❄️Do you wanna build a language~?

[Garakuta]

So, I think I have most things a language needs by now (phonetics, writing system, grammar, basic syntax), but how exactly do you go at making words? I mean, I could just write down 10,000 different letter combinations, but that seems unnecessarily time-consuming. I also worry that some letter combinations just won’t work for my language, so generating them with a program without restrictions also seems kind of problematic.
Anybody any ideas for an efficient process?

 

[Tamerlane]

In terms of words, all languages are descendants of older languages. What I'd suggest it start with a basic phonetic language and start developing prefixes and suffixes from it. (This is what makes etymology a fun field to discuss)

For instance, let's start with Japanese honorifics. The word "Senpai" is a descendant from the Middle Chinese word "senbìj." Compare the Mandarian "Xianbei" and the Korean "seonbae." Similarly, English and the romance langauges take a lot of words from Latin and Greek, such as prefixes (For Greek, "pseudo" meaning "false", "hypo" meaning "under," "hyper" meaning "over," etc. and For Latin, "in-" meaning "the opposite of" as a prefix, "inter" meaning "within," "ambi" meaning "both," "omni" meaning "all," etc.)

If you were to construct a language, I'd such starting with one-to-two syllable prefixes that are shared between a few in-universe races, and create unique conjunctions, articles, (though article adjectives are optional for most languages) prepositions, (though this may have some overlap such as with the Indo-European "in/en/etc.") and sentence structure. (Such as Latin which goes Subject-Object-Verb, English which goes Subject-Verb-Object, etc.) There are more things that will typically vary through languages without clear descendants, such as personal pronouns, but I'd assume you can manage that relatively well.

Also note that most grammar-y stuff is one-to-two syllables at most and are typically based on a vowel, such as "a/an" in English for an article and "in/into" for a preposition. This will make your life easier because of both language overlap and inserting a few vowels paired with a consonant sound is relatively easy instead of making a huge task about it.
@Garakuta

 

[Garakuta]

My problem was more with root words. Affixes (I use suffixes) for inflections were not that much of a problem, because, as you said, most of the time they are relatively short and with a few words you can experiment quite a bit already, how everything sounds. Anyways, generating them with a program doesn’t sound that bad anymore. Inflections will actually solve most of the problems I had with the idea and for the rest I will fine-tune it somehow.
On a different note: anybody know how to bring your letters in to a digital format? I can’t draw them cleanly myself, but I would like to use them somehow.

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

anybody know how to bring your letters in to a digital format?

Oh yes plz if anyone got an answer plz @ me too I'd hate to stockpile piles of paper just to store my letters, especially considering that I plan to have my language evolve.

 

[mochi]

@Garakuta @DANDAN_THE_DANDAN there's plenty of free software available for conlangers (for example, tools that automatically make words given your phonetic rules, etc). You should definitely check the main forums/mailing lists/wikis for conlangers, like the Zompist Board. You'll find plenty of practical advice.

About fonts, there's a standard way. First, you draw (not write!) your alphabet, either on paper+scan or directly digitally using an input tablet for artists. Then, you feed it to font making software like fontforge. I'm not privy to details, but if you want to make a good-looking font you must read up about kerning, letter-spacing etc. There are tutorials on the net. The more complex your writing system the harder it gets (think arabic or devanagari, where letters change shape depending on their context in the word).

Conlanging is not a weekend's project, it takes months or years of careful work!

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

Hmmm yeah I'm definitely not finishing this language before I finish the entire series...

 

[sinisempi]

i have wanted to do a script that's written in boustrophedon (alternating left to right and right to left rows) with all symmetric letters so you can read it just the same on both sides of a glass panel

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

@sinisempi Oh wow I'm interested. What kind of worldbuilding do you have to get your characters to write on glass rather than papyrus or wood?


Speaking of abnormal writing mediums, I also have thoughts about using strings for one of my writing system for my language. My world is military-heavy so they use encryption to prevent the enemy from knowing their strategy. At first they use flowers between officers while leaving the messanger in the dark so even when they are captured, they can't reveal the message. Then as distances became long, certain flowers become unavailable due to different climates and the flowers also begin to wilt so they change it with coloured ropes. After that someone thought about using knots to communicate a message so now the rope system uses both colour and knots to write an encrypted message.

