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Rosendorn wrote:As a general rule, you should not write made up languages in fiction. For multiple reasons.
Rosendorn wrote:
Two: Unless you have a linguistics degree and/or an incredibly good ear, you will mess it up. Right now, looking at your phonetic scheme, it does not look internally consistent. The names don't even sound like they come from related languages, and you're mixing languages that plain old don't have the same phonemes. Your language looks like a mix of Finnish and Arabic, two languages that really don't have a place meeting.
Rosendorn wrote:
This is on top of how the phonemes are difficult to string together, and humans generally don't put difficult to make sounds next to each other for the sole purpose of we don't want to work any harder than we have to. You must understand what sounds lead into each other naturally in order to create a language.
Rosendorn wrote:
Three: You have to understand how phonology transfers to orthography, aka how things are written. "R"s are usually not silent, so your broken down word really is unintuitive. To be perfectly blunt, most languages are actually fairly phonetically intuitive to understand, once you get a sense for their basic code (barring things like tonal languages, or languages that were never really written down). English is one of the few that isn't because of this thing known as the great vowel shift where the English decided they didn't want to sound French anymore (a large portion of English's vocabulary originated from French), so they changed how basically every vowel sound was pronounced.
Rosendorn wrote:
Four: When you start to rename things to make them sound fancy or "fantasy", then it does break the suspension of disbelief. People wonder why there's a made up name for something when it could be just as simple and less brain breaking to use the common name.
Rosendorn wrote:
It's really not a case of "the average English speaker" or "I wanted the languages to be realistic." Realistic languages are pronounceable, have rules, and have internal consistency. They have a set of sounds they use based on the International Phonetic Alphabet, which has nearly every language sound that exists on the planet written out in a standard format. Sometimes using on set of sounds rules out the use of others, just because those two sounds cannot be physically made by the same mouth.
Rosendorn wrote:
So unless the language serves some absolutely irreplaceable purpose in your work (things such as made up plants are an example, spells are not necessarily one), scrap it and go with common names. Linguists and readers will thank you for it.
Lareine wrote:Hey there!
Speaking as a reader, I'm not usually too fond of the use of long, impossible-to-navigate words in stories, whether as place and language names or not. See, the thing is, if I'm going to be reading a word every page or so, as a native English speaker reading English-language literature, I should be able to easily and intuitively pronounce it. It's kind of like the rule regarding how your protagonist's name should be pronounceable because the reader is going to be seeing it a lot.
By no means does it require you to make everything ridiculously simple to pronounce, but you have to take into account that for every story there is a readership. In fact, the readers are arguably the most important part of writing; we don't write to show off our own genius but to entertain and enlighten other people. As you write things like Laifftesjot, Qrainespfuhr, and Zaahr that aren't even said how they're spelled, your readership is alienated, since they wouldn't know where to even start pronouncing these things.
I've had people who don't really know how to pronounce (relatively simple) proper names in my invented country of Marad, and these are short names which for the most part are pulled directly from Old Persian and Farsi. They're also said basically exactly how they look. (For a taste: Suvani, Katin, Rouzan, Farrokh.) I'm not trying anything complicated, but I still had to be careful not to alienate my English-speaking audience with the spellings and pronunciations of these names while still staying true and respectful to the culture I set out to incorporate.
If you want to write solely for linguists and those who have in-depth linguistics education, sure, whatever. But if you're trying to write for your average person, it's probably a good idea to downsize a bit.
'Rosendorn wrote:So you do understand linguistics. Apologies. I start at the basic level and work my way up from there.
For clarification, the reason I assumed they were all the same language was your post had absolutely no indication you were asking about separate languages. Had you mentioned there were different regions in your original post, then you would have saved us both the trouble. It is unwise to assume differences are "obvious" when there is no indication of how you've worked your own internal classification system, for something we have no reference for and you already admit is potentially inaccessible. Providing a little bit more information in your original post would have avoided that.
The fact you had multiple languages would have been important to know, as would have the knowledge these were exclusively place/character/nation names. Tossing words at us and asking "are these understandable?" makes it look like you don't know what you're doing, simply because for all I know these are part of a singular language (I have seen languages crafted this poorly, so no, it's not obvious you knew what you were talking about) and are going to be routinely worked in sentences. It looked like you're asking about one example language out of the multiple you've created.
I would like to point out that nowhere did I suggest to use strictly European languages. My own world has names that are blended primarily from 4 different languages (Arabic, Persian, Hindi, and Kashmiri) with dashes of a handful of others (Tamil, Iranian, likely some Mongolian and Tibetan will be added), with a sprinkling of made up place names that still fit within the naming structure. Regional variations exist. Over 50 characters slot into different regions and the only deviations are old characters I named when I was quite young.
Looking over your replies, I'd ask yourself one key question:
Do you want to create languages, or do you want to tell stories?
If your primary purpose is to just make languages and play around for yourself, then go for it. Make whatever you want, at whatever difficultly level you want, using whatever conventions you want. It'll parallel reality, it'll look like it doesn't, and nobody else might understand but that's not the point— the point is to just create languages. There is nothing wrong with this option.
If your primary purpose is to tell stories, then the assumption is you want to tell stories to other people and have them understood by other people. This means building in a certain level of accessibility into your stories, depending on your audience. If you're writing your average genre fiction piece, meant for the average reader, then you have to consider what is pronounceable for the average speaker of whatever language it is.
No matter what language I'm working with, I make sure the orthography doesn't have sounds that are immediately unintuitive. Character names include Kerani, Isra, Vy, Jalil, Nitika, Aryan, Sakari. There's garükh yunu, a made up name, and Palanhaar, a deity name. I try to keep them relatively short, and using phonetic combinations that the average English speaker would be familiar with (with some exceptions, like the very infrequently used garükh yunu), while still understanding not everyone will know how to pronounce them. I keep it simple because language is framing my story. I add in regionally acceptable languages (as you can tell, my world is based in India) to further set the tone for culture, but otherwise make sure to keep it fairly basic.
Writing languages is fun. It's perfectly acceptable to write worlds for the sole purpose of language creation and culture exploring. But if that's your primary purpose, you've pushed all other aspects of writing to the wayside and used them as framing devices for your languages. If your purpose is to frame languages, I would suggest not to publish simply because you'll have to put things other than languages first, and it'll be less fun for you that way.
If you want to tell stories, then you must accept language is a side priority. The first priority is asking yourself what's the best way to make the story readable, which includes making it entertaining, engaging, and accessible. Your language might need simplification, your made up languages might have to become an "extra fun thing" instead of any sort of focus. Sure, you can still create gorgeous languages that linguists adore if they ever pick up your stories, but that's an easter egg.
Until you figure out your own purpose for writing, it's impossible to answer your question for what to do. Because right now, it sounds like you're quite attached to what you created and that you're using the story as a framing device for worldbuilding, which is the fun part of writing for you. But if your purpose is to tell stories, or if you want your purpose to become that you tell stories, you're going to have to revise your approach to languages so as to make stories accessible to your selected language. Not necessarily English, but your selected language of publication.
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