Good day friends and fellow nerds.
Since this is my first post of many on Substack, I hope you will permit me some small introduction: My name is Jonathan, I love sci-fi and fantasy, and I make fully fleshed-out fantasy languages. As a matter of fact, I have worked with a major social media company on a videogame langauge, and my Draconic language is scheduled for release through Kobold Press. I am also working on a Conlang to be deplyed in a full-scale musical!
I am not ashamed to admit to being an incorrigible dork. What took my attention in Baldur’s Gate III, for example, wasn’t so much romancing Lae’zel, as writing up a Githyanki lexicon with her as a primary source. I replayed Jason Mamoa speaking Dothraki in Game of Thrones an embarrassing number of times, wondering whether Dothraki was a fusional or agglutinating language--though my interest there may not have been entirely linguistic. I made my first conlang (constructed language) at around 6 years old. It was just a semi-structured sound system that mashed together French and English phonemes, the words didn’t really mean anything, but I remember the thrill it gave me to deploy fluent nonsense, and how fun it was to mystify my parents by speaking Embalenzie.
Nowadays, I still blend my love of fantasy with my enthusiasm for linguistics by creating constructed languages. I may be a bit biased here, but it seems to me that there is no better tool for immersing your audience into a fantastical world, than by deploying a conlang. You can encode a people’s history in their vocabulary, an ice-bound folk, for example, having a multitude of words for cold and sleet; you can add features that reinforce a species’ physiology, an insectoid species with mandibles having a language with a lot of click sounds; you can make correspondences between sound systems and geography, as languages with whistled vowels correspond to mountainous echoey regions; You can plot out the course of a conquest by one group over another by charting the number of loan words entering into the conquered language. Conlanging takes the scientific systematicity of linguistics and combines it with the subjectivity of music or poetry. Features of languages from the real world are re-interpreted within a conlang, given extra significance, in the same way that a musical note becomes more than just a single vibration when it’s played in a song
In upcoming posts, I will lay out what I think is the overall appeal is of constructed languages, and explain how to appreciate and recognize their storytelling power.