I mean the rope system will become obsolete when they develop letters before anyone else do but it will still be in my world's history so it's pretty cool. Papyrus is easier to make than dyed ropes and writing is faster than connecting ropes and making knots so it will probably be replaced. And if the military comes up with writing first then reading itself is an encryption.

I can also make it so that ropes is a noble method of communication because, in this world, being a soldier is the same as being rich. Ex-soldiers will use ropes to talk to each other long-distance for nostalgia's sake and they will teach their kids how to talk in ropes too. It will take some time for the younger soldiers to finally leave the military and spread writing outside so the normal folks will probably develop their own writing system different from the military.

Sorry for worldbuilding here I got carried away.

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

Hey guys I developed my first prototype for a writing system. I haven't figured out the exact letters yet but I thought up of a way to write tense. Pretty proud of it after 2 hours of brainstorming. I've thought up of the writing medium and historical context as well. What do you guys think?

Spoiler

Here's everything I wrote. It was in docs format so the format will probably translate horribly here. Things inside [ ] are just names within the language itself so sort of like how Tolkien name his fantasy places.

Spoiler

Writing systems:

Rope system:

What is it?

First form of encryption used by the military by combining coloured ropes and inserting specific knots at specific location

How did it come to be?

At first military officers use flowers while keeping the messenger in the dark as a method of encryption, as well as a physical method of communication in case the message gets too long.

When the distances became lengthier and the flowers became unavailable and the time became so long that the flowers started to wilt, this changed into the rope system which was originally made to mimic the colours of the flowers they were meant to represent.

A knot was placed at the beginning and no knots at the end, this started the trend of ordering messages to make coherent sense.

Eventually knots became part of the rope system itself.

What is its influence?

Ex-soldiers began using it outside of the military for the sake of nostalgia and they also began teaching it to their kids. Since at the beginning of the Crystal Era the most sought of job was a soldier, everyone, at some point in their lives, is a soldier thus the rope system is widespread for [first country].

With the lost of its ability to become an encryption, the military abandons the rope system for the military letters.

Military letters

What is it?

With the advent of [paper]*, military letters became possible. This involves ideological drawings to represent the letters. The drawings has been heavily altered from their ideas in order to maintain encryption.

Since drawings are easier to memorize than colours and knots, the letters can be changed quite often to maintain encryption. Only the most popular letters survive outside of military use, which is fine since the letters will change often. Some old military letters got into scientific letters.

As a descendant of the rope system, it is written and read up to down, from the tip to petiole. Longer messages can be written to swirl from the perimeter of the leaf to the center, still starting from the tip but ending wherever it ends. It can swirl clockwise or counterclockwise since it does not matter. Letter orientation also varies from top-down to perimeter-center. Eventually a standardization effort was done and it was decided that the swirl must be clockwise because the sun goes from left to right according to the relative position when viewing the front gates of the capital. The sun holds a religious meaning as a popular philosopher suggested that the God of Progress might be residing within the sun. The letter orientation became top-down only since it's easier to read.

[Paper] is a paper-like sheet made from the leaves of [Angry] tree. With careful crystal treatment, its leaves can be extracted without triggering its crystal system located within the trunk of the tree meant to throw nearby pebbles at the predator. This triggering occurs when the leaves get damaged and starts a reaction to turn the damaged area from green to red.

Thanks to this treatment, [Angry] tree farms can be set up without the chain reaction of pebble throwing spoiling the entire farm. Alternatively, a simpler treatment can be applied but without the presence of a hard material at the farms, including sickles to harvest the leaves.

The reason the [Angry] tree is selected is because it has the largest, nonsegmented leaves of all the tree in [first country]'s climate.

This crystal treatment also prevents this reaction from occuring unless a specific amount of equal upward and downward forces are applied. This combination of forces is hard to accidentally apply when storing, unless the leaf is purposefully being sit on which is a method to erase the message before disposal. The treatment also extends the shelf life of the leaves into a few winters. The shorter the shelf life, the less the background is red.

