#Klingon Sindarin and Black Speech for fictional languages

[scifigeneration]

How to build a 'perfect' language

by Bettina Beinhoff

A document in Tengwar, the script of the Elvish languages invented by JRR Tolkien, Dozza, Italy. Luca Lorenzelli via Shutterstock

It’s well known that JRR Tolkien wrote the Lord of the Rings cycle to create people to speak the languages he had invented. But, in the television age, artificially created or invented languages – we call them “conlangs” – have been gaining increasing attention with the popularity of television series such as Star Trek and Game of Thrones, and films such as Avatar.

Fantasy and science fiction are the ideal vehicles for conlangs. Marc Okrand, an American linguist whose core research area is Native American languages, invented Klingon for Star Trek, while Paul Frommer of the University of Southern California created the Na'vi language for Avatar.

The fantasy series Game of Thrones involved several languages, including Dothraki and Valyrian, which were created by David J Peterson, a “conlanger” who has invented languages for several other shows. Most recently, fantasy thriller The City and The City featured the language Illitan, created by Alison Long of Keele University in the UK.

I teach how to construct languages and one question my students usually ask is: “How do I make a perfect language?” I need to warn that it’s impossible to make a language “perfect” – or even “complete”. Rather, an invented language is more likely to be appropriate for the context – convincing and developed just enough to work in the desired environment. But here are a few things to bear in mind.

Who will speak this language and why?

It is very important to be clear about the aims of the language and its (fictional or real) speakers. When conlangs are created for a specific fictional character, the aims and speakers are determined by the story, the author or producer.

In some cases, fragments or descriptions of the language do exist. This was the case for Illitan, which was described as having “jarring” sounds in the novel The City and The City and there were a few Dothraki expressions in the first Game of Thrones novel. But what if there are no instructions? In a survey I ran a few years ago, many language creators pointed out that a sense of aesthetics and beauty guided them, along with the need to make the conlangs sound natural and a very pragmatic sense of how easily the languages could be pronounced.

There is also a strong link between language and culture, where some languages attract a large fan base because of the culture and community this language represents. A good example is Na’vi, which attracts many learners because of its welcoming community of speakers. In some cases the language itself has developed a strong culture and community, as is the case for Esperanto, which aims to bring people together regardless of their background and supports a strong sense of solidarity.

Start with sounds

The sound system is typically the starting point for language creators. This makes sense, given that sound is usually the first thing that we encounter in a new language. Do we want our conlang to sound harsh, alien or even aggressive? In the Klingon sound system this effect is achieved as follows:

Fricative consonants – like the initial sounds in the words “chair”, “show” and “jump” or the final sound in the Scottish word “loch”.

Plosive consonants – such as “t”, “p” and “k” – ideally produced with a stronger puff of air than is customary in spoken English.

Sounds that are unusual – at least to the ears of English speakers, who are typically the primary target audience. So imagine a consonant that sounds like a “k” that is produced far back in the throat (a sound which exists in Modern Standard Arabic) or a “g” that is produced more like a “gargle” and exists, for example, in Modern Greek and Icelandic.

These sounds all contribute to Klingon’s alien quality. On the other hand, Tolkien’s Elvish languages of Sindarin and Quenya were developed to sound aesthetically pleasing and – according to Tolkien himself – are intended to sound “of a European kind”. So Tolkien’s Elvish languages have systems which are much closer to those of European languages such as Welsh, Finnish and Old English, all of which influenced Tolkien when creating these languages.

Words and customs

Once we know how our language sounds, we can develop words. Here, the link to the culture of the speakers is important in establishing the most important words and expressions. For example, the Na’vi are deeply connected to nature and this connection is ingrained in their words, metaphors and customs. For example, when the Na'vi kill an animal they speak a prayer to show respect, gratitude and humility.

In contrast, the Dothraki – nomadic warriors relying on horses – literally say: “Do you ride well?” when asking: “Are you well?”

Grammar

Now we need to put our words together in a sensible way, including expressing tenses and plural forms. We can do this by adding different endings – so, for example, Esperanto uses the verb ending -as to express present tense, -os for past and -is for future, as in amas (love), amos (loved) and amis (will love).

We also need to decide on the word order and sentence structure. English has a typical structure of Subject-Verb-Object, but an alien-sounding conlang like Klingon may use a more unusual structure like Object-Subject-Verb – for example, the book (Object) – my friend (Subject) – reads (Verb).

Writing systems

Writing systems are bound to the culture of the speakers – and not all languages are written. Cultures with purely oral traditions, like the Dothraki, do not write. However, where such writing systems appear, they are often an artistic endeavour in themselves. The most famous example is Tengwar, one of the scripts Tolkien developed for the Elvish languages.

