Inventing Languages in Settings

[quarkstomper]

The closest I've come to inventing a language in a setting have been a couple campaigns where I tried to develop consistant naming conventions. In one of them, I devised a series of prefixes to names indicating noble rank and gender in an alien culture.

In another campaign, I decided that it was customary to give males long names that were mash-ups of shorter present-day names, such as "Collinjames" or "Tedwilliam". After a while, I realized that I had effectively doubled the trouble I had coming up with names for NPCs.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

I've thought about greeting customs in the Keltic culture of my Ärth setting, since it's still pagan, and I wasn't able to Google up anything pre-Christian (everything I found sounded distinctly Christian and/or referred to numbers that the average uneducated Kelt would be woefully ignorant about).


When you meet someone, except a very close friend or relative (or a slave - because a slave isn't a "someone", except in special cases), you greet that person by wishing two things upon him or her, out of five possible things to wish:

Wisdom, for druids and similar (although any wisdom-seeker would have to struggle to avoid being called a druid).

Health, which is never to be wished upon brave and manly warriors, because by that you imply you hope they will live to old age and die the straw death, instead of dying gloriously in battle.

Victory, to be wished upon a warrior at any time (not wishing victory upon a warrior means you're implyig he's not a warrior - them word be fighting words!), but it can also be wished upon someone who is about to soon face another ardorous challenge, such as a law suit, or an oral exam, either as a sincere wish or as a friendly joke.

Prosperity, wished upon farmers, traders, craftsmen and so forth. Farm work (but not owning a farm that others work for you), and even more so trading (but only some crafts) are non-noble professions, and therefore especially inappropriate for men (to a large extent the notion of a cash economy is thought unclean. The Kelts aren't misogynists, but if a Keltic man has some excess silver, he's more likely to give it to his wife, or to his sister if unmarried, than to keep it himself (and ask her for silver when he needs it, or outright ask the woman to make the necessary purchases for him), and he considers being factually aware of appropriate market prices, even for basic commodities such as food or clothing, to be a mark of impurity. It's wrong and ignoble and perhaps even unmanly to know such things! In GURPS terms if you have the Merchant skill even at default, it's a minor Secret).

Luck, the generic thing to wish if you can't think of anything else.

Use two elements (and althogh a few disagree, the order of the two doesn't matter), but omitting Wisdom when greeting someone who practices one or more of the "high" druidic arts is dangerous. Omitting Victory when greeting any kind of warrior is even worse, and wishing Health upon a warrior is worst of all.

And note that some non-warriors think of themselves as warriors, and likewise some men (and a few women) of limited intellectual capacity think of themselves as being among the wisdom-seekers. Overpraise mock greetings are possible, e.g. wishing Victory upon a pacifist or invalid, or Wisdom upon a retard, although of course rude and it can lead to law suits.


The two Keltic languages, which refer to Irish and British for simplicity, do not (in the 10th century) have words for yes and no. I would never demand that players roleplay that, nor would I claim to be able to remember it consistently as GM, but as a total amateur linguist I believe I can see certain remnants of this absence in present day English usage by Irish people (e.g. "to be sure" - the Irish might have used that phrase a lot more often, back when they couldn't say "yes").

The lack of yes/no is also a fact of Latin, one of the lingua francae of the setting, and probably also a bunch of other lnguages; I haven't looked closely into the subject.

The author of Albions Seed divided up customs into:

* speech ways
* building ways
* dress ways
* marriage ways
* gender ways
* sex ways
* child rearing ways
* naming ways
* death ways
* religious ways
* magic ways
* learning ways
* food ways
* dress ways
* sport ways
* work ways
* time ways
* wealth ways
* rank ways
* social ways
* order ways
* power ways
* freedom ways

To which I will add War Ways-and wonder why he missed such an important aspect of culture.

In any case, a good way to make a language might be to go down this list and make up words that express a given culture's take on all of these.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I'm very strongly oriented to the phonetic aspect of language, to the point of often reading passages aloud or under my breath.

That's certainly a point of view to consider when designing a language. As in, the users of a language may think like you, be indifferent, or think differently than you.

I've heard a statement (and it is not for me to decide how true it actually is) that, for example, the Japanese language is primarily written. As in, the written form is treated as the more 'important' one, and any statement that is supposed to look serious and/or truthful should be made in writing or print (e.g. when getting acquainted with someone, always give a business card, or at least write your name on a black board or the like). I also heard this is the reason why among those Japanese who do know English, a large number knows how to read/write at Accented/Fluent, but only speak at Broken. Conversely, Europeans* (and I guess Americans by extension) seem to focus on learning to speak, but not so much on writing (especially if there is no default between the writing systems).

I think languages whose primary form is written look more exotic.

* == Exception: programmers seem to handle foreign written grammar okay, syntax mostly okay, and spoken form not at all. :)

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

To which I will add War Ways-and wonder why he missed such an important aspect of culture.