By writing with a writing stick, a smoothed crystal on a stick meant to apply that specific combination of forces on the leaf, a message can be written in red with a green background.

Alternatively, the leaves can just be given 100% treatment which makes it entirely red with effectively eternal shelf life and a different writing stick meant to poke holes into the leaf to give a long-term message. It is written with the petiole of the leaf as down. A shredder is used for disposal.

How did it come to be?

[Paper] is faster to produce than the various dyed ropes. Letters are also easier to teach than knots. Letters also offer

Scientific letters

What is it?

A set of ideological figures meant to convey a message. It is written by scientists for scientists.

The scientific letters is a mixed set of rope system, military letters, and obvious ideological drawings.

Different ideas emerge on this writing system but a popular system came from the adaptation of the rope system into a [paper] medium.

How did the rope scientific letters come to be?

It became a hassle to prepare both rope and [paper] thus [someone1], a relatively famous scientist, adapted the rope system as figures on [paper].

Specific knots have certain swirls (inspired by the knotting themselves) and colours were replaced with the number of lines coming from the right side of knots (i.e. red comes from a short flower so it has one line, violet is the next highest flower so two lines protruded from the swirls).

Since there are [x] amount of colours and the resolution of the writing pens made it difficult to squeeze more than 3-4 lines at the right side, the lines eventually become drawn top right → bottom right → top left → bottom left. Up to two vertical lines can be fitted on either sides, intersecting the horizontal lines.

After realizing that this became a hassle and that certain knots didn't even have certain colours, they trade the lines for a simplified figure of the flower the colour came from, drawn at the right. However, it was too late since the lines became widespread and the popular letters stayed. However, the new and simplified colour figures also became popular so now two different notations for colours exist.

How did the ideological figure scientific letters come to be?

Inspired from the rope scientific letters, [someone2] also came up with their own writing system. It starts with the sci-rope system (simplified colours ver.) with ideological figures connected from either sides. The right side is meant as past tense whole left is future tense; to represent present tense the figure is written on the right while on the left is a circle. To represent past continuous and present continuous tense, the figure is on the right meanwhile a filled circle is on the left; future continuous tense is figure on the left and filled circle on the right.

This is the first writing system to represent tense alongside order of events so this quickly become popular as well.

Oh right btw,

Spoiler

in this world, specific plants grow crystals. Crystals are glass with trace amounts of metal impurities which gives them colour. This metal also carries the magic of the world that this alternate Earth's humans, as well as plants and animals, can activate. That's the TL;DR of it.

Because crystals can be used as weapons, metals and sharp stones become irrelevant. This means that currency is food rather than gold and the iron age is delayed in exchange for the crystal age. Because the [first country] is aimed towards expansion at its beginning, soldiers were equipped to scout and claim land suitable for growing crystals which the scientists will then develop. This is that world where I mentioned that there's religious pressure to keep progressing technology and basically everything progressable. Soldiers are fed with good food and that's how food became a currency. The chefs making the food can enjoy any entertainment outside of their jobs.

There's also the fact that there are rarely undeveloped pockets of civilization that fight back since they also carry the same religion (lore reasons) and they integrated with [first country] cause of all the progress they've developed. This is why soldier survival rate is effectively 99% and everyone wants to be a soldier, if not a scientist or a philosopher. So there's no plot holes thus far, right?

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

Hey guys, is there a free program where I can design and write in my letters? I don't want to keep writing and photographing every time I come up with a new letter or writing system.

 

[Hounder]

@DANDAN_THE_DANDAN Best I can suggest is just good old Paint/Paint 3D.

 

[mochi]

@DANDAN_THE_DANDAN You should use a vector graphic program, like inkscape, or a font editing program like fontforge. The latter as a guide on making fonts: http://designwithfontforge.com/en-US/index.html

 

[FireFish5000]

IMHO, a vector program like inkscape is.... significantly easier to use than a font editor such as font forge. I mean, obviously font forge has more stuff for designing fonts, but that stuff is.... just so much... it overwhelms me.
But to be fair, I didn't give it much of a chance. Kerning/keming is as far as my knowledge goes for typography. And since I like putting text on paths and using masks/clippings/patterns for cool designs, I have much more experience with vector programs.

