1. Velvet Sky

    Velvet Sky Member

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    Constructed Languages in a Fantasy Setting

    Discussion in 'Setting Development' started by Velvet Sky, Feb 7, 2017.

    I have some questions regarding constructed languages in stories. (Not questions of if I should create one or not because that's a moot point) One of my stories that I have been working on has constructed languages in it that I have spent a great deal of time on.
    I've studied basic German and Latin through school as well as English. I am far from being a proficient linguist but I do enjoy them and I think that languages in fantasy stories can add an extra depth and richness when done well.


    What are you guy's opinions of con langs in stories?
    When you encounter a made up language in a story you're reading what do you generally look for?
    What makes you say "yes, this is cool" or "this really sucks"?

    For those who have tried it before:
    How do you go about constructing a language?
    Do you have any tips to offer?
     
  2. Simpson17866

    Simpson17866 Contributor Contributor

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    Have written I a character who thinks in Verb-Subject-Object ("Did he this"), whereas use most Human languages Subject-Object-Verb ("He this did") and speak most human people Subject-Verb-Object ("He did this"), but have never I tried to write a language's vocabulary. Have always I thought that if had to I write a character who speaks another language, then would I write the dialogue in English and add in [language] to the dialogue tag.

    Have I been rethinking this lately, but realize I that would I have to do more than just vocabulary and VSO syntax.
     
  3. TheSameDullKnife

    TheSameDullKnife New Member

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    I think they can be very enriching if done correctly and did at one point attempt to create a language for a story I was working on, but ultimately, for myself, decided that they are simply far too much work. I'm honestly a rather low-energy (see: lazy) person, and doing things that are so very tedious in nature, while they can be fun and add a certain sense of immersion, is just not for me.

    That said, if you've got the time, patience, and energy for it, the best thing is to make sure you've got the rules of the language figured out. Vocabulary isn't important if the grammar rules aren't established and don't make sense. If you want it to feel authentic, be sure to make a few exceptions to the rules here and there. It's also helpful, though not necessary, to include varied dialects. Again, though, the most important thing is for it to have a pattern that can be followed in the same way as real languages do. It doesn't need to be a pattern utilized by any real language, but basing your language on existent ones in the general structure of the grammar will simplify things for yourself and for your readers. If you're going for something with a more mystical feel to it, it helps to draw inspiration from so-called dead languages, such as the Latin you mentioned.

    What you ultimately want is for the language to feel like something that evolved naturally over the course of time, thus including the exceptions to grammatical rules and some unique wording/dialect options that may not make sense to someone who naturally doesn't speak the language in question, as all real languages have such quirks. You don't want it to seem too uniform or perfect, basically, because in practice no language is like that. I'm kind of running in circles, I think, but colloquialisms are really make-or-break for constructed languages, in my opinion.

    Once you've got the grammar figured out and such things, then you can flesh out the vocabulary more, focusing primarily on the words you need for the actual story-telling and branching out from there to cover as much ground as is feasible. You're not going to want to bother coming up with terms for things that are never going to be relevant, since you're not going to cover every word that exists with your new language, anyway.

    I'm sure some of this, perhaps a lot of it, has already occurred to you, and if I come across as condescending or anything of that nature, I do apologize, as that is not my intent. I do have quite a few thoughts on this subject, but it's mostly just the wild thoughts of a madman sitting at his computer, reading this thread. I never studied linguistics, though it was touched on loosely in some of my college courses pertaining to grammar or literature in general, and I am by no means an expert of any kind. If you'd like me to elaborate upon any of these ramblings, or any other random input from my odd mind, I will definitely oblige, but for the time being, I seem to have lost my train of thought, so I'll end this with the parting thought that I hope this helps you in some way with your project.
     
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  4. izzybot

    izzybot (unspecified) Contributor

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    I'm gonna link some stuff I've read/watched, and some stuff I've been meaning to read/watch:
    It's kind of a lot, but so are languages.

    I sort of decided to start developing a conlang in what may be a backwards sort of way. I write sci-fi and I wanted this one race/species to have distinct names - the kind of thing where you can, for example, see the name Giovanni and reasonably assume it's Italian, or that Kruger is German. I just wanted them to be aesthetically similar, at first. Then at some point I decided they had to actually mean things, and started breaking them down. For starters, I had decided that the character named 'Cercivse' A) had been named after a family member (Cerse), and B) had a name meaning 'little falcon', both basically arbitrarily. Since there was only one syllable separating the two names, I decided that 'Cerse' itself just meant 'falcon', and it was the 'civ' part injected into the middle that inferred the 'little'.

