeing how each one influences the next, and just keep building.

Make A Lang Card Game - Part Two!

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 01:21:00 +0000

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 around and learning linguistic principles.

In addition to all this, after I'm done making all the cards, I want to make a flash game which you can play, and make it even easier to play with language, being able to click and drag cards around and such. Also, I want to make it so that you can develop a conlang in the game, and have it spit out a long code which you can copy and paste. Then you could post about your language online, include the code, and others would be able to paste the code into their flash game and see your conlang pop up on the screen! I think could work much more quickly than having to write out your entire phonology, morphology, syntax, grammer, etc. Especially if the code is in a file that can include a lexicon and notes on the language. It could make Conlang Relays a smoother process and more fun! But thats probably a couple years away still.

Please comment if you have any helpful ideas or if you think this can't be done. I'm interested to hear your opinion either way!

Phonoaesthetic Considerations

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 18:23:00 +0000

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 that will make it unique? Or what are the unique characteristics of the language you want to emulate? On this handout, John Quijada remarks on how Quenya (Tolkien's elvish language) sound nothing like Polynesian or African Bantu languages, despite having similar phonemic inventories. Interesting, huh?

There are a lot of options on this sheet that could go over your head if you look at them all at once. I suggest a strategy or exercise (whichever you prefer): consider each item individually, write out your selection on a page somewhere, then look at your answers and try to think out how this language might look or sound. Generate some words and put together a few sentences. Then go through it again with a new page and change a few things. See how it changes and compares to the last page. Try this a few times and get a feel for how the pieces of language fit together and change the overall picture of a language.

A Common Conlanging Pitfall

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 22:30:00 +0000

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 start looking through that cupboard at all the other ingredients in there. And that pantry over there. And all through the freezer, wondering just how many different meats and fish they have in there. BUT, what if you were in a small kitchen? What if you only had ten ingredients, but you only want to use five, so that you have something left over for another meal tomorrow? You work more quickly, and you get more creative. The end result may not be a masterpiece, but that doesn't mean that its worthless. Conlangs are, by their nature, works that are continually updated, tweaked, and polished.

Choose fewer building blocks and be more creative with them. Once you've done a conlang or two, even if you get thrown into the huge kitchen, you will know how to make a few things and you can make them again, and start experimenting with other ingredients, or more ingredients.

Make A Lang Card Game - Part One

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 18:02:00 +0000

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 complex piece of work, and the amount and depth of data involved can be extensive. Even a large numbers of cards would probably fall short of being able to COMPLETELY describe and explain a deep and full conlang. But, the flavor/charisma/general characteristics should be able to be expressed, IMHO. This is the premise I started with.

As for the game, here's the basic rules: at the beginning of each game, players are given a sentence (or maybe more than one, for a longer or harder game) to translate. Each turn, each player draws and plays some cards, makes a word from the current pool of phonemes, the goal being to come up with enough words and rules to be able to translate one's sentence; the first one who translates their sentence wins!

Cards played are adding phonemes, restricting the number or class of phonemes, merging phonemes, morphemes, coining inflections, restricting meanings or broadening meanings of words, and it goes on and on. There are cards that restrict your opponant's action on his next turn. Here's a sample of some phoneme cards so far. I'm not done but hope to have some time during the holiday season to finish all these cards up!

2nd Language Creation Conference Part Two

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 21:10:00 +0000

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 over your conlang, and how one might build-in some restrictions on a conlang so as to keep your control.

Sylvia Sotomayor spoke next about her conlang, Kelen, and her experiment with building a conlang that has no verbs! Sylvia is another linguist who studied at Berkeley and, if I remember right, her conlang was also a project for one of her classes. Pay attention, if you're still in school and reading this! Here's a link to the handout for her talk, and of course you can go here for the Powerpoint and audio.

Right before lunch we heard James Gang talk about Verbotomy, which wasn't so much conlanging, as inventing words and playing with language a bit. This was a lot of fun! And it does help you think about language in new ways, which is what conlanging does most of the time, too. As I am writing this I just added a Verbotomy widget to my blog and you can go to Verbotomy.com to see some more of this fun game.

After lunch on Sunday, our last talk of the day was Clint Hutchison, who spoke to us about, of all things, shorthand, and "Universal Semantic Markers." It was a great talk for thinking about orthography and having one character represent a connection or concept. For more on this, go to the LCC website, media page.