Probably a religious and/or political bias of his, and yes it is strange. Killing other people is usually an extremely serious thing, and also different ways of killing needs to be discerned between. Most obvious to me is "to murder" vs "to slay". The first is dishonourable, stealthy and unmanly, while the second is done out in the open with the relatives of the deceased knowing the identity of the slayer (if there are no witnesses, he can make up for that by bragging about it, or putting a sort of trademark on the dead body). It doesn't much matter whether it's done by sword or by fireball, as long as it is done openly.

There's also the distinction between being a thief and a raider. Today theft is theft, violation of property rights is violation of property rights.

Some people don't even discern between theft and robbery any more, but in some past cultures, the difference was that a raid was done openly and with the identity of the raider knowable (to the extent that there wee any survivors), e.g. "I am Kolbjörn of Lejre, and I am taking your silver and your women, because I am a stronger man than you (if you have a problem with this, come visit me in Lejre in a few days, so we can 'talk' about it. Ask anyone for directions, the know where my farm is)".

A thief doesn't do that. He doesn't want you to know who he is. His whole modus operandi is based around other people not knowing he's the one that did it.

Originally Posted by jason taylor

In any case, a good way to make a language might be to go down this list and make up words that express a given culture's take on all of these.

Yes, that's probably a very good approach, for people who need to create artificial languages.

There's also the types-of-snow thing, a sort of extension of what I wrote above: What things do people in the setting discern beween? And what do they lump indiscriminately together? As far as I know, Old Norse had just one word for female slave (ambatt or something - träl was used only for male slaves), but it doesn't make sense to me that people didn't discern between young female slaves and too-old female slaves, so I've decided that the distinction is indicated by some kind of inflection or tone-of-voice thing. Probably the "girl" version of the word sounds lighter or higher-pitched than the "woman" version, even though they're spelled the same.

In a society that didn't care much about age, or was just less age-obsessed (less of the discard-and-replace-with-a-younger-model), you might very well not get that.

A very pacifistic anti-violence nevereverkill society might not discern between "to murder" and "to slay". In fact it can be argued that we live in such a society, whether it's Denmark, or just about any other European country (there could be exceptions somewhere for all I know), or the USA or Canada.

Classical age Greece had a special world for free foreigners, free non-citizens, because they were a bunch of (often non-allied) city states, and so needed to distinguish between those who were citizens and those who were not. And they also had the word "barbarian", for non-Greeks, so to an Athenian, a man from Sparta was a foreigner but not a barbarian.

In Iain M. Banks' "Culture" setting, the artificial (probably machine-designed) language Marain cannot discern between sexes. They have no words for "he" or "she", "his"/"her"/"its". Obviously it is possible to say that "Gurgeh is a man" or "Gurgeh is male", but not to casually indicate a gender just by the way one refers to a person, like I could write or say "in another thread, Brett Evill gave me the URL to his wiki" - now we know that Brett Evill is male.

Marain is a made-up language, deliberately constructed to serve certain purposes. I strongly believe it's capable of great detail, nuance and flavour, and that the absense of gender-specific pronouns (a term I had to look up to make sure it's the right one) is deliberately engineered, because the Culture won't acknowledge that there's any valid need to discern between genders (at least in casual usage). I don't personally agree, but it does make sense in a society where most people are bisexual, and where it is extremely common for people to spend at least a few months or years as the opposite sex just try it (Gurgeh is seen as odd, in "Player of Games", because he's heterosexual and has never changed his sex).

Bill can probably talk a lot about the Sapir-Worf hypothesis (and that might be very interesting), but I do think language often reveals something of culture, in the way there are - or are not - words for discerning between different things. What a given culture thinks - or has thought in the past - to be important, and what they find to be unimportant.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Bill can probably talk a lot about the Sapir-Worf hypothesis (and that might be very interesting), but I do think language often reveals something of culture, in the way there are - or are not - words for discerning between different things. What a given culture thinks - or has thought in the past - to be important, and what they find to be unimportant.

There is actually very little evidence for even the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; most attempts to test it have been negative. Some of the obvious implications seem not to work; for example, feminists get up in arms about gendered language use, but there are entire language families that entirely lack grammatical gender, and the people who speak them are not sexually egalitarian; Mandarin is a notable example.

You mentioned words for snow. I recommend the essay "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax," in the book by the same name. It traces the history. Whorf made up "Eskimos" having seven different words for snow as a hypothetical example in a popular essay (I have the collection of essays on my shelves!); it was then picked up and exaggerated, "telephone" style, to twenty, fifty, hundreds. . . . Inquiries with linguists who actually know Inuit languages show that if you count distinct root words (in English, snow and snows and snowed and snowing and snowy don't properly count as five words!) that primarily mean "snow" (example: In one Inuit language, there is a word used mostly for snow, whose source is a word related to building or houses or something like that, because guess what?), you don't even get seven. And it isn't as if English had only one: we distinguish snow from slush, for example.