    That was basically the first building block towards an actual language. Now, in addition to meaning (contextually) 'junior' in a name, I had a word that could be applied to other words. I decided parents often added 'civ' to young kids' names in affection. If someone wanted to describe an object, a person, a gesture, or whatever as small - there was a word for it.

    It also gave me an idea of how their language worked. Each name is broken down into smaller, descriptive parts: 'Cercivse' means 'little falcon', but 'cer' and 'se' are distinct sounds, so they must make up 'falcon'. To describe a falcon in two words, I went with 'predatory bird', and decided that 'se' is bird. Now I have an animal noun, increasing the vocabulary. I decided that all of their names can be broken down like this, and much of their language - they have simple monosyllables for simple concepts, and stitch them together into longer, descriptive words for more complicated or new concepts. The sound for 'bird' is probably more broadly used for anything that flies, including airplanes and space ships, but with modifiers that mean 'metal' (which itself would probably be constructed from 'stone' and 'fire' or something), 'cloud', 'star', etc. It's a language that's mostly nouns and adjectives.

    Again, this is all arbitrary and largely before I did any research at all on how to do this shit, so it's just kind of what worked for me with what I already had (a language defined only by names).

    I'm also working with something that's, in-universe, a language whose native speakers are long dead, and is only spoken by a people who kinda-sorta learned it from them, adapted it to their own biology (the original speakers being distinctly non-humanoid), and proceeded to use it for a good 800 years, subjecting it to linguistic drift and general corruption. These surviving speakers populate a large continent and don't always get along and communicate, so it's also developed several semi-distinct dialects, and for example, they have literally about half a dozen different spellings and pronunciations for the name of their planet. So there's a lot of wiggle room for irregularities and nonsense.

    My main goal is still to create something that LOOKS like a real language. That's what I'd want to read. A secondary goal is to sneakily teach the reader a few words/phrases as I go - eg showing that 'civ' is a term of endearment for small things in addition to a name part. Ideally, I'd get to the point where I can slip bits and pieces of the language into dialogue and have readers understand it without being confused or put off, while also having sections where characters speak briefly entirely in the language, and the reader doesn't just think this is gibberish, but this is what scaration looks like.
     
  5. Velvet Sky

    Velvet Sky Member

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    you don't sounds condescending at all, please, by all means post any thoughts you have on the subject.

    Thank you, I like your thoughts on slipping it into the story pieces at a time.

    I started working on this to use inside of my story but it has evolved into a much larger project and I have (when I have the time) been working on it apart from my story.
    It has since turned into 8 or 9 pages defining the rules and commentary (with examples) on sentence structure, masculine and feminine nouns/noun endings, and phonology, with another two pages of translations and a very very brief history of the language.
    but I still have a lot to cover because it ties in closely with a third project (a history of the peoples, religions, and land in which the story is based, since the history and decomposition of the language is heavily tied to the diaspora of people groups)
    I have a lot of loose ends floating around in my head to do with verbs, verb endings vs changing the structure of the word to indicate tense, placement within the sentence, singular to plural, regional dialects.
    It's immensely helpful to hear others thoughts while i'm working on it to get outside opinions.
     
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  6. TheSameDullKnife

    TheSameDullKnife New Member

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    Honestly, it sounds like you're getting off to a great start. Based on what you said about the pages you have defining the rules and commentary, I'd suggest (if you're not doing so already) that you perhaps write a "textbook" of sorts to explain your language, loosely basing it on some pre-existing resource. By doing so, you have a guideline to follow (the pre-existing resource), and you will also be creating your own resource for future reference. In college, I had to buy several grammar textbooks, and while they could get redundant and difficult to slog through, they served their purpose very well and were quite useful in explaining the English language on a more refined level than lower education texts. If you used such a book as a frame of reference for creating your language, you'd be doing similar to what you're up to now, explaining concepts, giving examples, etc., and you'd also be doing enough repetition of some concepts to help them stick. The grammar book for the language could also, in theory, be published separately from the story itself, if that's something you'd be interested in, so that it could be shared in its full glory with your readers.

    The idea with something like this would be going through the lessons in the existent textbook to teach yourself your own language, if that makes sense? In these kinds of texts, we start with basic lessons, and by the end have moved on to more advanced concepts by working up to them in some logical fashion by treating it almost as a science. You could easily take the lessons from such a book, and the lessons from a book intended to teach a foreign language, and apply them to your own work, explaining your language and figuring out what things you need to address as you go along. Perhaps look at multiple grammar and language books to use as guides, even. I'm not sure if I'm making sense right now, so I'll give an example of what I mean.

