Make A Lang

Conlang Relay & New Insights on Conlanging

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 16:43:00 +0000

The Third Language Creation Conference is THIS WEEKEND! If you aren't going, it will be simulcast on the web at the previous link. I'll be there, when I'm not working.

The podcast is my translation of the conlang relay text into Pitak (pee-tawk) from Kapakwonak.

Translation: Li pisu na mul kiso funefemu - I close to sea seated in-a-time
En molfos kotiko i a mol fimilu pumo - A wave up-broke and the water over-me swept
Li tepo molfous netokwa i ama nami tilwato - I tried the-wave to-not-fight and this to-me happied
Li meno onos molfousi pumisu puma - I dreamt about the waves away-me sweeping
Wo la tiko, li komanu kuso - When it broke, I continuously-it felt
A molfos komanu moso sapwa i pumisu teko - The wave continuously was-able to-go and away-me took

First of all, participating in the relay was a great experience for a bunch of reasons, and I highly recommend participating in one on the ZBB or other conlanging forums! One reason was that it forced me to really get into someone else's mentality about language and their conlang, and break outside of my own. Another reason was that it also forced me to think about my conlang from someone else's point of view, as I had to type up enough of an explanation for them to be able to translate it.

Kapakwonak is a fusional language and difficult to parse through; it was a challange to figure out how each infix added meaning to a sentence or word. There were six sentences in the text, and each one seemed to get a little harder; I think because the message was getting more garbled as we got into it. The first sentence had the peculiar challenge of figuring out that 'I moved downwards upon my legs' meant 'I sat down.'

Pitak is meant to be a simple, primitive language; the biggest challenge with translating it was simplifying what was being said. I did not translate 'I moved downwards upon my legs' literally; and more's the pity - it would have been hilarious to see how this got interpreted by the conlanger after me in the relay! But it wouldn't be said in this way in Pitak - unless you were describing a dance move, perhaps. However, there are other confusing things about Pitak - most words can be nouns or verbs, depending on how they are inflected; so to sit, would be translated more like 'to seat,' or 'to be seated,' because 'kis' means 'seat,' not sit.

I realized something as I came out of this. I've written about simplicity in conlanging, but I think there is an inverse relationship between simplicity and comprehension/transferability of meaning. I think that the simpler a language is, the easier it is to misconstrue meaning and what is trying to be said. I still believe that simplicity is the way to start; that if you don't understand all the underlying linguistic principles you should keep breaking it down until you get to a level you do understand, and I believe that too much complexity can make your own conlang impossible to conjugate/speak/write. But I no longer believe that complexity is the enemy. And I still believe there is a lot more I have to learn about linguistics.

More on the 3rd Language Creation Conference soon.

Sound Changes - PLUS First Podcast!

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 02:20:00 +0000

Sound changes are when an established sound in a language shifts into another sound or sounds. This is, in my opinion, a fun part of conlanging, and a great way to lend some pseudo-reality or aging into your conlang. However, as my mantra has always been to SIMPLIFY, I need to say up front that this is also a great way to make your conlang much more complicated, so experiment and play with this but use with caution.

No language is ever truly static, but is constantly changing and shifting as new cultural influences rise, new celebrities make new things cool (or uncool), and create new vocabulary or import words from other languages, possibly bringing new sounds into the language. In this article by Jeff Henning he mentions sound changes and shows a table of common sound changes (look for a 10 X 9 table). Sound changes can be something that happen over time in a language, or in a region (New England vs. Southern vs. California dude accents) and/or something grammatical. I wanted to show some examples of these without getting into too much detail, and maybe you'll find something you want to use in your conlang.

Think of the word 'knight,' as in 'medieval knight.' Doesn't it sound like the word should be spelled n-i-t-e? There's been some major sound changes and lenitions here since Middle English. As you move from your proto-lang to your conlang, you might consider integrating things like this. For example, creating a rule that all mid-clusters in all words retain all letters but only the last letter of the cluster is pronounced. 'Halketht' would thus still be spelled h-a-l-k-e-th-t, but pronounced 'haketht.' Switching the clusters, 'hathtelk' would become 'hatelk.'