There was a panel next, on the conlang "relay" which had actually taken place prior to the LCC, in which conlangers basically played a game of "Telephone." This is a game, for anyone who has not heard of it, where everyone sits in a circle, and the first person whispers a phrase to the person to his left, and that person whispers it to the next person and so on until it comes back to the first person. Inevitably, someone mishears the whisper, and the phrase begins to change. The first person then reveals what the original phrase was, and what the final phrase was, and everyone has a good laugh. Well, in this case, the original phrase was translated into a conlang, and enough rules and vocabulary of the conlang are given/explained so that the person can translate it, and then they translate the phrase or story into their conlang and the process repeats. In the panel we went through the several conlangs involved in the relay, and how the story of "The Talking Rock" got changed subtly in each step. Each participant had to read the story in their conlang, as they translated it. It was informative, enlightening, and really funny. I hope to participate in next year's relay!

There was another workshop on vocabulary and another panel after this, about incorporating conlangs into your life, and spreading the good conlang word, which I hope I'm doing a bit of with this blog, but I had to leave. I did check them out later at the LCC website, though.

The second LCC was,IMO, even better than the first. Of course, it was easier to pack in more content and speakers when you have two days instead of one, but I really loved the mix of technical talks, fun activities (workshops, Glossotechnia, Verbotomy, the relay panel) and talks on and about individual conlangs.

One of the things I realized about my own conlang, after thinking about John Clifford's talk, was that I might want to REALLY simplify my proto-language. The other thing I did was I started making my own card game, so that I could wrap my head around linguistic principles better, and better see how a change in one part affects the rest. Both these ideas yielded rich results! I'll be posting more about this card game, Make A Lang, and the proto-language to Fauleethik I developed, very soon. Stay tuned!

2nd Language Creation Conference Part 1

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Sat, 24 Nov 2007 16:35:00 +0000

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" fit the picture in my head so much better.

I'll summarize a bit of what I got out of each talk during the LCC2. First of all, I was thrilled that David Salo was going to be giving the key note address; Mr. Salo was the linguist that worked on the Lord of the Ring movies, and helped them to come up with lines in Elvish and Dwarvish. You can go to the LCC website to hear his entire talk. I knew it would be enlightening to hear a linguist talk to us about creating historical depth to our conlangs. He made a few illuminating points: using irregularities can make a conlang more beautiful and feel more realistic, and using bits of other languages is something Tolkien did, and something we can do to help us accomplish things in our conlangs (aha, remember my post on Knowing A Second Language?).

The next talk was about "phono-aesthetics." John Quijada is the MAN. I loved his talk the previous year, and I loved his talk this year. He really knows how to make linguistics fun and accessible, and he really knows his stuff. Last year he showed me his Ithkuil binder, his first conlang which he designed for maximum efficiency (meaning maximum meaning from minimum syylables) and it was a freakin' tome, and probably weighted at least five pounds. He's working on a new conlang now, related to Ithkuil but easier to pronounce, if I remember right, called Ilaksh. But to comment on his talk: he talked about the differences between languages, how they sound and feel. The most obvious example of this would be that Elvish sounds "pretty" and orcish sounds "ugly." French sounds very soft, Bulgarian sounds harsh, Italian sounds very vowely. He talked about the "personalities" of languages and how we can study other languages and give our conlangs personality by adopting pieces of other languages, or thinking up new ways of creating personalities. Once again, you can go to the LLC website and hear his entire talk. He also gave us a handout which was very good. I'll scan this and post a link to it next week.

Lila Sadkin was next with a report on a conlang she developed as a thesis project, called Tenata. This conlang does not use tenses or cases! Her talk was another delving into the mechanics of what makes language work, and how it could work differently. The end result was very verbose, lots of syllables, but the structure is fascinating. And I'll just plug her website, which is right here.

Next, was one of my FAVORITES. Jim Henry spoke about Glossotechnia, a language creation card game. This REALLY got me excited and catapulted my own creativity. I won't go into all the details and rules here, but if this concept excites you, you can read more on the LCC website, and at Jim Henry's page, here. Also, Jim's game inspired me to make one of my own, which I will be posting more about later!