    I have been thinking of a specific book as I write this post, and that would be English Grammar: Language As Human Behavior by Anita K. Barry. I will not pretend to have memorized the content of this book, because honestly, grammar can become tedious. I don't even often use the book for reference. However, the book goes into detail to delve into the mechanics of the English language, and I respect it for that. It is intended for native speakers, and isn't a conlang, so it may not be the best model to follow, but you could perhaps follow a similar model in elaborating on and formulating your grammar. In this book, we start off with chapter one being titled "Why Study English Grammar?" This, and the following chapter, are introductions to the book and to the studying of the language. When we get to chapter three, it's a very simple start, "Nouns and Noun Phrases." This chapter is broken down into "What Are Nouns?", "What Are Some Common Subcategories of Nouns?", "What Makes Up A Noun Phrase?", "Determiners", "What Are The Functions of Noun Phrases?", "Verbal Nouns And Noun Phrases," "Compounds," and "Reflections." The chapter is followed by practice exercises, and then we have similar chapters for verbs, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs, prepositions and particles, clause types, and combining clauses. The book is concluded with a glossary and an index, as you'd expect from a textbook.

    Obviously, I'm not saying copy this textbook, or any other one, for your exact formatting or whatever. I'm just saying I think such resources are a good place to get direction from if you're having trouble figuring out what to do now or how to proceed. In theory, your language will be a believable language by the time you've finished crafting it, so you want it to have basis and inspiration from real languages when applicable. So you'd combine ideas like what I mentioned in that last paragraph with something like a text designed to help teach someone a new language, which focuses more on introducing new vocabulary to beginners, rather than on the finer workings of its grammar. Books of this variety could also give you a better idea as to what types of vocabulary are most important to get to first, as they tend to focus on the spoken language, rather than written, and consequently include common dialogue, a lot of which could apply to a fantasy world as easily as it can real life. Greetings, directions, family, things like that tend to be covered earlier on and addressed in as natural a way as possible with text-based learning.

    I guess really the big thing is that research is key and you want to make sure you've got all your bases covered.
     
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  7. Velvet Sky

    Velvet Sky Member

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    Oh my word. When it's not 0230 I'm going to reread your post because even half asleep I can see that was easily the most constructive things I've seen. Kthanks
     
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  8. ToBeInspired

    ToBeInspired Senior Member

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    There are actually books and guides to establishing your own fictional language. However, I honestly do not believe it to be of the utmost importance. If your book faced the success of Tolkien, then it would be understandable. Most authors do not just as most readers do not know how to tell if a fictional language is phonetically accurate.

    While it may make sense with your story, consider the time devoted to it and if you personally feel it worth it. I myself would rather focus on writing another publishing than spending time learning and composing a fictional language.

    Best regards,
    ToBeInspired
     
  9. Velvet Sky

    Velvet Sky Member

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    Whether or not it is of utmost importance or readers can tell if it's accurate or not is irrelevant and not the primary purpose of the topic.
    I'm not vain enough to think that anything I wrote will ever reach that level of success.
    However, a write for myself primarily and I take great pride in the scope of the project and the extent to which both the story and the story world I have created are developed.
    If it were about publishing and success I would be actively trying to publish the manuscripts sitting on my computer.
    But thank you for your time,
    Ash
     
  10. ToBeInspired

    ToBeInspired Senior Member

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    Heh, wasn't saying anything against you or your project. I was just trying to advice you to consider the benefits compared to the time spent. I'm used to working upwards to over a hundred hours a week at certain times in my life. I tend to reflect on time management.

    Anyway, like I said there's a diversity of options for you with constructing a fictional languagae. A constructed language is called a conlang. You need to consider phonology (consonants, digraphs, vowels, diphthongs, etc.), stress, phonological constraints, orthography, grammar, word building, alphabets & scripts, and more.

    There's a whole wiki devoted to conlang. The only point I was trying to get across is that it's pretty time consuming.

    A basic search will get you all the information you need to get started. You could also look for any free books on the subject as well. However, there are forums devoted to the subject and people willing to assist you in constructing your language. My suggestion would be to search for conlang forums and find at least one you like and go from there.
     
  11. izzybot

    izzybot (unspecified) Contributor

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    In fairness, @ToBeInspired, the OP said
    ... right off the bat. It's not that you said anything against her or her project, it's that you answered a question she explicitly wasn't asking :)
     
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  12. Velvet Sky

    Velvet Sky Member

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    Thank you for your advice.
    I have done quite a bit of research, but I have found it's extremely helpful to actually talk to people. Information gets out in different ways and tips from experience.
    Also people's thoughts on reading it rather than the creating it.
     

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