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Using Made-Up Languages



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Fri Apr 08, 2016 2:59 am
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Werthan says...



How should I approach using made-up languages in fiction? I started making up stories without even thinking of publishing anything, so I have a bunch of languages that are nigh unpronouncable to the average English speaker, or pretty much anyone for that matter, since the goal was that they'd be realistic, not that they'd be marketable. Words like "Choskchssör", "Laifftesjot", "Hääde", "Qrainespfuhr", "Zaahr", "Lokarnien", "Leuaniea", and "Fua'da" are just going to leave people bewildered, even if those are the kinds of names for things you'd likely see on a legitimate otherworld with languages genetically unrelated to anything on Earth rather than just combinations of English sounds put together in ways to sound vaguely exotic (and yes, the way those words are written are not supposed to be pronounced as English. They're romanizations that I made after I decided how things would be pronounced and I still tweak them sometimes. For example, the z in "Zaahr" is like the z in pizza, the aa is like the a in Chicago with a Chicago accent, and the hr is like the pronunciation of ḥā' in Iraqi Arabic, but not like Modern Standard Arabic). If I'm going to publish anything, will people like the made-up languages as-is or should I just switch the sounds over to their closest English equivalent and then spell the words that way?
Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde

(And as long as you don't have
This: Die and become!
You are only a gloomy guest
On the dark Earth)

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  





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Sun Apr 10, 2016 2:14 am
Rosendorn says...



Okay, noticed you were looking for feedback on this in another thread in another forum. Next time you don't get a reply in a few days, I'd suggest patience, because Resources doesn't get that high a level of traffic and this is actually a pretty specialized topic when it comes to writing advice. If you think a topic was posted in the wrong forum in Resources, ask somebody in dark green or light green under the "Resources" section of this list to move it for you.

Onto the question itself.

As a general rule, you should not write made up languages in fiction. For multiple reasons.

One: Language development is still relatively unknown even to linguists. We have no idea why people chose to use sounds in certain ways, and linguists dedicate their whole lives to this sort of thing.

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.

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.

All of this adds up to: you're mixing languages' phonetic codes in ways that you would need a deep understanding of phonetics to modify, and that takes quite a bit of time to master.

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.

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.

If you really absolutely want to create a language, pick up this book by a professional fantasy language creator (yes, that job exists, and that should tell you just how nuanced language creation is). It breaks down why successful languages such as Klingon work, and yes, it is because linguists were involved.

Tolkien got away with making fantasy languages because he was a literal linguist. Most fantasy writers do not have the skills he had to generate language, and it's best to leave it alone. Unless, of course, you're willing to put in the work understanding linguistics to generate something sensical.

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.

By the way, you can look up the phonemes for any language by googling "[language] IPA" and accessing fairly comprehensive wikipedia articles. This is one of those cases where wikipedia is actually a fairly reliable source, but still cross check.

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.
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo

Ink is blood. Paper is bandages. The wounded press books to their heart to know they're not alone.
  





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Sun Apr 10, 2016 3:51 am
Werthan says...



Rosendorn wrote:As a general rule, you should not write made up languages in fiction. For multiple reasons.



Then what should I write, Old High German and Latin?

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.



Those aren't all from the same language. That's like complaining Ubykh and Hawai'ian aren't internally consistent. Also, Choskchsskiirt is most similar to High Alemmanic phonologically, not Finnish and Arabic.

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.



Have you actually seen some of the words in real languages? Look at Georgian if you want a bunch of hard sounds next to each other, or Nuxálk. Lots of languages are far, far worse than Choskchsskiirt, which is only CCCCVCCCC and about equal to English or German.

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.



If you mean <hr>, that's a digraph, so it's not silent. It represents a sound somewhere between an h and an r, because I don't like typing uncommon diacritics. Also, I'm pretty sure the Great Vowel shift didn't happen because the English didn't want to sound French, considering the same kind of thing has happened in Icelandic, which is amongst the most isolated languages on the planet.

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.



I only use names like these for places, characters, etc. Otherwise I do use common names. Sometimes I use common names where I probably should use these terms, like referring to Zaahr as "the Earth" when it's not our Earth, and their sun as "the Sun" and their moon as "the Moon" and things like that. There are also some iffy ones, like the "riders" and the "World Tree" and the "thunder drum" among others that could probably go either way.