After lunch, David Peterson spoke about the evolution of his conlang, Sidaan. Interesting, since I'm kind of doing the same thing with this blog. David has developed LOTS of conlangs over the years, but he admitted none of them were very deep. He also admitted having commitment issues (heh). This talk was much more technical, and he spoke about how Sidaan evolved as he wondered if a language could change naturally from a SOV (Subject Object Verb) syntax order, to a VSO syntax order. Fantastic stuff.

Next was Donald Boozer, talking about a conlang he is developing that has a very unique feature: there is NO voicing at all! No vowels, no voiced plosives, no b, v, d, g, etc. A lot of unvoiced fricatives and use of hand gestures. It is called Drushek and it was one of the first conlangs reviewed at an LCC that was supposed to be spoken by beings that are not human. The Dritok speak this language and they are kind of like kangaroos with more human-like mouths. Check out more on this conlang at the LCC website or Boozer's site. He also compiled a great handout called "The Conlanger's Bookshelf" which occupies pages 20 through 31 in the LCC2 program! It's another EXCELLENT resource.

Don Boozer's talk was the last of the day, and we were going a bit over schedule. There was still a workshop and a panel to be done. My wife had come with me on this first day and she was beginning to get a bit tired, so a little ways into the workshop I begged off and went home, but I got onto a team with David Salo and Jim Henry and we played around with ideas about vocabulary and sentence structure and that really tickled me.

There were a lot of linguist folk at the LCC, people who had studied and were in the field of linguistics, but there were also a lot of people like me, casual conlangers who just enjoy language and want to learn more about how it works. More on the 2nd day of the 2nd LCC in my next post (yeah, the second one lasted two days!), and the advancements I made in my conlang because of it.

Orthography Part 3 - The Conclusion

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 19:36:00 +0000

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 marks the plosive at the front of the mouth, P, and the bottom stroke marks the plosive at the back of the mouth, K. A line down the middle of each of these marks them as voiced, to get B, D, G. The fricatives are in the middle and all have a stroke on the left side. I made F & Th related, as an extra stroke differentiates Th from F, and the same with S & Sh. The nasals and liquids are different, and especially for R I wanted something that was unique, because I had imagined some sort of "half-consonant, half-vowel" status for R, so I made a letter that has the root shapes of the consonant and vowel combined. I gave L a similar type of character. The five letters in the last column were supposed to be sounds that came into the language later, and thus have a subtlely different look. Z and J carry on the tradition of putting a line through the middle of the character to show that it is voiced; in fact Z is merely a voiced S character. Ch and J are supposed to look like combined versions of letters; T + Sh=Ch, D + Zh=J.

So my design principles were relatively satisfied. I did not create a formal chart of strokes as I had previously imagined from reading this page about the D'Ni language from the Myst games, but the characters reflected at least some data about where they were pronounced in the mouth. I was happy with this alphabet, and I knew I needed to spend more time actually developing the grammer, cases and such. I didn't know much about such things. I've never taken a linguistics course, so I started reading a lot of pages on Wikipedia, about cases, tenses, grammer, and such, and re-reading the Language Construction Kits, but I couldn't seem to put it all together. Until the Second Language Creation Conference...

On another note, I made a font for this alphabet using Font Creator, made by High-Logic. This is a fantastic program for making fonts! Its expensive, but if all you want to do is make a conlang font, you can download it and use it for a month for free, which should be all the time you need to make a font or two.

Orthography Part 2 - Root Shapes

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Sun, 18 Nov 2007 16:16:00 +0000

So once I had my design principles, and I had decided what alphabets I wanted to inspire me, 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't necessarily want a beautiful alphabet, but I wanted something that I liked, that I could write easily, and that had a distinct look.

The breakthrough for me was when I decided that I needed some sort of "root shape" or shapes for the letters. For example, in English, a round circle could be the root shape for O of course, but also for G, C, Q, D, and U. Lower case letters especially share root shapes: b, d, g, o, p, and q; m, n, u, v, w. I'm not sure I'm conveying this concept clearly enough, so I'll put another pic on Flickr.com to show it.

