Conlangs: Making Your Own Language

If you're as nerdy about languages as us, you've probably thought about or even tried to make your own language. If you're as useless at it as we were, you have undoubtedly failed. We spoke briefly about Elvish and Simlish in previous posts, but now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty of making your own language.

But does it sound right?

Creating a language is not an easy task to undertake. The vocabulary of the average speaker of the English language is estimated to be between 35,000 and 75,000 words. Do you really want to single-handedly undertake the task of creating that many words for your new language?

Even if you have the time to create the lexicon for your new language, in order to make your conlang accessible you will have to ensure a certain degree of neutrality. If you want speakers of other languages to adopt your conlang you can't make all your words sound too much like English, for example.

After you've completed the arduous task of creating the lexicon, even with a simple nomenclature that would enable you to create a few roots and let other words be created from them, you'll still have to work on the grammar. If you're looking for clarity and making your language easy to learn, you should try to avoid irregular structures, which are pretty unavoidable in naturally-occurring languages. Take a long, hard look at your syntax. What may be simple for a native speaker of French, Spanish or Italian may not be so simple for a native speaker of Mandarin, Japanese or Korean.

You could even make "shorthand" your writing system.

If you have managed to tackle the lexicon and grammar, you still have the phonetics to think about. How will the language sound? You'll need to make sure that the phonemes in your language occur in almost every other language in the world, or at least as many as possible.

If you were to cross-reference every sound produced in every language, you'd probably find very few, if any, that were found in even 90% of modern-day languages.

What about the look of your language? All the world's languages don't share the same writing system, and some don't even have one. Do you want to use an alphabet, abjad, or abugida? A syllabary or logographic writing system? You'll have to create the simplest writing system to ensure that the written form of your language is easy to adopt.

If you've made it this far, we salute you. We gave up by the first step and decided that the pub was always the better option.

Music And Language

Here at The Lingua File we love music, and we also love language, obviously. Music and language are more closely linked than you may first think. We're about to tell you how:

Sounds

All spoken language is made up of sounds. We're vibrating air and causing areas of compression and decompression. Music is exactly the same thing. Compression and decompression of air.

The Ear

If both language and music are sounds, then the ear is the principal organ for being aware of either language or music. Of course, language isn't limited to sounds and the ear. Sign language works entirely with gestures and visuals, and writing works without any sound.

The Brain

With music and language both being sounds that are processed by the ear, then they must share some processes in the brain. Not only are they both processed by our ears and their corresponding neurons, they also are stored using common systems. The brain stores the underlying rules of both music and language, melodies and semantics, in the same system using the temporal lobes. The arbitrary information, however, is stored in independent systems for each.

Even though it uses the alphabet it goes from C to C...

A Written System

Both language and music feature systems in order to represent themselves visually. Languages have writing systems such as alphabets, abjads, abugidas, and logographic or syllabic systems. Music has sheet music, complete with staves, notation, key signatures, tempo, directions and anything else you might need in order to play the piece (instruments and/or orchestra not included).

The Words

Everything in the world is related to language in some way. We require a lexicon in order to name things, such as objects and abstract concepts. You'll find in music that most of these are Italian. Why? Put simply, Italians love music.

Here are twelve (the number of semitones in an octave) of our favourite musical terms and their origins:

A Capella: The meaning has altered slightly, but the idea of there being a group of people without instrument remains. From Italian for "in the style of the church/chapel".
Bass: From the Italian Basso, meaning low.
Cadenza: A solo part, usually improvised and ornamental. From Italian for "cadence".
Diminuendo: Getting quieter. It's the Italian word for "decreasing".
Encore: To be played again. From the French (for a change) word for "more" or "again".
Flat: Half a tone lower and finally an English word.
Geschwind: From German meaning "quickly".
Ma non troppo: This is perhaps the vaguest instruction ever, from the Italian for "but not too much". Use when asking for ice cream. (Though honestly, can one ever have too much ice cream?)
Presto: Very quickly. From Italian.
Quasi: From Latin and Italian for "almost".
Tutti: Italian for "all". When put with "frutti" you have a good bit of ice cream.
Wolno: From Polish, to be played loose or slowly.

You've just learnt the most important phrase
in Italian: "Tutti frutti, ma non troppo."

A Rundown Of Writing Systems: Letters Explain

It's fairly obvious what the word writing system refers to, and you're probably familiar with one if you are able to read this. The letters that make up these sentences are part of an alphabet. However, there are several types of writing systems and not every one is technically an alphabet.

We're going to try and briefly explain each one...


Alphabet

If you didn't know that English is written with an alphabet then you have probably been living under a rock with your eyes closed, your fingers in your ears and screaming at the top of your lungs. Why is it an alphabet though?

The word "alphabet" comes from the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, alpha and beta. Apparently, they thought it would be stupid to call it an alphabeta. Alphabets represent phonemes, the sounds that make up words. That's how you know what each of these words sound like. Alphabets include the Latin Alphabet (this one), Cyrillic (the one used in Russian with all those cool-looking backwards Rs and stuff), Greek, Georgian and Armenian (as found in Greece, Georgia and Armenia, of course!).

Abjad

So what the hell is an abjad? Ever tried to read or speak Arabic? That uses an abjad. They're called abjads because of their first letters, 'alif, bā', jīm and dāl, but calling it an 'alifbā'jīmdāl didn't have the same ring to it.

Each letter represents a sound, although usually just consonants. So how do you know what the vowels sounds are? Good question! You don't. You'll just have to learn all the words and a series of vague rules... sorry.

Abjads were around before alphabets and tend to be written from right to left. They're the envy of every left-handed person in the western world. No smudging for lefties!

Only Chuck Norris could smudge this.

Abugida

An abugida can represent consonants with inherent vowels. This means that you know what the vowel is, either by way of diacritics, accents and squiggly lines, or spinning the letters around and all sorts of other crazy methods.

Think of Hindi, or for a fake version, any jar of curry from your local supermarket.

It's apparently a good read... if only we could read it.

Logographic or Syllabic

Chinese and Japanese are prime examples of languages with logographic writing systems. Their symbols represent a whole word. So you just learn entire words... not the letters. Imagine having to learn all those characters! They also have writing systems that are syllabic, which means they use symbols to represent a single syllable (often a consonant plus a vowel sound) . Interestingly, Japanese uses Chinese characters for its logographic alphabet, but they aren't mutually intelligible between speakers of the two languages. In Chinese and Japanese you can write from either top to bottom or left to right.

Don't tilt your head like a dog! It's meant to be like that.