At this juncture, I had to make a choice between the two paths that were before me:
1. Assume that the language that everyone speaks is the base language of the setting, so to speak, and make it equivalent to English.
2. Do the above, in a way, but create the language from scratch so that I can use the intricacies of the language in my writing (translated to English, obviously).
Guess which one I chose?
So, having chosen to go down the rabbit hole, I set about creating the language.
Origin
So, languages don't just show up out of nowhere. They tend to evolve out of something. There are few language isolates. So, I decided to give my language a family. This meant a parent language, and a bunch of other related languages. This was one of the best and one of the worst decisions I ever made.Sound system
First of all, I didn't want this language to sound like English. That's boring. So, how did I go about it, you ask? Simple. Make the basic sounds in the language very different.So, how did I go about it?
The first step is to get yourself an IPA chart. There are many wonderful ones on the internet (I found this one very useful). Step one, in the bag.
Step two is the difficult bit - figuring out how much of the chart to put into my language. Even this younger, naive me had the sense to not put the whole thing into my language. I also had the sense to let go of the sounds that I couldn't hope to make. Given that I am most decidedly not monolingual, that still left me with a lot of the chart. So, what is someone who is most decidedly not a robot to do?
In the end I made the tough decision to let go of most of the chart. The sounds I chose were:
Vowels: The schwa, a 'u' sound (like in pull), a 'e' sound, two 'o' sounds, two 'ah' sounds, and the 'er' sound (basically, schwa with a sort of r at the end. I don't do that in my natural English accent).
Consonants: Mostly what you get in English + ñ, unvoiced w, a trilled r, ts, and pf.
Sounds good, doesn't it? Certainly I thought so at the time. The consonants weren't too much of a problem, to tell you the truth. The vowel system, on the other hand, turned out to be a complete mess at least in this iteration.
Plus, there is this rather inconvenient detail; you see, single letters do not a language make. I had to make words out of them. This is where my lack of research caught up with me.
You see, most languages have these nifty patterns when it comes to how sounds can be put together. For example, in an English syllable, you can have up to three leading consonants (optional), one or two vowels (at least one vowel mandatory) and up to five trailing consonants (optional and thankfully some of them are silent). I didn't realise this at the time.
So I set about creating the words. How, you ask? Of course I used the tried and tested technique of using a random number generator to pick letters randomly. Don't get me wrong - I use a variation of this system now. The pitfall was that I neglected to fix the possible vowel and consonant combinations.
The end result was a near unpronounceable mess exacerbated by the insane vowel system. I used a random number generator with a normal distribution, with the vowels numbered 1-8, which made it worse. So the end result contained ample vowel and consonant bombs even with me selectively ignoring letters given by the random number generator. It sounded nothing like what I thought it would be.
So, after a while, and after some deliberation, I did the sensible thing, and started over.
This time I went with just seven distinct vowels. I dropped the /ts/, /pf/ and ñ, and added aspirated consonants instead. Then, the most sensible thing I did was to define the possible consonant and vowel clusters.
That done, I could actually create words. With a random number generator, true, but now they sounded like actual words.
Grammar
Ah, my favourite subject in school, the reason I absolutely loved learning languages (NOT TRUE!).You see, trying to build a language without grammar is like trying to code without a compiler (yes I have heard of interpreted languages and assembly and machine code. May be this is a bad example? Meh, you get the idea).
The problem is that there is no such thing as a universal grammatical system. There are so many ways to format a message to another human being. For a conlang, you can go with any system you want to or even invent one. Not being a linguist, I decided to take the conservative route and get my inspiration from indo-European languages.
I had to narrow it down further - English falls into this category, as does Latin, Sanskrit, and Russian. I decided to draw inspiration from Latin at first.
There was a problem with that - I don't know any Latin. Still I really liked the case system and the flexibility it gave the sentence structure. So I decided to borrow that with no understanding of how it worked. I think ought to tell you, at this point, that my mother tongue is Sinhala.
So, continuing with the story. I had to learn how the case system worked. There were very few practical Latin courses online, so I decided to go for the next best thing - German. Don't facepalm too hard - a concussion will not be pleasant.
Still, it gave me some understanding, and I learned to say the very important phrases 'Hilfe, das Pferd frisst die heilige Kartoffel' and 'der grün Bär ist unsichtbar' (thanks, Duo!). That accomplished, I set out to get the language working.
I still had trouble with the case system. I was ploughing along when one day, the problem was magically solved by a random wiki walk. It allbegan when, for some reason I started researching Sinhala phonology, which lead to grammar, and boom, everything was cleared up just like that. You see, Sinhala has a case system. I've been speaking it my entire life. That cleared everything up instantly.
After that, there were a few more things I had to brush up to get the language working - deal with articles, expressing time (I decided to go with verb tenses), word order (not very important with cases, but you need the natural, default order. Plus there are times when some order is necessary even with cases), expressions, politeness levels, and so on.
Miscellaneous
Other things I had to consider include the number system (I came up with a pretty interesting one), colour names, and compound words. The latter was a fun outcome of learning German but how the words combine is somewhat different.The extended family
I already mentioned that I came up with an extended language family. That could have remained a piece of trivia in the novel if not for one fact - every named character in the novel so far except for two speak languages belonging to this language family as their mother tongue.So, yet again, I was at a crossroads. Yet again, I chose the more difficult option. No, I didn't flesh out these languages quite so much, but I did develop the basic phonology and grammar. Still, given what it added to the story - totally worth it.
Writing system
One more thing. Having created a language for a piece that is completely in a written medium, you would imagine that I was satisfied. Not so. There was no need to develop a writing system - no one was going to see it anyway. Yet I created it. Was it crazy? Undoubtedly. Was it worth it? Yes.For this, I took my inspiration from Japanese, in a way. This is why I made the parent language a logography. The language in question ended up with an alphabet derived from characters in the parent language (simple explanation. The in-universe explanation is a little bit more complicated).
Perhaps you are wondering how I fitted a language with verb conjugation and a complex case system into a logography. I'll just say I took some inspiration from Chinese and Japanese. The end result is very functional if not exactly pretty, but it works.
Final thoughts
There are a lot of things I didn't talk about here, but I will get to them in a later article (accents, dialects, and all that stuff, for example). I touched on a lot of topics here, but I didn't go into detail - perhaps, that, too, will be another article.In conclusion, it was difficult. Writing conversation in this language is still difficult for me. Still, given the layers it added to the story, to the characters, the character interactions, and all that, it was completely worth it.
Thank you for reading, and have a nice day!
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