Language as System (What does it Mean)
In the last post, I considered the ways that thinking linguistically about the people, culture, setting o a fantasy world can greatly enhance immersion and realism. Now, 'I’ll give a brief overview of some of the ways in which the more structural elements of a conlang (its vocabulary, its grammar) can be crafted into a story.
Syntax
Syntax is my favorite part of language, and also the most gritty, grimy, dorky part. Basically, Syntax is interested in compositionality. How do the different parts of a language work together to compose a phrase, a sentence? You can tell a story even at this abstracted level. My favorite example of syntactic storytelling in a conlang comes from Klingon. The word order of Klingon is Object-Verb-Subject. Now this word order (incidentally the opposite of English’s SVO order) is extremely rare among earth languages. I believe there’s only like 5% of the world’s languages that favor this word order. So what is being said with this unusual word order? Why, that Klingon is alien of course! That it’s an off-world language! By using a rare word-order, Marc Okrand, the creator of Klingon, was able to communicate the literal non-earth origin of his extraterrestrial conlang.Phonetics
If the Lexicon is a list of all the words of a language, the Phonetic Inventory is a list of all the sounds of a language. Choosing the sounds to compose a language with involves a delicate mixture of logical necessity with subjective aesthetic choice. The Conlanger starts off with some arbitrary choices in regards to what sounds she wants in her language and then proceeds from there, deriving the remaining sounds according to rules of phonetic distribution. Let me briefly explain what I mean.
For my Draconic language, I wanted a harsh, crackling sound. Something like fire burning a piece of wood. In order to achieve this. I decided to make k the most represented sound. Now k, is what is called a stop consonant. That is, you produce it by making a blockage (a stop) with your tongue and then quickly release it. Languages tend to want to fill out the oral space. If I have a k stop consonant, in the back of the mouth, I need a t stop consonant towards the front, and a p stop consonant at the lips. But wait, we’re not finished: p,t,k might fill out the oral space, but they are all devoiced (pronounced with the vocal folds at rest). We want Draconic to be an energetic, loud language. Voiced sounds are more prominent than voiceless ones, so we decide that all voiceless sounds in Draconic will have a voiced counterpart, which gives us p,b,t,d,k,g as our stop consonants. I could keep going of course, deriving out the entire phonetic inventory, but as you can see aesthetic and objective judgements are required at this stage.Phonology
Phonetics is what sounds you have; phonology is how they are put together. There are literally so, so many things you can do at this level. Do you want simple syllables or horrible stuffed syllables full of clusters? Do you want a tonal language? A Stress-initial language? What happens in rapid speech? Linguistic Overwhelm!
For the time being, I’ll focus on syllable structure. Basically, a syllable is a vowel. Just a single vowel, with stuff added optionally to the front (the onset) or the back (the coda) of the vowel. Here is an abstract representation of the single-syllable words sing and cat.
The size of a syllable has repercussions on what kind of writing system you’ll want to use. For example a language with a simple syllable structure (CV) might favor a syllabary as a writing system (where each symbol is a Consonant vowel combination, hiragana and katakana being examples ), whereas a language with a more complex maximal syllable (CCCVCC) would favor an alphabetical system. The syllable size might also affect the ease with which the language is acquired or understood by real-world learners. I remember having to considerably abridge the first draft of my Draconic lexicon because the words were too confoundedly long.Language change
The rate and extent of change in a language corresponds to degree and kind of contact with other languages and the stability of transmission between generations. An isolated language, as linguists have observed, is less likely to exhibit startling variations; is less likely to incorporate grammatical structures from other languages (though it may borrow some words); and is more likely to display some idiosyncratic or unusual grammatical feature, like an evidentiality system (a grammatical paradigm that allows speakers to specify the reliability of their information); and is more likely to have a conservative rate of change. A high-contact language on the other hand, will have lots of internal variation (in terms of different accents and dialects); lots of borrowing; a flattening of unusual grammatical features; and an openness to accepting new elements. Keep an eye out for opportunities to tell a story in the deep time of your world through long-term conlang history.Semantics and word-classification
You’ve probably heard that in French tables are girls and plates are boys. Well, not really. What’s actually going on is that the french words for “table” and “plate,” la table, le plat are classified as belonging to the feminine and masculine gender respectively. Grammatical gender has nothing to do with physical/psychological gender (not quite true, it has a something to do with it, but we can discuss that later). Grammatical gender is just a book-keeping system for organizing words into different groupings. I took this idea of organizing words into different grammatical categories for my draconic language, which has three genders: animal, vegetable, and mineral. This classification is explained as being an artifact of the Elemental Language’s influence on Draconic. The elemental language classified all things according to their elemental composition, a feature with Draconic later adopted and modified.
I've thought about creating my own languages for quite a while now, but after reading Mark Rosenfelder's "The Language Construction Kit" and browsing Holly Lisle's "Create a Language Clinic", I realized this is way beyond what I can do. I tried getting into the IPA chart to understand sounds and the syntax, and it just leaves my head jumbled. No matter how hard I try to understand the elements of linguistics, I can't seem to even catch a thread of the process.
So my hat's off to those of you who can do this! Well done!
Fascinating, well-thought out. This is the type of content I love to see on Substack