I chose a root shape from the Tibetan alphabet. I flipped it around backward and made it narrower, and decided to take off different sides to get different characters, and add little strokes to make more characters. Then I flipped it upside down to get more characters, and decided to make all those upside down characters vowels, to clearly differentiate between consonant and vowel characters. I didn't make any character too complex, or make characters with strokes too close together, so it could be easy to write and not confuse different characters for each other. At this point I was pleased with what I was getting, and I realized something: when I tried something that seemed to work, my enthusiasm for working on the conlang surged, and my progress jumped to lightspeed.

I'll write one more Orthography post, detailing how I finally assigned sounds to the characters of the conlang.

Orthography - Making Your Own Alphabet

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 14:53:00 +0000

Come to think of it, I think 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 I called the Rune Alphabet, 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 essentially a conlang Cyan/Richard Watson developed for their games and books.

Somethings to consider as you start developing your alphabet: 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 all consonants and vowels would be represented by diacritic marks (Hebrew & Arabic are abjad scripts). A little research on Omniglot will get you acquainted with these concepts, and show you how these alphabet systems work and look.

Two main principles guided me as I began developing my alphabet: as I had been studying phonology, I realized that Tolkien designed and arranged the Cirth runes so that sounds that came from different regions of the mouth looked different, and sounds that came from a certain place in the mouth resembled each other. Meaning, the P and B are similar, B just has an extra stroke, which seems natural because B is P but voiced. And P and M are similar, because they are both bilabial consonants. Personally, I just thought there was something cool about that. The other principle I wanted to integrate into my alphabet was something I found while researching D'Ni: the letters seemed to be made up of simple strokes, combined in different ways. And the D'Ni numbers, which look so different from the letters, also appeared to be rooted in the same simple strokes.

So, I wanted to create an alphabet that would correspond in some way to the IPA chart, where simple strokes could be substituted for 'bilabial,' 'dental,' 'velar,' etc. and another set of strokes for 'plosive,' 'nasal,' 'fricative,' etc. so that if you knew what strokes meant what, you could tell how a letter should sound, just by looking at it.

After learning about aUi, I toyed with the idea of giving runic meaning to each letter, so that just by putting a certain vowel or consonant in a word, you knew it had something to do with sound, or motion, or movement. I still toy with this idea, but for now, I think it restricts me on word creation more than I would like. But I still find the ideas of multiple layers of meaning built into the language to be delicious... Mmm... :)

So I had pretty clear design principles. But what sort of look did I want for the letters? I wanted something that could first be drawn with sticks in the dirt, that looked runic enough to be carved into wood and stone, but which had the potential to later become a beautiful flowing script like D'Ni. I spent a lot of time on Omniglot.com, studying all sorts of alphabets there. I found myself looking at Tibetan over and over. I liked the shapes and curves in the letters, but not the complexity. I didn't want letters that had so many strokes it took a long time to write anything. The other alphabet I started looking at a lot was Georgian. It was probably modelled after the Greek alphabet (as is our English alphabet), but the Asomtavruli version looked different in a way I liked. Thats really the only way to describe it.

Despite knowing the design principles I wanted, and having a resource like Omniglot.com at my fingertips, it was a long time before I discovered the letter shapes I would ultimately use for my conlang.

Knowing a Second Language

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 20:59:00 +0000

If you don't know a second language, please don't learn one just for the sake of creating your own language, unless you are a genius like that guy Jared in The Pretender. But do learn one to enrich your mind, broaden your understanding of another culture, and to stave off dementia.

I happen to speak pretty fluent Bulgarian and it has definitely helped me with Conlanging in a few ways. 'Pretty fluent' because i lived there for a couple years and spoke it well, but haven't had many opportunities since I've been back to speak it. Can't remember all the vocabulary words so well anymore. But being able to think in another language and knowing the grammer can free up your thinking as to what is possible for your conlang.

It could be argued that knowing a language or two might also limit your vision as to what you will and won't attempt, but my experience has taught me that this is NOT a bad thing. When I was reading through conlang websites, I was bombarded with possibilities. At some point I really had to choose what I wanted and did not want and just start in a direction and experiment. There is a trend I see a lot when I look through forums, of people wanting to create languages that are not similar to English, or Romantic languages (Spanish, Italian, French, etc), to not look like these languages or sound like them. If you want to create something unlike these languages, using another language can help.

