Inventing a language.....

[SEVERUSMAX]

.....but so far have only the alphabet done. It's for a story.

 

[neonlyte]

.....but so far have only the alphabet done. It's for a story.

How would we know it's an alphabet? Any numbers in it?

 

[R. Richard]

.....but so far have only the alphabet done. It's for a story.

Inventing a language is a rather formidible task. First, you need a grammar, a structure to the language. The grammar would, of course, define the various parts of the language, including things like cases, verb tenses, etc. Then you would need to define how the parts fit together, including any order constraints. Then you would need to define an alphabet, including definitions of how the symbols of the alphabet are formed. Then you would need to form words from the alphabetic symbols. Then you would need to form sentences from the words, under the rules of the grammar. [Of course, in the interest of brevity, I have omiitted many necessary steps.]

If you fail to do all of the steps properly and in order, you wind up with an abortion like the so called English language.

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

How would we know it's an alphabet? Any numbers in it?

I haven't even tackled math yet. So, far it's an alphabet not unlike some of the more primitive cuneiform style of the Sumerians. Something like that. I think that I am going to do with it what many languages do- omit articles. That should make for some interesting sentences or statements.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

Any non-English phonemes in the the alphabet? How do you describe them?

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

Any non-English phonemes in the the alphabet? How do you describe them?

This language isn't really based on English, but it so far coincides with the 26 letters of the English alphabet. I haven't decided on adding any other letters.

 

[Quiet_Cool]

I'll give you credit just for trying. The most I'd be willing to dive into would be saying that so-and-so spoke, and to such-and-such, it sounded more like mumbling, or gargling, then he-and-she smiled and interpretted.

Yeah, it's cuz I'm lazy.

Q_C

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

I'll give you credit just for trying. The most I'd be willing to dive into would be saying that so-and-so spoke, and to such-and-such, it sounded more like mumbling, or gargling, then he-and-she smiled and interpretted.

Yeah, it's cuz I'm lazy.

Q_C

Thanks.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

This language isn't really based on English, but it so far coincides with the 26 letters of the English alphabet. I haven't decided on adding any other letters.

Alphabets are cool to do. It's fun to redesign the rules of spelling and stuff, and when I was in school we used to spend a lot of time designing new codes for secret messages. I remember we used to ditch the letters "c" and "q" all the time and use special letters for "sh" and "ch" and "th". Being in hebrew school at the time, I also tried putting the vowel sounds beneath or above the consonants. Worked pretty well.

What's really tough is inventing a language that isn't based on English or one of the romance languages. Tolkein was a linguist as well as a mythologist, and even the languages he made up for LOTR were based on English. He just used different alphabets and vocabularies but kept English syntax and grammar. I think I heard he borrowed elements of Arabic for his Elvish alphabet though, and Dwarvish was based on the old Norse runic alphabet.

The game Riven uses a complicated alien math system based on 5's instead of 10's and without convential place holders. As I recall, it's based on boxes and dots. When I finally cracked that code, I was ecstatic

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

Yes, it is quite a daunting, but exciting undertaking. Language being much of the foundation of human knowledge, logic, and overall cognitive and social development.

 

[Equinoxe]

Tolkein was a linguist as well as a mythologist, and even the languages he made up for LOTR were based on English. He just used different alphabets and vocabularies but kept English syntax and grammar. I think I heard he borrowed elements of Arabic for his Elvish alphabet though, and Dwarvish was based on the old Norse runic alphabet.

I would have to disagree with that. Whilst both Quenya and Sindarin have influence from many languages, including English, in terms of basics, Quenya most closely resembles Finnish and Sindarin most resembles Welsh. I can't speak to Sindarin particularly, but Quenya is actually quite different from English: in addition to the differences in phonology (there are sounds which don't exist in English and placements of sounds which don't occur in English, such as words beginning with ng as in ring, though that, in the context of the story, was an archaicism), and the obvious differences in orthography, there are numerous grammatical departures. Quenya is a highly inflected language like Latin or Greek, with numerous verb and noun forms, most of which don't exist in English (Old English was more heavily inflected); it has three numbers to the two English possesses (singular, plural, and dual), several verb tenses which don't properly exist in English (like the aorist, and an actual future tense, which English has never strictly possessed), and in general is highly synthetic, where English is far more analytic.

