Constructed Languages

Hello, you have A Way with Words?

Hi, this is Rachel calling from Frisco, Texas.

Frisco!

Well, welcome to the program, Rachel.

How are you doing?

Well, I was calling because I’m curious about creating languages, like, from scratch. And I was wondering if either of you guys had ever done that before.

Whoa!

No, I don’t have the free time for that, nor do I have a civilization under my control.

Why are you going to? You are going to do this, right? Maybe you have a civilization under your control.

Well, I’ve just been thinking about it. It seems like it would be fun to do. I mean, obviously it would be a really, really big project. But you know how Tolkien created languages for Lord of the Rings?

Right, sure.

I can’t remember the name of the guy who did it, but for the movie Avatar they created languages. It just seems like it would be kind of fun to do. And so I was wondering if you guys had ever done it before.

I’ve never done it.

So you just want to do it for fun, right?

Yeah.

And then what will you do with it? Is this for a video game you’re making or a book you’re writing or just to test yourself?

Well, I’m not really sure what I want to do with it, honestly. If I can use it at some point in some other project in the future, it would be great. But at this point, I just kind of want to see if I can do it.

There is a group called, well, they call themselves the Language Creation Society, but most people in the linguistics world know them as conlangers, which is a condensation of constructed language. So these are people who make languages. Perhaps they work on them together, or they make their own, or they put them in novels that they’re writing. Some of these people might have done them for films. And definitely many of them look to Tolkien as an inspiration.

You can find this organization at conlang.org. You’ll also find some great stuff there, a podcast, mailing lists, a conference, and most importantly, the essential books that you need. One of them is Mark Rosenfelder’s The Language Construction Kit, which basically just tells you how to get started when you want to make your own language.

So, Rachel, did you have any idea that there were a whole bunch of you out there?

Not really, no. I hadn’t really done much research into it. I just figured, well, if I want to make a language, I should probably ask some language people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, you can do that with these folks. I mean, there are lots and lots and lots of you, and they kick this stuff around all the time. And they have conferences so you can get together with people and talk about it face-to-face.

And if you want a good overview of what it’s like to invent a language, probably the best book that was recently published is Arika Okrant’s book called In the Land of Invented Languages. And she just goes through some of the more well-known invented languages and talks about the reasons why and how it was done and the personalities involved. And it’s very enlightening. It’s great. It’s a good introduction. It’s not too academic.

All right. I’ll definitely have to look into that.

So you’re going to have to figure out things like, what, the alphabet? What else are you going to have to figure out?

I guess I’m probably going to have to start working on, like, grammar rules and pronunciation and, well, the alphabet.

Yeah.

And, yeah, I’m not really sure how I’m going to do it.

Yeah, numbers and nouns. One of the things that they talk about in these beginning texts is first deciding whether or not you want to make something completely from scratch, which is incredibly hard to do, or you want to build on rules that we already know from existing languages or alphabets that we already know. And most new languages just go ahead and use an alphabet that the creator is familiar with. So that’s a start, and that should take some of the trouble out of it.

Oh, yeah, yeah, cross that one off the list. Okay, take out the alphabet for now.

And then a lot of them try to look for what’s the purest in the languages that they love most. What are the features of English that really speak to them? What parts of Latin do they find appealing? Is there something particularly beautiful about the sounds of another language? And then they mix them together.

Because so often the language creators aren’t looking to be clever so much as they’re looking to be beautiful. They want to make people love the thing that they’re creating, just like an artist might. So I would keep that in mind, Rachel, as you do this, all right?

All right.

Thanks, Rachel.

Thanks.

Take care. Best of luck to you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Have you had experience with a conlang? Maybe you’re fluent in Klingon. Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Did you ever try to learn one of those, Grant?

I never did. Some of the Tolkien words I mastered when I was a boy, but just because I was a fan of his work.

That’s cool stuff. And he was a classicist, so I’m sure that he brought in all kinds of cool stuff.

Yes, and he has old Anglo-Saxon roots to a lot of his words.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So they’re introductions into older forms of English as much as anything.

Yeah, very cool.

Well, call us, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.