Personally, I just wanted something I liked the sound of. Bulgarian had some consonant clusters I didn't particularly enjoy, and it wasn't frequently a 'pretty language.' "Obeechum tei" just doesn't have the sonorous ring that "Je t'aime" does. But that didn't mean I just threw everything out. I liked some of the diphthongs in Bulgarian, the word orderings... And especially the simplicity. Anyhow, studying a language can provide rich material for your conlang.

Experimentation and the 1st LCC

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 19:08:00 +0000

Alrighty, I pulled out my conlang binder and looked up the random Language Kits I found and printed up over the years. Unfortunately, the only one that I have a link for is the Zompist Language Construction Kit, but it is one of the best. I might scan the others and post a PDF file or something later.

Initially, none of these did me much good, because I didn't really know how to experiment with language fully. I mostly played with word generators, plugging in slightly different sets of phonemes, giving different morpheme rules, to see what I got. You can do this yourself very quickly at the Fantasist link in the corner up there. But because I didn't push forward I really limited my own progress. All I was doing was looking at words. Once I had a phonology and morphology, I should have tried grammer, developing cases and so on. I was stuck!

BUT, something got me unstuck and catapulted me ahead in ways I wouldn't even guess. One time while I was visiting Langmaker.com, I saw an announcement for the first Language Creation Conference. It was in Berkeley which isn't far from Danville, where I was living at the time, and I decided I had to check it out. What a lightning bolt to the brain! I'm not a linguist, and my understanding of most linguistic concepts is remedial, but even so I was opened up to all kinds of new concepts and I could understand other things so much more clearly. Speakers talked about other conlangs, methods for developing conlangs, concepts of linguistics, and more. aUi was an interesting conlang to learn about, and I actually fooled around with the concept of vowels creating certain meanings for words, because I liked the Futhark runes, and if the runes had a meaning individually, or with other runes, why not have that meaning carry over into words? But I hung that idea up for now. I heard about Toki Pona for the first time as well. I will NEVER forget John Quijada getting up and speaking some Ithkuil for us, which had some of the strangest sounds I've ever heard. It sounded like those bug people in Episode Two of Star Wars (Geonosians, I think)! Most of the people there were so much more advanced and more sophisticated in their understanding and developing of conlangs than I was, but I kept my mind open and learned a lot.

The Language Creation Conference website has a WEALTH of information for the beginning and advanced conlanger. Dig through the site and listen to the talks. If you are serious about conlanging, it is one of the best things you can do to catapult your progress into the stratosphere.

Morphology 101 & Language Construction Kits

noreply@blogger.com (Danger is my middle name) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 17:11:00 +0000

So Phonology is what sounds are included or allowed in a language. For example, larple could be an English word, but zhangkonn doesn't look like an English word by a long shot (Maybe more of a Chinese/German hybrid word?). Morphology is also related to this, because the morphology of your language dictates how the sounds can be put together. CVC, consonant-vowel-consonant, could be one way to make a simple word. This would be a "closed syllable," meaning there is a consonant on each end of the vowel sound. In the morphology of your language, do you want to allow consonant clusters? (CC) St, sht, lmthk? Or maybe you want to allow clusters at the end of words or syllables, but never at the beginning? Will your morphology allow for vowel sounds to be put together? (CVVC) Lion, poet, joey? Or do you want lots of open syllables? Once you step into morphology there is a LOT to consider.

The thing that made it simple for me again though was simply reflecting on what I wanted my language to sound like. For a long time, I wasn't sure. But I'd just force myself to write out a sentence in my conlang-to-be. Or as I'd watch movies, I'd pick out phrases or parts of phrases that sounded like what I wanted.

At this point I had picked a name for my language, which was Peetik. I had looked into Orthography (which will be delved into much more in another post) and found Omniglot.com, which is a great resource, and read that the Cirth runes were based on actual Norse runes which are called Elder Futhark. The name Futhark comes from the first six letters of their alphabet. Like "alphabet" comes from "alpha-betos," the first two letters of the greek alphabet. I wanted to have my language named the same way.

By this time I had also found a few Conlanging kits on the Internet. These made me very excited - Hey, there were actually other people out there doing the same thing I was trying to do! One of my favorites was the Zompist Language Construction Kit, and I'll have to track down the links for the others I worked off of. In the beginning, they didn't do me very much good, and I'll explain why in upcoming posts.