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.



I know IPA. I just didn't use it here because I thought it would alienate people. I used different romanization schemes for each of the languages. Here's all the IPA and glosses:

Choskchsskiirt:

Choskchssör
[ˈχɔsk͡x˩ssøːʀ˩]
choskch-s-sör
people-RFX-earth
"People's Land"
(The first [χ] is supposed to be chi, the uvular one, because the phoneme /x/ is uvular before back vowels. The second one is part of the velar affricate. In this language the word for earth/dirt is polysemous with the word for country, so I just generally translate it as "land".)


Laifftesjot
[ˈlaɪfː˥tʰəˌʃɔtʰ˥]
(I don't have a gloss for this yet, but it's some sort of adjective + noun compound, hence the pitch accent appearing on two syllables within the word, this is a village in the Southwest near the Capitol. Also, geminate consonants are underlyingly consonant clusters, while long vowels have a phonemic length contrast, hence the difference in quality on all non-low vowels between long and short vowels.)

Hääde
[ˈhæ̝ː˥.tə]
PR
"Hääde (a village in Kchroanzeel)"
(This is from an old foreign term, like Berlin.)

Qrainespfuhr
[ˈʡʀaɪ˩nəsˌp͡fʊʜ˩]
qraine-s-pfuhr
PR-RFX-forest
"Qraine's Forest"
(This one is a beast in terms of weird sounds, but it pretty much just sounds like German when you say it instead of some atrocity.)


Zaahr
[t͡saːʜ˩]
"(The) World"
(This is also polysemous with the common word for "ground", but when I use it, I'm referring to the world, unless I just translate it as "Earth".)

Lokar:

Lokarnien
[ˈɺoː˥˩.ka˞ˌnʲɛn]
lokar-nien
PR-ground
"Lokar-land"
(The word for ground is polysemous with the word for country in Lokar. This also gets translated to English as "land". This is an adjective + noun compound like "Deutschland", not noun + noun, although Lokar are really inspired by Baltic and Slavic tribes.)

Leuaniean:

Leuaniea
[ˈleu̯a.njea̯]
PR
"Leuaniean Empire"

Fua'da:

Fua'da
[ˈfʷaʔ.da]
fua'-da
PR-ADJ
"Fua'-ish"

Also, if you think there aren't languages that vowels like Finnish and consonants like Arabic, look up Chechen. There's nothing I could make that hasn't been done in real life.

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.


I invented my world just so I could have an excuse to make up languages. Is that a good enough reason to keep them? Or should I just replace the made-up languages with Old High German and Latin and things like that for the purpose of stories and make up languages on the side? I love making up languages, and I could go on about the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of Choskchsskiirt all day if you wanted me to. I could show you giant lists of sound changes from the proto-language with all sorts of umlaut and chain consonant shifts. But that's not what this site is for, this site is for writing stories. I mostly didn't want to talk like I was knowledgable about language because I was afraid people would think I was just an intellectual and not an artist, that I only had a head and not a heart.
Last edited by Werthan on Sun Apr 10, 2016 5:53 am, edited 1 time in total.
Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde

(And as long as you don't have
This: Die and become!
You are only a gloomy guest
On the dark Earth)

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  





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Sun Apr 10, 2016 5:50 am
Vervain says...



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.
stay off the faerie paths
  





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Sun Apr 10, 2016 6:02 am
Werthan says...



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.


Well, the audience in mind was "the kind of person who likes the names in Russian novels rather than being annoyed by them". I love reading all sorts of foreign names in foreign books. And the work this is from has a whole ton of foreign culture too. Will that also alienate people?
Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde

(And as long as you don't have
This: Die and become!
You are only a gloomy guest
On the dark Earth)

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  





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Sun Apr 10, 2016 6:44 am
Rosendorn says...



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.
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo

Ink is blood. Paper is bandages. The wounded press books to their heart to know they're not alone.
  





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Sun Apr 10, 2016 6:52 am
Werthan says...