In Bulgarian, any voiced consonants at the end of a word become unvoiced, although they are still written as a voiced consonant; a mark would be spelled b-e-l-e-g (I don't know how to write Cyrillic characters in the middle here), but would be said 'belek.'

Ok, so far everything has been shifts in consonants. What about shifts in vowels? Consider the difference between the British and Scottish accents. Okay, there are quite a lot of different British accents, but listen to clips of Braveheart and you can hear some right proper Scottish accents. Both Scottish and British accents can/will trill the r, but the biggest difference between them are the vowel sounds. Most short i sounds become 'eh's. Most long i sounds become 'aw's. "I'll do it" becomes "Aw'll doo et."

Americans don't round things out and exercise our lips and tongues as much as the Brits do and our language sounds quite different. Say 'me' and draw the corners of your mouth back, like when you smile. Now say it again but purse your lips as if you were saying 'oooh.' Might be the same vowel, but a very different sound, right? You could build something into your proto-lang/conlang progression that over time, people got lazy with the vowel rounding and vowels became unrounded and 'brighter' (I'm borrowing a singing term - brighter means the sound is more in the mouth and not back in the throat).

Another thought on vowel changes: long vowels vs. short vowels. I use this in my conlang - Pitak has only long vowels, but Fauleethik has both long and short vowels. But there is a dialect that converts all sounds to short vowels, so Fauleethik is actually said like Falitik (listen to the podacast to hear how I pronounce this). But what are long and short vowel sounds anyway? Maybe your language will use a different classification, like... 'initial' vowels and 'ultimate' vowels. Whatever classification you use, you could have vowel sounds shift and migrate over time or for different accents.

So, in summary - sound changes can happen in many ways for many reasons, and we just touched on a few. Changes in the sounds of a word while the spelling remains the same, grammatical changes making a sound different from the spelled sound, accent changes, and vowel changes.

You might have noticed I'm trying to spiff up the blog a little! Let me know what you think. But only if you have good things to say. ;)

Free Font Creation

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 22:52:00 +0000

I want to share some new resources I just found out about. This is for everyone that wants their own font for their conlangs, but don't want to spend the money for font software.

Go to www.yourfonts.com NOW, and follow the easy steps. You can have your own conlang font in MINUTES for FREE. It doesn't get any easier or cheaper than this, folks.

This is designed for you to make a font out of your own handwriting in English, but there's no reason it can't work for conlanging purposes!

If you don't want a hand-written font, the other resource I found is called FontStruct and you can check it out at Fontstruct.com. Free!

Deconstructing Ubese - a Star Wars conlang extrapolation

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 07:23:00 +0000

And now for something completely different.

I don't know about you, but I was always intrigued by the language Boushh/Leia spoke in Return of the Jedi. There were only a few examples of it in the film:
"Yatay, yatay, yotoh," supposedly meant "I have come for the bounty on this wookie."
"Yotoh, yotoh" = "$50,000, no less."
"Ey, yotoh" = C-3PO paraphrases this as "Because he's holding a thermal detenator!"
"Yatoh, cha" = C-3PO paraphrases this as "He agrees."
There is something else Boushh/Leia says after the business with Jabba is concluded but I can't really make it out. But the 'yatay yotoh' stuff is what fascinates me.

After a bit of searching I discovered that it was called Ubese. After all this research into linguistics and blogging about conlangs, I thought it would be fun to explore an unknown language, and see if I can deconstruct it, and extrapolate on it. Of course, this would have to be a very simple language; but I've posted a few times about how important I think simplicity is.

Ubese seems to be the ideal choice to examine and extrapolate on. How would you convey meaning with such seemingly limited and simple vocabulary? Such simplicity would imply, to me, that this is a very context-based language; that words mean many different things according to their context. If this is the case, repeating a word, or reduplication, alters, shifts, deepens, etc. the meaning. If this is the case, what could the sentences mean, if translated to English?

"Yatay, yatay, yotoh," supposedly meant "I have come for the bounty on this wookie." I'm guessing the literal meaning would be something closer to... "I come, bounty." In other words, there is very little literal meaning. In every sentence Boushh is talking about the bounty, and in every sentence 'yotoh' is said, so I don't think its a stretch to assume that yotoh is the word bounty, or probably, given the minimalistic nature of the language, it means just reward or money. By repeating 'yatay,' which must refer to his coming, I think this deepens the importance of his coming; either because he's coming for money, or he's come from a great distance. Being such a minimal language, no connecting words are used - you have to infer what is meant by saying yotoh/bounty. But since he's got a wookie on a leash, its not too hard to guess what bounty he is talking about.

