I’m composing this post in anticipation of Dorothy Tinker’s post on language, as part of her on-going Culture-Building post series.
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Zompist.com author Mark Rosenfelder makes use of a particular system for creating a language out of thin air for a novel or video game, that goes roughly like this:
>Devise a sound system, determining the consonants and vowels that will be used to speak the language-to-be.
>Create a small stash of words using the sound system in order to gain a sense of what the conlang’s words are going to look like, and also for use in later parts.
>Construct the grammar for the conlang — the pronouns and other basic particles, and the noun, verb, and adjective paradigms (for how they will inflect in your conlang).
>Start fleshing out your language, devising sentences and phrases, as well as incorporating cultural aspects that will help make the language unique and interesting.
I’ve created a fair few conlangs thus far, for my novels-in-progress, and for all of them I’ve followed a slightly different approach:
>I come up with a word bank of words with cognates in the conlang-to-be, to get a sense of what sounds I will be using and what it will look like when I use such words as place-names on maps.
>I then construct the basic grammar for the conlang, starting with the pronouns, then the noun paradigms, then the adjective/adverb paradigms, then the verb/helper verb paradigms, then the numbers, adpositions, conjunctions, and other word particles.
>At this point I have a very good idea on what consonants and vowels I will be using, so I then put together the sound system paradigm.
>Lastly, I get into the Semantics, the Syntax, and Pragmatics of the language, at which point I also extensively expand the word bank into a dictionary of sorts.
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At the end of the day, I’ve personally found that the hardest part about creating a conlang is being satisfied with the finished product enough to want to use it for whatever it was you intended to use it.
It’s also difficult, to an extent, to create a unique conlang without at least some knowledge of linguistics and what the various parts of speech are. I’ve found the grammar in particular becomes discombobulated to an extent when just looking at the English forms (for example, deriving a word for ‘I’ and the helper verb ‘am’ to be used for the phrase ‘I am’, and then coming back later to make a single word for ‘I am’ that looks nothing like the two-word form).
Anyway….
Blogger at the Edge of the Universe. 