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.
'

Well, the stories aren't really framing for worldbuilding, but the worldbuilding isn't framing for stories either. They're both just sort of seperate things that meet in the middle. I don't know what to do about that. Right now this is my purpose for writing: "Writing is a form of prayer" - Kafka. If I just liked to worldbuild and make languages, I wouldn't bother writing at all.
Und so lang du das nicht hast
Dieses: Stirb und Werde!
Bist du nur ein trüber Gast
Auf der dunklen Erde

(And as long as you don't have
This: Die and become!
You are only a gloomy guest
On the dark Earth)

- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  





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Sun Apr 10, 2016 5:53 pm
Rosendorn says...



And therein lies your problem.

Stories and worldbuilding are not separate. Stories come from worldbuilding, and worldbuilding comes from stories. It's people who build society, then society builds people, then people change society. It's a sociologist's chicken and egg scenario, where we're never quite sure which came first.

Your setting influences your characters, which in turn influences their choices, which in turn influences how society perceives them and changes (or doesn't) to meet their needs.

A comic book illustrator I follow once got a question: "do you draw the background or character first?" and he answered with "I draw both at once so they look like they belong together." The same principle applies for writing. You build the setting and the character at the same time so they fit together.

If you've built them separate, then how are you going to make them fit together? Separate building means you don't really have a deep understanding of how the world will react to the plot. You don't know how the world and upbringing will impact the character's choices. If society's told them that they are in a certain role and some choices are morally bad, then you have to decide how much they listened, and what repercussions they get for either listening or not. Whether or not they listened depends on their own personality, which is part innate and part reactive to what they were taught.

See how woven it is?

If your language is made without thought to how people will speak it, then it sounds like you haven't given thought to how the characters will be speaking it. If that's dealt with, great. But if that's not? Then you have a much bigger problem than simply "will readers understand it."

You need to mesh your world and story. It's the only way anything plot wise will sound plausible.
A writer is a world trapped in a person— Victor Hugo

Ink is blood. Paper is bandages. The wounded press books to their heart to know they're not alone.
  





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Thu Apr 21, 2016 9:17 pm
Tecumseh says...



If I am repeating something, my apologies, but, ... I skipped past the whole like, "YOU KNOW NOTHING ABOUT LINGUISTICS, PROVE YOURSELF MORTAL BEFORE I GIVE THEE AN ANSWER" conversation that occured.

Books That Worked Doin' What You Wanna Do
First, maybe give one or more of these books a (re)-read, as they either feature made up languages or, in Tolkein's case, were made pretty much just to showcase those languages and ended up badass anyway:

- The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and The Hobbit, Tolkein
- Always Coming Home by Ursula K Le Guin
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (it'll have the Russian sounds you want)
- The Witcher by Andrzej Sapkowski.

How To Also Do That
1. Grab the phonetic rules of Russian (or whatever target language you want things to sound like) to come up with a handy dandy guide of what consonant clusters and other combos are and are not legal, and make sure you don't break those rules. What is it, phonotactics?

2. Grab the same rules of English (or whatever language that your readers speak natively), and pay attention specifically to the illegal consonant cluster rules (like, in English, you don't mix nasals with plosives so you don't have like, "mtar" as a word, but "vlim" is okay), and add those restrictions, which are mostly here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_p ... evel_rules

3. Party hard with pretty sounds that don't confuse us ignorant 'muricans.

Worldbuilding In General
I can't leave alone the "i draw both at the same time" comment because it just is not useful. Rosendorn, you seem to have a habit of assuming everybody is an idiot and then telling them that things're way more complicated than they need to be.

Whenever a comic book artist does anything, regardless of the order they draw in, they always find out the composition, unless they're amateurs, and that composition remains the driving force behind the work, no matter the subject matter or the medium.

Comic books are an iterative process of thumbs -> roughs -> pencils -> inks -> colors. When you say "worldbuilding is interwoven" you aren't wrong, but it's not a useful statement. It just makes it out like writing and worldbuilding are just discouragingly too complicated and you have to come up with both at once, even when that's not the case at all. The composition always drives the artwork, and the story always drives the writing.

So, OP, in general: basically you determine your plot, first. Screw the world it exists in. You want your composition, here. You are interested in those dramatic moments that you want to write. Read K M Weiland's Secrets Of Story Structure for a push so you know where to put which dramatic event. As you do this, if some idea of your world would go really well, make a note of it, but just focus on your plot.

