The Conlang thread: tlhIngan QIp

Started by Legend, Dec 17, 2016, 11:09 PM

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Legend

Constructed languages are beautiful and awesome if you're into world building. We should talk about them more often.

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Sample text in the Betenic alphabetSample text in Davesh in the Davé alphabetLong sample text in MártölammëSample text in KalaSample text in the Oxidilogi alphabet
The most famous conlangs are:
  • Esperanto, spoken by millions. It's a natural language at this point.
  • Klingon, spoken by thousands
  • lojban, a language designed to lack ambiguity
  • Elvish from The Lord of the Rings (Tolkien made the books to showcase his languages)
  • Na'vi from Avatar
  • Dothraki from game of thrones



I've worked on a few conlangs but they've all kinda merged into VizionEck's.




Legend

Star Citizen has a conlang.

Cute Pikachu

Im still confused what this is lol.
The Vizioneck Nintendo Fanboy!

Switch Software Sales Guide:
http://vizioneck.com/forum/index.php?topic=5895.msg218699#new

the-pi-guy

Im still confused what this is lol.
A thread about constructed languages.  Languages that people make for game, TV, movies, books, etc are all in that category.  

I've always wanted to sit down and create my own language and make a world with history like The Elder Scrolls and Lord of the Rings.  

Legend

Im still confused what this is lol.
Japanese, English, French, etc. all developed naturally.

Conlangs are languages that are developed artificially by small groups of people. They are sometimes designed as universal languages which are easy for most languages to learn, or they are artistic and designed for movies/games. Like in Game of Thrones when they talk in a foreign language it's not just random sounds, it's actually a fully developed real language with thousands of words.
A thread about constructed languages.  Languages that people make for game, TV, movies, books, etc are all in that category.  

I've always wanted to sit down and create my own language and make a world with history like The Elder Scrolls and Lord of the Rings.  
It's not that hard to create a simple conlang. Most conlangs only have a few dozen words and very simple grammar. Dragon speak in Skyrim for example is extremely simple and not a full language.

Get started and have fun!!!

Legend



the-pi-guy

It's not that hard to create a simple conlang. Most conlangs only have a few dozen words and very simple grammar. Dragon speak in Skyrim for example is extremely simple and not a full language.

Get started and have fun!!!
The biggest reason I've never done it, is because I would want to flesh it out as much as possible.  Put a lot of work into it.  

Ignoring that though, I decided to make a little writing system today.  I'm basing it off Japanese's syllabaries.  Still working on it.  

Words will be similar to Japanese, structure wise.  

There are a few horizontal components that represent vowels and a bunch of more vertical components for consonants.  


Legend

The biggest reason I've never done it, is because I would want to flesh it out as much as possible.  Put a lot of work into it.  
I can understand that ;D


Ignoring that though, I decided to make a little writing system today.  I'm basing it off Japanese's syllabaries.  Still working on it.  

Words will be similar to Japanese, structure wise.  

There are a few horizontal components that represent vowels and a bunch of more vertical components for consonants.  
So what makes it different to japanese? Are the horizontal and vertical components unique?

What's your goal?

the-pi-guy

I can understand that ;D


So what makes it different to japanese? Are the horizontal and vertical components unique?

What's your goal?
Phonetically it's the opposite of Japanese.  

Japanese has characters for vowels and then all of the characters have the form "cv".  Consonant vowel.  So every sound in Japanese has a vowel at the end.  No double consonants. (Although there are exceptions to that).

This is basically the opposite.  
Characters have the form "vc", so words like "am" are possible, but "ma" is not.  

I find this a bit unnatural, but I just wanted to try it out.  


The horizontal are just simple lines.  Like "a" is a solid horizontal line. "--"
Verticals are usually more complicated, but one of them is just a vertical like "|" which is "m".  
Then the character "+" made by putting together, is "am".

the-pi-guy

Sharing for funsies.  

I kinda don't like it.

the-pi-guy


the-pi-guy

Someone posted this in the procedural generation Reddit.  
           
   

    Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet


I'm not really impressed though.

Legend

Thoughts?  ^
I'm getting there!

Someone posted this in the procedural generation Reddit.  
           
   

    Imgur: The most awesome images on the Internet


I'm not really impressed though.
Yeah looks really poor unless they were going for an illegible look.

Legend

@the-Pi-guy

I think it's a cool concept. Has some traces of being a featural system yet isn't as "sterile" as most of those feel to me. A ton of different ways vertical and horizontal elements can be represented. It could be cooler if you embrace this distinction between verticals and horizontals even more than in your example.

Take the Z, V, S, D, B, R, Th, T, Sh, Y, L, F, K, Ch, and W. They all have elements that have a slope of zero. Especially with something like AK, this could be confusing. A speaker would not know which horizontal lines belong to the K and which one belongs to the A unless they had experience with that specific combination.

I and O could be replaced with the horizontal lines of Z and V. Then 45 degree elements could be more common in the vertical characters, instead of only using two as a pair. IE the F character could have one instead of its horizontal bar. Sure it'd look more like the english N, but I feel it'd greatly increase clarity of the designs.


Another/alternative thing you could do is make all the vowels in a word connected. The vowel of the next element would continue from the previous vowel as if they were all a single line. This could give your script a cool visual identity and additionally help with differentiating which lines belong to which parts. It might require shallowing the I and O a bit to keep the vowel line from extending too far up or down. One negative/positive about this is that combinations of vowels and consonants would look different depending on the word they're in. On one hand this makes it harder to parse the syllable directly but on the other hand it makes it easier to read whole words since additional information is encoded in each part. Two otherwise identical words that start with I and O would never be misread as the other.


With the actual aesthetics, the characters with just straight lines feel at odds with the characters with curves. It's pretty hard to judge though without seeing the vowels and consonants overlaid. I like the visual identity of D and F. They feel unique.


It's a cool flip on Japanese to reverse the consonants and vowels. I imagine it would feel really weird for a native Japanese speaker to hear.