"Yotoh, yotoh" = "$50,000, no less." This is said after Jabba offers $25,000. It makes me wonder if by repeating 'yotoh' it doubles the amount, or just means 'more!'? Here's another question: can it mean EITHER, depending on HOW you say the yotohs? For example, you might say 'yo-TOH, yo-TOH,' with the stress on the latter syllable, to change the meaning from 'bounty, bounty' to 'twice the bounty.' Or, you might say 'yo-TOH, YO-toh' to change the meaning to 'half the bounty' or even, 'the bounty has been cut in half.' But for now, lets decide that it means to double the amount.

"Ey, yotoh" = "Because he's holding a thermal detonator!" This is definitely paraphrased. But what would the literal meaning be here? The word for bounty/reward is repeated, preceded by a vowel sound. AND the really cool thing is, if you listen carefully, THIS time when he says yotoh, he stresses the FIRST syllable. How might this change the meaning? Whatever it is, its something you say when you pull out a thermal detonator. I think the 'ey' is basically a 'hey' like, "Hey look!" There's probably a technical term for this, like 'attentional exclamatory.' And I think the different stress could simply be Boushh's way of connoting that he's about to get really crazy - the same way we change the intonation or stress of a normal phrase to make it obvious we are either being funny or sarcastic. I thought about assigning this change of stress some sort of inflectional meaning, but in a language so minimalistic, it seemed more fun to make this a way for speakers to show some emotion.

"Yatoh, cha" = Boushh agrees to $35,000, and C-3PO paraphrases this as "He agrees." The yatoh is troubling, because if it was another yotoh, along with the one syllable word, it wouldn't be hard to assume that the 'cha' is some sort of affirmative word or even a suffix. But, its yatoh, NOT yotoh; so what could it mean? Without a bigger corpus to study, I'm going to assume that it is an inflection. This sentence agrees to Jabba's compromise, so I'm going to say that the 'a' changes the meaning to be 'you/your.' So by saying 'yatoh, cha,' Leia is saying 'your bounty, ok/yes."

But this raises another question: what about the other words? The meaning of 'yatay' would now be extended to mean 'I come to you.' 'Yotoh' could now be extended to mean either 'my bounty/reward' or 'his bounty' referring to Chewbacca; I'm going to go with 'his bounty.'

Phonology - Known consonants: t, ch Known semi-vowels: y Known vowels: a, ay, o
That's not going to be enough. The phonoaesthetic of this language seems, to me, to be one that wouldn't use lips much, so I'm not going to use p or b.

Yes, I know Boushh's name has a B in it, and he was supposed to be an Ubese bounty hunter, so, given that the name of the people and this Ubese character HAS A B IN IT, UBESE SHOULD HAVE A B IN IT. However, I am ignoring this. Let's face it - Lucas wasn't thinking about linguistics when he created the names, and at best he just approved whatever audio Ben Burtt created for the brief exchange. I'm just using the material that is directly apparent from ROTJ, and, to my ears, a b sound just doesn't fit in with the phonoaesthetic of this language. In fact, I want to stay away from voiced consonants altogether. This also means no front rounded vowels that might require a lot of lip action to make. So here's the phonology I came up with:
t, sh, ch, k, n, l, hh (an h sound further back in the throat), y, ee, ay, i, a, u, o (the six vowels compare with these six words: beet, bait, bit, bat, butt, boat). I kept trying to imagine other words and sounds coming out of Boushh's helmet in that synthesized, amplified, hoarse voice. I realized something that made me think I may have gotten it right: I was keeping my tongue inside my teeth and lips. One more thing; I didn't think there would be any diphthongs. The language seems like its not supposed to require much effort to pronounce or enunciate.