Next, you can build your world with your plot in mind, because you now have a new perspective: "How can I use the world as a communication device for the conflict and themes within my awesome plot?" Do the same thing with your character designs. Hammer out your characters with more priority than your world, first. Decide what is important about that character, what they value. Go through the values of the character and decide whether or not the world they live in upholds or opposes each of those values. What would cause more intrigue and conflict within your plot?

So, marry the worldbuilding in its broad strokes to your plot points, your character motivations. Once that's done with, have fun with the details, because you will then have a direction and theme for those details to go in.
  





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Tue May 10, 2016 1:43 pm
Tenyo says...



Tenyo input!

Hakuna mattata! (Lion King, "No Worries")
Valar maghulis. (Song of Ice and Fire, "All men must die".)
Diftor heh smusma. (Star Treck, "Live long and prosper")

Personally, my favourite uses of a made up language in books are the languages I can interact with. I think no matter how complex you make your language, it's the greetings, proverbs and repetitions that matter most because they're the ones that will really bring it to life. One of the best feelings when reading a book is when those meaningless words that exist to express another language actually take form and become recognisable.

Because of that, if you're writing in English then it's probably best to have words that are easily pronounceable in English. It will make it easier to read and say them, and in turn easier to interact with them.
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Sun May 15, 2016 3:34 pm
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Kale says...



I'm late to the feedback party, but since no one else has covered this, I figure I may as well toss in my two cents.

And I'm going to start with vehemently disagreeing with a lot of what Tecumseh said. Not all stories are plot-driven, and so not all stories benefit from a plot-first approach.

Based on my own observations, stories tend to fall into three main categories based on what drives them: plot, character, and setting/world. Plot-driven stories are straightforward: their main focus is what goes on. Character-driven stories are also pretty straightforward: they focus on characters and why they do what they do. Setting-driven stories are the oddballs, and they focus more on exploring the scope of the world they reside in without necessarily caring much about plot or characters (though they may utilize both, with The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion being excellent examples).

You're definitely aiming for the setting-driven story type, and while this type may not have as wide an appeal as the plot- and character-driven types, there's definitely a market for it, especially in the speculative fiction genres.

However, it's absolutely necessary to figure out what you want to do with this story because it will affect how you approach the story and share it.

If you just want to have fun with world and share it with other people who appreciate the intricacies of worldbuilding, AND you don't mind other people playing in your sandbox and contributing to the world as well, you'll need to write some plot- and/or character-centric stories set in the world to generate interest and a fanbase before unleashing the full force of your worldbuilding and conlanging upon your fans. There are always fans who want to know more about the intricacies of the setting and character histories, and they'll get as much enjoyment out of your sharing as you will out of the sharing. And if you keep yourself open to derivative works, these fans will have even more fun and tell all their similar-minded friends about your awesome world that they can play in, and everyone will be happy.

The only downside is that it takes a lot of work for almost no pay-off to establish yourself in this way (unless reader engagement is pay-off for you), and unless you get the initial interest-generating stories traditionally published, you're probably not going to make any monetary profit off of it. If you don't care about making money, then blogging-oriented social media sites are perfect vehicles for getting your stories and world out there because they also allow for closer interaction with your fans (which is a large part of the fun of playing around in other peoples' worlds).

If you want to make money off of this though, you're going to have to write a lot of stories set in the world and get them published, which means weeding out the more intricate aspects of the worldbuilding (like the conlangs) for the purposes of accessibility. Once you've become established, then you can start slipping in more and more of the intricacies, and one day, you may even get the opportunity to publish supplemental world setting materials.

The thing is, you absolutely need to be established first before you can go all the way with incorporating your conlangs. George R. R. Martin can get away with it because he has decades of publications behind him; same goes for all the other spec-fic writers who are noted for their worldbuilding, such as C. J. Cherryh (I'm not a fan) and Guy Gavriel Kay (he needs more love). All the writers for the Star Trek and Star Wars expanded universes are building off of the pre-established universes, even if they themselves lack credentials.

So either way, you're going to have to establish yourself and your world with more traditional stories, and which way you go will ultimately hinge on which is more important to you: enjoyment or income.

Or, if you're writing this primarily for yourself, you can just take all of the above and toss it out the window. If you love it that much, just write it and forget about everyone else. Just don't expect any glowing receptions if you later choose to share it.
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There are some things you can't share without ending up liking each other, and knocking out a twelve-foot mountain troll is one of them.
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