Other languages created by Tolkien, which are far less complete, even have very radically different structures: Dwarvish uses something of a tri-consonantal root system, like Semitic languages, as does Adûnaic, which also has a system of characteristic vowels, and the Black Speech is agglutinative (and intentionally created to be as ugly as possible).

Edited to add: The Cirth script, which was originally an Elvish script later used by the Dwarves, is indeed based on Germanic runes. The Tengwar Elvish script resembles some Indian and Indian-derived scripts, like Tibetan, but is still quite a bit different.

 

[Guest]

between charlie and me, you should have no problem putting together a new language.
tres cool idea. i look forward to reading when you are finished.

 

[SEVERUSMAX]

between charlie and me, you should have no problem putting together a new language.
tres cool idea. i look forward to reading when you are finished.

Thanks.

 

[Otto26]

There are several good websites out there for people wishing to create languages. I prefer to go with pre-existing uncommon languages myself. Esperanto is dead easy to use, sufficiently foreign to just about everyone, and has lots of instructional sites on the web. Any of the various pidgin forms are good and you can do quite a lot with some simple modifications of English (change the sentence structure, phoneticize the alphabet structure so that every letter has one sound, run words together, etc..).

I've got a novella in submission that makes use of Esperanto.

 

[Munachi]

i liked trying to invent languages and scripts since i was quite little... never got far though, as i somehow always lost my notes and started all over, but it is fun. at first i would base them on languages i knew (that is, have quite flective structure, with a mixture of synthetic and analytic forms, and a writing system similar to the latin script)... later on i liked trying to play around with other forms, invent agglutinative languages, for example, sometimes even slightly towards polysynthetic - but as i never got far, i can't really say if it would have worked. recently i made up a script and actually took some time to learn it, but then i decided i want to invest my time in learning "real" languages instead, and started learning swedish. though that's no new script to learn. i started learning to read cyrillic at some point though and want to continue that, i guess it will be a bit more useful than learning my own invented writing system.

 

[dr_mabeuse]

I would have to disagree with that. Whilst both Quenya and Sindarin have influence from many languages, including English, in terms of basics, Quenya most closely resembles Finnish and Sindarin most resembles Welsh. I can't speak to Sindarin particularly, but Quenya is actually quite different from English: in addition to the differences in phonology (there are sounds which don't exist in English and placements of sounds which don't occur in English, such as words beginning with ng as in ring, though that, in the context of the story, was an archaicism), and the obvious differences in orthography, there are numerous grammatical departures. Quenya is a highly inflected language like Latin or Greek, with numerous verb and noun forms, most of which don't exist in English (Old English was more heavily inflected); it has three numbers to the two English possesses (singular, plural, and dual), several verb tenses which don't properly exist in English (like the aorist, and an actual future tense, which English has never strictly possessed), and in general is highly synthetic, where English is far more analytic.

Other languages created by Tolkien, which are far less complete, even have very radically different structures: Dwarvish uses something of a tri-consonantal root system, like Semitic languages, as does Adûnaic, which also has a system of characteristic vowels, and the Black Speech is agglutinative (and intentionally created to be as ugly as possible).

Edited to add: The Cirth script, which was originally an Elvish script later used by the Dwarves, is indeed based on Germanic runes. The Tengwar Elvish script resembles some Indian and Indian-derived scripts, like Tibetan, but is still quite a bit different.

I stand fucking corrected as hell.

Thank you.

--Zoot

 

[dr_mabeuse]

This may be a weird place to bring this up, but I've always wondered - how do those court-reporter typewriters work?

These days I guess they record everything on audio, but before that they had court reporters who would take down testimony and questions verbatim using machines with like ten keys. They never seemed rushed as they would if they';d been typing, and I always wondered what kind of language or codification they used. Anyone know?