Morphology - We already have a basic word demonstration in our examples, so lets stay with it. One word is basically a phrase, the meaning of which can be deepened, shifted, extended, etc. if the word is reduplicated, or different stresses are used. Words will consist of open-syllables (CVCV, or just CV). I went to Fantasist.net to try out the phonology and see what kind of words I got from one of the word generators. I'll post the entire word list it gave me here, so you can see the results: tiya, keeto, sheeli, kayyo, teechu, hhaylo, kashu, chuta, litay, naychu, sheenay, shosha, chayshay, tayyu, yaykay, chochu, sheehho, lanee, naylee, kayto, sheekay, kuti, hhahha, tayyi, luna, shushay, yohha, yakee, luhho, taynu, hheena, lalee, naku, kika, nuyee, yukay, kaysha, lochu, yoko, shayay, shuyo, yisha, tihhi, shocha, cheeni, koshay, kuhha, luno, yohho, tichay.

Remember, as you read these, that you have to use the correct vowels; some of the words look like they could be pronounced a certain way in English, i.e. kayyo looks like it could be pronounced kaiyo, with an i sound as in 'hi,' but that sound is not in the phonology - its kayyo and the ay sounds like bait or bray. Not all of them sound exactly right to me, but looking through them I could easily come up with phrases that "sounded right" to me, as though Boushh might have spoken them as well; "yakee, yakee, teechu," or "shocha kayyo tayyu." Ah, but I forgot - the 'cha.' Okay, so now we can have sentences like"keeto shuyo tee."

Let's nail down the possessive/relationship inflection rule I started to create when I was wondering about 'yotoh' vs. 'yatoh.' The first vowel sound of a word will Ok, so I = i, you = a, it/he/she = o, we = ay, they = u.
yitoh = my reward, yatoh = your reward, yotoh = his reward, yaytoh = our reward,
yutoh = their reward

Lastly, lets talk about grammar and syntax. Given the simplicity of the language, it doesn't initially look as though it is fully conveying Subject Verb Object, but it is. Through the morphology rules, subject is conveyed in the first word of the phrase, which is also the verb. And the next word is the object. Whichever comes first is the verb, and the second is the object. So, by this rule, if you switched the phrase 'yatay yotoh,' to 'yotoh yatay,' the meaning would then become something like 'He rewards your coming;' or lets use 'yitoh yatay.' 'I reward your coming,' makes a little more sense. If you said 'yitoh yitoh yatay' the meaning would be 'I truly/deeply/doubly reward your coming.'

But let's not leave out that little nugget 'cha' (as in 'yatoh, cha'). I think that in a language so minimalistic, there would have to be some helper words to convey meanings that the standard rules of grammar do not allow. I think the smaller one-syllable words can help us here. So, we already have 'cha' as an affirming word. Let's add: nay = negating or 'no'; tee = elevating or up; hhu = declining or down. Ooo, and I almost forgot a big one - How do we convey past, present, future tense? No marker for present tense, but ko = past tense, kay = future tense.

This is not very much, but I wanted to finish by translating a few phrases into this so far.
"Do you like to run down the hill?" Let's establish 'shishay' as 'run' and 'tiya' as 'like.' We haven't talked about how questions work in this language yet, but lets borrow a little from our own language and say that a higher pitched ending syllable denotes a questioning phrase.
'Taya shishay hhu?' A gesture pointing down the hill would be used, instead of saying it.
'I built two houses.' Let's establish 'kito' as 'build' and 'tinay' as 'house' and 'shay' as 'two.' We haven't talked about how singulars, plurals, or other numbers are conveyed in this language (this post can only be so long!) so now we have to. Alright, adding an n to the end of a word makes it plural (you can only do this to the second word in a phrase; doing it to the verb doiesn't make sense), and numbers will be added in before the word they modify.
'Kitoko shay tinayn.' Supposedly, you could also say 'Twice I built a house' by saying 'Shay kitoko tinay.' Which one should be the most correct?

There's still a looong way to go, but I like the way this is going so far...

Orthography Evolution

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 22:43:00 +0000

I've been working on a few posts, but wasn't feeling very spiffy about any of them when I had an idea to post something about how my orthography has evolved since I made three posts about it at the end of '07.

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:

An item of interest: the Pitak characters have thicker horizontal strokes than vertical strokes. I thought it would be interesting to see how this looked, since our English alphabet characters are thicker on the vertical strokes (meaning, the sides of an O are thicker than the top and bottom, and the same goes for the other letters). It turns out, I like having thicker vertical strokes, and you'll be able to compare the two a little further down the page.