Only thing I remember from my week of hell forging is I hate figuring out anchors/whatnot that help determine how letters/symbols connect with eachother. Baseline and x height were about the only thing I understood. Figuring out how to make characters like

^.,?T_-x`

(and every other letter) connect well and look good was my worst nightmare and helps me understand why a license for a proprietary font family can be so expensive despite their being so many free alternatives....

But since your creating the written language yourself and are not trying to support a wide range of existing characters/symbols, you probably do not need to worry about as much crap. (although I swear type hinting alone is it's own subject)

 

[firelight]

Step 1. Learn what not to do. For example:
[ul]Silent letters (w in two)
Letters that have multiple pronunciations (a in say or cat, or on/kun reading in japanese)
Multiple alphabets (hiragana, katakana, kanji)[/ul]
If you follow step 1, you've already made the best language to ever exist.

 

[FireFish5000]

@firelight

Their

zombies could

live

as long as the broadcast stayed

live

over

there

.
I love english!

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

Ngl I have zero idea of what my language will be. I'm currently still choosing the beginning words and thinking like a godlike being who does not care for his humans and wants to create the fewest words possible and not caring about how horrifically messy its grammar will be is pretty interesting yet difficult at places.

Small preview: the beginning words will be chalk full of compound words because that's what the god thinks will make the least necessary words possible, also zero synonyms. For example, the word for "leave" is (opposite)(come), the word for "away" is (process)(opposite)(come). The grammar for the beginning words will be super disgusting lol.


Btw my writing system will be top-down. I've, so far, design 2 writing systems for the early times: for military and for scientists.

Military written language is entirely an encryption thus letters change very, very often. Basically I don't even need to bother with designing the letters since every chapter probably have different letters.

Scientific writing is the design I posted before. It will be top-down with symbols at the left and right to represent tense which will be useful for documenting experiment procedures. This is the one I wanna design letters for. Would either of those allow for this? @mochi @FireFish5000

 

[Tamerlane]

@FireFish5000 The magic of homophones.

Latin has the opposite issue, in which it uses a lot of the same words that drastically change their grammatical meaning based on context. (The word "ut" is a practical bastard when trying to translate it because of the million things you have to keep track of like if it's a result clause or not)

For instance, in Latin, the preposition "cum" (pronounced 'coom') meanings "with," when followed by an ablative.

BUT if it's at the start of a clause, it makes a "cum" clause which can change the meaning of the translation completely and drastically, meaning it can be cum temporal, (time at which an event takes place) cum circumstantial, (circumstances around the events taking place) cum causal, (showing a cause/effect relationship between the two clauses) or cum concessive (showing a disconnect or contradiction between the two clauses).

Examples:

Spoiler

1.Temporal-
Cum in Romae estis, agite sicut Romani.
When you are in Rome, do as the Romans [do.]
2. Circumstantial-
Cum Caesar loquatur, omnia audiunt.
When Caesar [the Emperor] speaks, all listen.
3. Casual
Cum nox caderet, fugeremus
Because night fell, we were fleeing.
4. Concessive
Cum dux fugitus essem, tamen nemo timorem erat
Although the general had fled, no one was scared.

So yeah, English isn't a uniquely bitchy language. It's just the one we're all used to being bitchy.

 

[NauseatingKittenz188]

would Orwellian words or Newspeack consider as a new language?
Ex. doublespeck , crimethink
the interesting thing about Orwellian words is that Orwell make up new words but these words use English but don't exist in any English dictionary.

another thing that I wanted to bring up is the idea of combine different languages to create new words that has a new meaning or has same meaning as another word. This would be a interesting way to show two cultures influencing each other or world building.
ex "Ageta( fried) chicken"

I have no idea if is already a thing so if this have been done in other storys then leave some examples.

 

[DANDAN_THE_DANDAN]

@NauseatingKittenz188 Last time I heard, Spanglish is a thing

@Tamerlane Oh wow I'm using this.

 

[mochi]

@DANDAN_THE_DANDAN sure, both allow designing any kind of character. The difference is, inkscape is for one-off (geometric) designs, whereas fontforge is for making a real font that you can use in the computer to display any text that uses those letters.