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Old 09-26-2012, 01:59 AM   #71
Flyndaran
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Default Re: ConLang

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Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris View Post
Are you thinking of perhaps Matěj Kůs, a Czech motorcycle rider? If so, the effect did not last nearly so long and doesn't seem to have been witnessed by any native English speakers, so the quality of his speech is hard to determine.
Oops, maybe it was. But even baby English would have been interesting and semi-proof of adult learned language being in a different brain section.
I thought it might be a case of his primary language being unavailable, and his brain working with what little it could access.
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Old 09-29-2012, 08:47 PM   #72
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Default Re: ConLang

I can't add anything to this discussion that hasn't already been mentioned somewhere, but I can confirm some things from experience...

Assuming you're just creating a language for assigning names or writing short bits of speech for evocative purposes (e.g. Klingon), I find the best way to start is by defining the sound of your language. Decide on some common phonemes and if you have any oddball sounds not normally used in the language(s) you speak: clicking, gurgling, long moans, whatever. If you don't want to make up your own, or they all end up sounding too much like your native language, try stealing some from a much different language. (I got a lot of mileage stealing bits from Turkish place names, though most of that material never really got used.) Try combining them in some different ways and see how they sound; you might decide that some phonemes either don't go together at all, or they change their sound a bit when put together. Some might only be used in the beginning or ends of words. You can put as much or as little effort into this sort of detail as you're inclined to; if the only one who's going to be using the language is you, then you can fake a lot of it as you go along, though that won't get you the consistency you might want... but it may give you ideas for how else the language could work, or other phonemes, and then you iterate, etc.

Honestly, you could stop there; you already have a fair set of guidelines now for how words (or names) in your language will generally sound. If you're wanting even more consistency, then the next thing to do (as pretty much everyone else has said) is to define anywhere from a few dozen to a couple hundred roots - verbs, nouns, adjectives, whatever - and that way if you have one town called "fast monkey" and another one called "fast milkshake", and your players appreciate that both of them begin with "Jarh-", then they'll be very impressed. They won't appreciate that, though, or else they'll just make fun of your towns for all sounding alike, unless you're running a heavy linguistics game... which is why I said you could stop before.
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Old 09-30-2012, 08:59 AM   #73
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Default Re: ConLang

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Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris View Post
Are you thinking of perhaps Matěj Kůs, a Czech motorcycle rider? If so, the effect did not last nearly so long and doesn't seem to have been witnessed by any native English speakers, so the quality of his speech is hard to determine.
One of the hypothesises attempting to explain that incident was that (along with giving him damage to his Czech) it gave him a speech impediment distorting his pronounciation that happened to improve his pronounciation of English - which isn't as ludicrous as it sounds. I took speech therapy with another student who was a native English speaker and could hear the difference between the English R and L (and the French R as well) quite clearly but was unable to produce anything other than an intermediate sound that made them sound like they had a regionally ambiguous east-Asian accent.

Shifting consonants that were previously pronounced in the wrong part of the mouth to the right part due to neurological trauma would work - I don't know enough about Czech to know if a moderate shift would produce more English-like phonemes or not.
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Old 10-01-2012, 08:57 PM   #74
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A conlang can be made more 'realistic' in some ways by deliberately introducing things that don't fit into it, too, if you want to go to the trouble. Languages pick up loan words, which then become loan-roots, sometimes for major words. This is best done by considering the history (real or fictional) of the place where the language is spoken. (Tolkien being the exemplar here.)

For example, consider the word 'parliament'. Most of the Anglosphere associates that word with England/Britain automatically, but its root is French,
cognate with the word 'parlay'. There is a wealth of Anglo-French history, spread over several centuries, concealed within the word 'parliament'.

Another possible example: I once watched a subtitled anime, and of course (since I don't speak Japanese) I did not understand the sound track. However, at one point I heard the English word 'android' used in reference to an android. So, imagine a linguist trying to decipher the root of that 'man-like' without understanding that the word was not originally Japanese.

Another thing that can happen is that multiple words, spread over different tongues, can derive from some specific person or event. To use politics again, consider: the words 'Tsar' and 'Kaiser' are both forms of 'Caesar'. Yet Caesar was not a title in the original Latin, but rather a personal/family name. One might comparably imagine a conlang set in a future setting in which the ruler is referred as the 'thesmi'. Few would realize that this is a compression of 'the Smith', which originally referred to the once-legendary Chairman James Smith, first ruler of the World Federation or something like that.

Words can derive from technology, as well. Consider the phrase 'above board', which usually means 'open, honest, without deception or ulterior motives', or things on those lines. IAMNM, this derives from nautical terminology meaning 'visible on the deck', or above the boards of the main deck.

(I could be wrong about that derivation, but even if I am, it's suggestive of ways to produce words/phrases in a real-seeming 'feel'.)

Last edited by Johnny1A.2; 10-01-2012 at 09:18 PM.
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Old 10-06-2012, 11:36 PM   #75
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Default Re: ConLang

Though I truly love conlangs, I've decided to avoid them wherever possible and use real languages instead. The logic being: if I'm going to make my players learn a bunch of random stuff, shouldn't it at least have some vague use somewhere? Thus in Ubantu, everything is in kiSwahili as far as I can manage it. When I recently rewrote my Centaur culture, I used Lakota (the online dictionary is a treat). Now I'm working on the Naga Kingdoms and using Sanskit. The Lord of the Nagas is Nagamaharaja - three nice little roots that might find use elsewhere.

Oh, yeah, and death to meaningless apostrophes! If it doesn't represent a glottal stop, it doesn't go in the word! :-)
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Old 10-07-2012, 01:44 AM   #76
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Default Re: ConLang

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Originally Posted by tantric View Post
Oh, yeah, and death to meaningless apostrophes! If it doesn't represent a glottal stop, it doesn't go in the word! :-)
Ukrainian would like to have a word with you. Also, English, doesn't it? :)
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