Hi everyone! In a book i'm writing I need a little help with a language i'm creating. I was just wondering if there's anything I should or shouldn't do. It's in a civilisation based off of both the ancient Greek and Egyptian time periods but they are more technologically advanced than we are right now….Any idea's or tips???
I have some tips, but they depend on how much of this language you want to create. Do you just want enough for people and place names? Or do you want a minimal grammar to write basic sentences in the language? Or do you want to go all out with a full grammar, formal language, slang, possibly alternate dialects (à la Tolkien)?
Let me know how much you want to create and I’ll share some tips based on that. :)
Thank you so much!!! Ideally i need enough so that I can have a few decent sentences every now and then in this language. It will be translated by another character to someone who doesn't understand but i need help with the flow of the words and all that. So ideally minimal grammar would be great thanks!!
All right, a minimal grammar! So, tips:
Dos
- Decide on the sounds of your language, and stick to them. English has 44, with way too many vowel sounds for the letters we have for them. Hawaiian has something more like 11 (don't quote me on that, though). If you really like the sound of an existing language, you could base your sound system on it (Greek, for example). Using only a subset of all the possible sounds in the universe will give your language its own flavour and consistency.
- Create some content words using those sounds: these are your nouns, verbs, and (optionally) things like adjectives and adverbs. It's hard to play around with grammar rules when you have no words to play with.
- Create the grammar you need. There's no great need to create a system for how your language handles subordinate clauses if your sentences in-story don't have any subordinate clauses.
- Have a different grammar to English, at the very least in parts. For example, English adds suffixes to form the past tense: I dance –> I danced. Maybe your language adds prefixes. Maybe it changes the vowel in the verb. Maybe it uses an auxilliary verb (a bit like, 'I did dance'). Maybe it has several past tenses, one to mean within the last 24 hours, one to mean within the time the speaker was alive, and one for events that occurred before the speaker was born. Maybe it doesn't encode for tense at all and the speaker needs to indicate time (last week on monday I dance).
- Create words that are relevant to your culture. They probably don't have kangaroos, so they won't have a word for one. However, they might have words for seven different seasons or souls-that-have-died-but-not-passed-through-to-the-afterlife-yet. What's common and important about their culture, setting, etc.? They'll have words for that.
- Look at grammars for existing languages (I use wikipedia for this). You can glean ideas for different features and often realise that there are other ways of doing a thing than the ways that the language/s you know use/s.
Don'ts
- Don't make this language a cipher of English. That would mean that for every word in English there's an exact equivalent in your language, and this is not realistic. Throw any English sentence through Google Translate to a few other languages, and you'll find that not only do the words not happen in the same order, but there aren't even the same number of words. If "kai manan so nali manan ta yetsu" = "This book is the book I bought" you've basically replaced every English word with something foreign. Don't do that.
- Don't make it illegible/unpronounceable. Say I have the word 'cllrrrstrixnaie' - it looks like a cat ran over the keyboard, you can't even imagine how to say that. Then I tell you, "It's pronounced Coll-strik-nay." What I should have done is spell it something like 'colstriknay' in the first place. ;)
Any questions, just ask! Also, for a more in-depth resource, check out the Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder. It's available for free online, and it's amazing.
OMG THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!!!!