I realized one thing I wasn't entirely comfortable with was the letter order/arrangement. I designed the Pitak letters to manifest certain phonetic characteristics; for example, the voiced characters have middle strokes, or partial middle strokes if they are a combined sound (ch=t+sh, a combined sound). I had tried to arrange the letters so that the "related" letters flowed together, i.e. the unvoiced plosives were together, the voiced plosives were together, so that when you looked at the alphabet, you could see the relationships. The above letter order wasn't very conducive to that. I made a letter order I felt better about, and re-made the font, with vertical strokes now being thicker than the horizontal strokes, and I liked the way it looked much better:So now, the plosives are all on the left, or on the right, unvoiced or voiced, along with the unvoiced and voiced consonant combinations of ch and j, nestled in between the consonants that make up their sound. Then the second and fourth columns are fricatives, unvoiced and voiced. In the middle, nasals, a liquid, and h, because I wanted it to have a special heritage, if you will, of being a half letter, and that it is used in words for childhood, shortness, and etherealness. Also, semi-vowels are between the consonants and the vowels, showing their mixed heritage, and their letters are combinations of consonant and vowel shapes. Well the W and R are... the Y symbol is a bit of a stretch, to my mind. The ng sound is where it is because... well I was just experimenting, and thought I didn't want a voiced th sound, so substituted the ng sound in, so its close to the n sound, to which it is related.

This letter arrangement I liked much better, and I reworked a few characters to better reflect their new placement and their phonetic qualities. H is now a very minimal letter; only two strokes; this is to reflect the attributes I mentioned above, as well as a minimal effort being required to make this sound. Ch and J characters are better combinations of the letters for t+sh and d+zh.

Now originally, I had 30 characters in the alphabet, which, on a keyboard, still allowed me some keys to make up punctuation. With the new alphabet, now I had 33 characters and I'm getting short on keyboard space. I wanted to have one character for each sound (meaning no sounds that require two letters, such as th, sh, ch), but I don't want to have too many characters either. I started wondering if I should shorten my phonology. I also wanted to improve my font; in comparison with the English characters, my letters look so little - I wanted to beef them up more. So I decided to cut out the ch and j letters, and the ng. I moved the l into the place of the ng, because this column is all voiced consonants, and h isn't voiced (h was the only other consonant I was considering moving). I also moved the postion of w, y, and r to where they match up more closely with the vowels they are close to.
You can see now, in this third iteration, that the characters are bigger, "beefier," and don't seem as small when compared to the English letters, although I think they could still be bigger and better. But the vertical strokes are now noticeably thicker When I prepared the earlier alphabet graphics, I actually had to use a bigger font size each time. This time, I didn't. As you create your own font, you'll probably go through a similar period of trial and error, until you know how big and thick you need to make the letters. Again, I used High-Logic's FontCreator 5.6 to create this font.

If any of you have orthographies to share, please do! Feel free to put links in the comments to your alphabets, abjads, syllabaries, etc., handwritten or otherwise.

Morphology 101

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 08:53:00 +0000

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 post later. But the first concepts to digest are Lexemes vs. Word Forms. A lexeme is a unit of meaning, in as much as rock and rocks have almost the same meaning. A word form can be considered another form, or sub-meaning of a lexeme, so rocks is a pluralized word form of the lexeme rock.

Morpheme vs. lexeme vs. word-based morphologies: There are three main approaches to studying morphology, and you can keep these in mind as you develop your word structure. Most of what follows for the next few paragraphs is pretty much copied and pasted from the Wikipedia article on Morhology, because I think its already pretty easy to understand.

Morpheme-based word forms are analyzed as arrangements of morphemes. A morpheme is defined as the minimal meaningful unit of a language. In a word like independently, we say that the morphemes are in-, depend, -ent, and ly; depend is the root and the other morphemes are, in this case, derivational affixes. In a word like dogs, we say that dog is the root, and that -s is an inflectional morpheme. This way of analyzing word forms as if they were made of morphemes put after each other like beads on a string, is called Item-and-Arrangement.

