Language Related Posts

Language, A Living Thing

Originally appeared June 17, 2009 in Research, Writing Fiction | Tags: Fictional languages, writing

 Made-up languages have always fascinated me, perhaps as much or more so than “real” ones. I still can’t believe someone really took the time and trouble to codify (much less actually learn to speak!) Klingon, or Elvish, or a number of other fantasy/sci-fi languages; to me, that speaks of the human tendency to create from thin air and throw ourselves into surreality without so much as a bathing suit attached. It’s fantastic, and a little frightening, and immensely inspiring.

When I read a fantasy novel about a fictional word which uses a real language (Latin, German or Spanish seem to be the top choices) as an alternate, I always feel mildly cheated. Those authors who put the time into developing their own language hold my interest much more thoroughly, but then . . . I’m something of a linguistics geek, despite my utter lack of ability to talk or read anything but English. Alas, my high school French and Spanish classes have long since disappeared from my tenuous memory, and although my mother, grandmother, and many relatives have tried to teach me German, that has miserably failed as well. My attempt to teach myself Italian was fruitless and quickly abandoned. However, I can claim a decent working knowledge of English and a firm interest in etymology, and I’m reassured to think that English is rated one of the most complicated languages in the world. Where else, after all, can you find mind boggling phonetic transcription nightmares such as:

here/hear . . . or . . . not/knot

For some terrific examples of how twisty English can get, I suggest visiting the Linguistic Mystic: http://linguisticmystic.com/; he hasn’t posted in a while but there is a wealth of archives well worth reading. I also suggest browsing through http://www.omniglot.com/; they have a terrific section on important phrases to know in many languages, including such truly indispensible statements as “my hovercraft is full of eels”.  More seriously, Omniglot offers some useful idiom interpretations as well. Did you know that Tolkien’s famous phrase, “All that glitters is not gold”, might actually be from a Russian proverb? If you love playing with languages, this site is well worth your time.

Ah . . . where was I? I think I’ve wandered from my original intent, which was to talk about developing a fictional language. But really, the two sites I just named have tons of great info on the subject; so why don’t you go browse those for a while instead? Meanwhile, I’ll sneak off, regroup, get some coffee, and come back tomorrow for another try at this topic. . . .

Language, A Living Thing: Part 2

Originally appeared June 28, 2009 in Research, Writing Fiction | Tags: Fictional languages, writing

 Ah, language. What a miraculous thing it is. Just think about this a moment: somehow, from a handful of originators (depending on your belief system) who all, presumably, spoke the same language and dialect, we’ve become a planet full of people who can barely understand one another if we move more than a hundred miles in any given direction. Well, all right, that’s an exaggeration, but the basic point remains: we’ve diversified into an astounding array of dialects and languages. Some people, as we speak, are busy trying to save vanishing languages, some are inventing new languages to bridge gaps between real cultures, and some are happily inventing fictional languages to support their own creative efforts. More people are writing fiction today than ever before, some published, some self-published, some hidden in a deep drawer with a large rock on top.

… I’m digressing again. Sorry. I get so enthused about words and writing … all right.

The question I’m trying to address here isn’t the fascinating history or popularity of messing about with languages, or even the astounding shift possible within a single language (just look at the difference between American and British spellings, in such a relatively short time! Colour/color, for example — but I won’t sidetrack.)  What I’m trying to examine, if I can ever stop meandering, is just how one develops a fictional language for a fictional world. And the answer is … first you have to know a real language pretty darn well. If you can’t even write in your native language, how do you expect to pull off a fictional one? So step one is to understand one, preferably more languages. I personally haven’t been able to master anything besides English, but I’ve had enough exposure to Spanish, Italian, and German to know that the structure of other languages is vastly different from my native tongue.  Well, duh, that’s obvious — but it isn’t, when you stop a moment. Latin-based languages share similarities in structure, but put them up against, say, Chinese or Russian, and you see a whole different world. And that’s important because no matter how original you want your fictional language to seem, if you don’t use something even vaguely similar to an existing structure, readers won’t feel able to connect with the imaginary language. For example, most languages on Earth don’t stick more consonants than vowels into every word, so creatures who say “Xtrqabble, mhcltriq bhuczthxh” just sound weird, whereas if they say “xabble, mihcle bahtuk” sound vaguely comprehensible (if still weird).

Which comes to the next step: structure and rules. If the creature’s only going to talk once, no big deal. If it has to communicate multiple times, you may as well set down your pen (or step away from the keyboard) for a moment and think about fictional grammar and punctuation.  Verbs and adverbs are a good place to start; let’s say, from the example above, that “mihcle” is a verb of some sort. Maybe it means run. What would it look like in the plural? “Mihcles”? That leans you towards an English, Spanish, or French style base right there. German and Dutch verbs usually don’t change in the plural form (rennen and looppas, respectively). And the Cyrillic and Asian alphabets are frankly beyond me to figure out. So let’s say we’re using a Latin-based slant, with the ‘s’ for plural, to keep things simple. And we’re using a similar-to-English structure, without upside-down question marks and umlauts, no funky punctuation or diacritics. There! We’re already making important decisions about our new language.

One of the most interesting things to me is how a small word like “run” can become huge in another language (look back at that Spanish translation!).  And then there’s the many meanings of that one, simple word in English: “run” can be a verb or a nound; it has a three inch column of definitions in my dictionary, including “to go by moving the legs faster than walking” and “to make flow in a specified way” and “a ravel, as in a stocking” and “a route” . . . and so on. So if your creature is saying, “Quick, run away!”  the relevant word might look the same in “Drat, there’s a run in my stocking!” And if the verb for “away” sounds similar to a noun, say, the word for “stocking” (perhaps bahtuk is “away” and behtook is “sock”), it’s quite easy for linguistic difficulties to become extremely hazardous . . .

Hmmm . . . . no, no, don’t sidetrack. Ahem. Back to the development:

There are so many rules within the English language itself as to confuse even native speakers, so spending time parsing every aspect of a fictional language out seems to be a short (or perhaps long) and unneccessary path to madness. On the other hand, a few basic rules help keep things consistent. Honorifics are almost always important to know up front. Knowing what insults, numbers, greeting/farewell, gender/age indicators,  “the/a/and”  type words, and exclamations of anger or sorrow look like in the fictional language tends to come in useful. Once you’ve figured those out, and made sure they sound as though they belong in the same language (“funcionamiento” and “funzionamento” obviously come from similar languages, in this case Italian and Spanish, but “looppas” absolutely does not belong beside either of those versions), you’re probably got a decent crib sheet to cover all occasions.

For example, if “run” (verb) is “mihcle” and the plural is “mihcles”, what’s “running”? How about shifting to a noun: “runner”? Does it matter if the runner is male or female, child or adult or elderly? How about past tense (ran), or constructions such as “runner-up”? If you can make those decisions for a handful of words, and have that all similar enough to avoid boggling the eye or brain, you’ve got the basic idea nailed.

And that, patient readers, is the last I’ll say for today on the subject. I owe a debt of gratitude to the marvelously helpful web site http://babelfish.yahoo.com for the translations offered here — so if any of them are dead wrong, please let me know (and go fuss at Yahoo, too!).  Thank you for reading, and please do check out the “Linguistic Mystic” and other great sites listed in the previous “Language” post if you’re at all interested in this topic. I also owe a great thank you to Geoffrey, who pointed out some mistakes in the original version of this post, and supplied yet another great link: The Language Construction Kit.