The first article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in JRR Tolkien’s Tengwar script (transcribed from English). Alatius/Wikimedia Commons

Klingon maintains its alien quality through very spiky characters and Esperanto, developed to be learned easily, contained some symbols which have subsequently been changed as they were too cumbersome.

So, like natural languages, conlangs change and develop (for example, all conlangs regularly acquire new words). What is important, though, is to keep the speaker community active, otherwise only fragments of your conlang may remain, as is the case for Sauron’s Black Speech in the Lord of the Rings. But given what we know about the evil Sauron, perhaps that is just as well.

About The Author:

Bettina Beinhoff is a Senior Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and English Language at Anglia Ruskin University

This article is republished from our content partners over at The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. 

#Language #science fiction #Science Fiction and Fantasy #Science

[samalusia]

So you want to be a conlanger?

A new way to learn a language: create one!

You’d be forgiven for reacting with confusion and bemusement upon reading the title of this post. To clear things up, a conlanger is somebody who builds a language from scratch (a constructed language, or conlang) for the purposes of use in a work of fiction. Arguably the most famous conlanger in history is J. R. R. Tolkien, who was singlehandedly responsible for the creation of all the languages we see (or rather hear) in his famous Legendarium. His works include the Elven languages such as Sindarin, Quenya, and Noldorin, as well as the menacing Black Speech of Mordor. Of course, Tolkien’s name can be attributed to numerous more conlangs, but detailing them all here would be too mountainous a task. I’ll revisit them another day.

The reach of conlangs in the modern world is vast and often flies under many peoples’ radars. World famous films and TV shows often prominently feature conlangs, such as Parceltongue in Harry Potter, Klingon in Star Trek, or Dothraki and the Valyrian languages in Game of Thrones. All of these conlangs have a common trait in respect to their genesis – all of them were created and nuanced by linguists. Tolkien himself, before working on his Legendarium, was a Philologist (a branch of linguistics concerning written texts and etymologies). As a linguist myself, perhaps I am rather biased in the ways I appreciate these conlangs and their creators; nevertheless, the sheer task undertaken in creating them cannot be understated. Producing a conlang has been an integral part in a worldbuilding project I have been working on for some months. It has undoubtedly taken up the bulk of the time spent on the project and is certainly far from finished. Regularly frequenting online conlanging communities provided me with a wealth of inspiration and taught me something valuable: there are plenty of aspiring conlangers out there, most of whom are extremely talented and are capable of creating languages that could stand toe-to-toe with the aforementioned established giants, and some which, well…won’t. The discrepancy between those that captivate the imagination and those that do not can be summarised in one word: realism. It’s forgivable to think that in order to create a language that’s believably fictitious (and in some cases, inherently alien), it has to differ as much as possible from any natural language on Earth. This train of thought often leads to conlangers designing their lexical inventory (the words of the language) to include long and incredibly unpronounceable words that essentially seem like their cat has just walked over their keyboard. In my experiences, the opposite tends to be the case. The linguistic brilliance of Dothraki, High Valyrian, Quenya, etc., stems from the fact that they simply sound real. This is because they were all heavily based on, and influenced by, real world languages, and abide by the same linguistic rules that natural languages are bound to.

So, with this information, potential conlangers are faced with a dilemma: how do you make a language sound ‘real’, but also different enough that it passes as a true fictional language? Unfortunately, there’s no clear way to tackle this. However, from my personal conlanging experiences, the best solution is to find a relatively obscure real language (which won’t be a hard task – there are over 6,500 spoken languages in the world), familiarise yourself with the linguistic properties of that language, e.g. its phonological system and rules, its syntactic structures, etc., and stay close to this source language when developing the conlang. Some people might be put off by needing to have such a focus on stereotypically ‘boring’ elements such as grammar, but there is definitely more to it than that. Some of the most fun I’ve had so far with my conlang has been developing and evolving its phonology (the system of sounds that make up the words of the language). In this arena, your creativity is absolute, and with so many possible phonemic combinations, you can produce something beautiful time and time again.

I’ll talk more about my conlang in an upcoming post – but be warned, it’s still very much a WIP. One thing to remember, though, is to embrace inconsistencies in language. No single language on Earth (that I’m aware of at least) has grammatical or structural rules that have no exceptions to them. English is particularly famous for its inconsistencies (anybody want to say “i before e”??), and traits such as this are inherent and important for making a language sound properly real. It adds an extra dimension to it that implies a history of linguistic change. For linguist nerds such as myself, it makes me think in detail about that history: what culture or country invaded which in order to instigate linguistic change or assimilation that’s ultimately led to these weird structural systems? What social or technological development drove the change? The potential answers to these are vast, but the important point here is that nearly every component to a conlang is admissible, no matter how strange it becomes, so long as the feel of the language is properly embraced.

#text post #conlang #conlanging #linguistics #phonology #language #fictional languages #worldbuilding #writing #writing inspiration #ramble