The morpheme-based approach is the first one that beginners to morphology usually think of, and which laymen tend to find the most obvious. This is so to such an extent that very often beginners think that morphemes are an inevitable, fundamental notion of morphology, and many five minute explanations of morphology are, in fact, five minute explanations of morpheme-based morphology. This is, however, not so. The fundamental idea of morphology is that the words of a language are related to each other by different kinds of rules. Analyzing words as sequences of morphemes is a way of describing these relations, but is not the only way. In actual academic linguistics, morpheme-based morphology certainly has many adherents, but is by no means the dominant approach.

Lexeme-based morphology is (usually) an Item-and-Process approach. Instead of analyzing a word form as a set of morphemes arranged in sequence, a word form is said to be the result of applying rules that alter a word form or stem in order to produce a new one. An inflectional rule takes a stem, changes it as is required by the rule, and outputs a word form; a derivational rule takes a stem, changes it as per its own requirements, and outputs a derived stem; a compounding rule takes word forms, and similarly outputs a compound stem.

Word-based morphology is a (usually) Word-and-Paradigm approach. This theory takes paradigms as a central notion. Instead of stating rules to combine morphemes into word forms, or to generate word forms from stems (stems meaning the root word), word-based morphology states generalizations that hold between the forms of inflectional paradigms. The major point behind this approach is that many such generalizations are hard to state with either of the other approaches. The examples are usually drawn from fusional languages, where a given "piece" of a word, which a morpheme-based theory would call an inflectional morpheme, corresponds to a combination of grammatical categories, for example, "third person plural." Morpheme-based theories usually have no problems with this situation, since one just says that a given morpheme has two categories. Item-and-Process theories, on the other hand, often break down in cases like these, because they all too often assume that there will be two separate rules here, one for third person, and the other for plural, but the distinction between them turns out to be artificial. Word-and-Paradigm approaches treat these as whole words that are related to each other by analogical rules. Words can be categorized based on the pattern they fit into. This applies both to existing words and to new ones. Application of a pattern different than the one that has been used historically can give rise to a new word, such as older replacing elder (where older follows the normal pattern of adjectival superlatives) and cows replacing kine (where cows fits the regular pattern of plural formation). While a Word-and-Paradigm approach can explain this easily, other approaches have difficulty with phenomena such as these.

Now that I've thrown all that at you, I want to condense it a bit by emphasizing this: word-building is usually analyzed with a three-way distinction:

Derivation: adding affixes to roots or compound stems to get new stems with different meanings; side vs. inside vs. insidious.

Composition or compounding: joining of two or more prior members (i.e., already extant words) to create a new word. Sometimes the words don't need to become one word, like bookkeeping. The meaning of hunter can change a lot by adding a word - deer hunter vs. bargain hunter.

Inflection: Adding affixes to roots or stems that alter grammaticalized categories, as opposed to altering meaning (as with derivation); categories like person, number, gender, tense, mode/mood, aspect, etc. We do this in English - we pluralize something by adding an s at the end. This is an "inflectional rule."

One last concept - Isolating Morphology. This is basically a lack of morphology. Every word has its own meaning and there is no morphology. You could not have words like "amusement" or "firefighter" in an isolating language. You could have a word like "trolsh" that MEANT amuse or fire, and another word "im" that meant -ment or fighter, but words cannot be derived in an isolating language, so you just wouldn't combine them into "trolshim". Also, because words are not marked by morphology showing their role in the sentence, word order tends to carry a lot of importance in isolating languages. Isolating languages are common in southest Asia, if you want to know any examples of how this might work.

I want to give props and thanks to Jeff Burke who helped me with this post. Please check out his blog - he's writing a novel just like me! Also special thanks to Baalak, who recommended me to add something about isolating languages.

Ama pos tulonu sa taka oma so! This post is already too long so thats it!

Generating Vocabulary

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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!

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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 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 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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.

More Phonotactics

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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, phonotactics. Lets keep explanations, and these phonotactic rules, simple. The phonology 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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!

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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 binder of Ithkuil material, Ithkuil being his first conlang which he designed for maximum efficiency (meaning maximum meaning from minimum syllables) and it was a freakin' tome; 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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

d4ng3rismymiddlename@gmail.com (Jack Redwood) — 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.