Bill Stoddard

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Probably a religious and/or political bias of his, and yes it is strange. Killing other people is usually an extremely serious thing, and also different ways of killing needs to be discerned between. Most obvious to me is "to murder" vs "to slay". The first is dishonourable, stealthy and unmanly, while the second is done out in the open with the relatives of the deceased knowing the identity of the slayer (if there are no witnesses, he can make up for that by bragging about it, or putting a sort of trademark on the dead body). It doesn't much matter whether it's done by sword or by fireball, as long as it is done openly.

Conceivably, although David Hackett Fischer never gives any hint to what such bias was. His book was about pre-independence American culture and it's effects. And there never really was a time when American culture in general was pacifist. Of his "four strains" only the Quaker middle colonies were pacifistic in outlook. The Puritans, the Virginians, and the Scotch-Irish were never militaristic per se; if anything they were antimilitaristic. But all three were warlike. There's a difference to being militaristic and warlike; the first is about the extent to which war is bureaucratized and pre-independence America never did that to the extent that continental Europe did. However America was always warlike though paradoxically ambiguous about war because it also always did have a pacifist inclination that counterbalanced that. Certainly that was the case in the pre-independence world; it couldn't be otherwise. The French and the Indians were far to near and the stakes were far greater then the normal dynastic round of exchanging obscure provinces and getting back to plotting their next evil deeds; they were among the obscure provinces bet in every war and unlike some obscure provinces seemed to believe their own way of life to be at stake.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by whswhs

There is actually very little evidence for even the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis; most attempts to test it have been negative. Some of the obvious implications seem not to work; for example, feminists get up in arms about gendered language use, but there are entire language families that entirely lack grammatical gender, and the people who speak them are not sexually egalitarian; Mandarin is a notable example.

You mentioned words for snow. I recommend the essay "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax," in the book by the same name. It traces the history. Whorf made up "Eskimos" having seven different words for snow as a hypothetical example in a popular essay (I have the collection of essays on my shelves!); it was then picked up and exaggerated, "telephone" style, to twenty, fifty, hundreds. . . . Inquiries with linguists who actually know Inuit languages show that if you count distinct root words (in English, snow and snows and snowed and snowing and snowy don't properly count as five words!) that primarily mean "snow" (example: In one Inuit language, there is a word used mostly for snow, whose source is a word related to building or houses or something like that, because guess what?), you don't even get seven. And it isn't as if English had only one: we distinguish snow from slush, for example.

Bill Stoddard

Conceivably. It is almost certainly true however that language gives insights into culture whatever the validity of that particular application. In any case, it is a fairly convenient method for constructing a pseudolanguage.

[Grouchy Chris]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

In Iain M. Banks' "Culture" setting, the artificial (probably machine-designed) language Marain cannot discern between sexes. They have no words for "he" or "she", "his"/"her"/"its". Obviously it is possible to say that "Gurgeh is a man" or "Gurgeh is male", but not to casually indicate a gender just by the way one refers to a person, like I could write or say "in another thread, Brett Evill gave me the URL to his wiki" - now we know that Brett Evill is male.

In the real world, this doesn't tell you anything about the culture that speaks the language. It's easy to find languages that don't distinguish between male and female in its pronouns. In Finnish, pronouns distinguish only between animate and inanimate. In Mandarin, the same pronoun, tā, is used for males, females, and inanimate objects. (He, she, and it are distinguished in writing, but that came only after contact with the West.) No one should take this as a sign that Chinese society considers a person's sex unimportant.

[ak_aramis]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

I've heard a statement (and it is not for me to decide how true it actually is) that, for example, the Japanese language is primarily written. As in, the written form is treated as the more 'important' one, and any statement that is supposed to look serious and/or truthful should be made in writing or print (e.g. when getting acquainted with someone, always give a business card, or at least write your name on a black board or the like). I also heard this is the reason why among those Japanese who do know English, a large number knows how to read/write at Accented/Fluent, but only speak at Broken. Conversely, Europeans* (and I guess Americans by extension) seem to focus on learning to speak, but not so much on writing (especially if there is no default between the writing systems).

One can establish the cultural differences by looking at children's education.

Japan and the US start emphasis on pre-reading skills about age 3-4, and actual reading about age 5. (Which, typically, is about the age that you get 90% of students having brains capable of decoding the symbology into sounds). Many European nations don't begin pre-reading skills until age 6-9, and actual reading until ages 8-10. By which point some 99% of children have brains capable of so doing.

There was an entire chapter on this issue in one of my textbooks for my master's program.


(Pre-reading skills: knowing the alphabet, being able to retell a story, being able to write the letters of the alphabet.)

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Grouchy Chris

In the real world, this doesn't tell you anything about the culture that speaks the language. It's easy to find languages that don't distinguish between male and female in its pronouns. In Finnish, pronouns distinguish only between animate and inanimate. In Mandarin, the same pronoun, tā, is used for males, females, and inanimate objects. (He, she, and it are distinguished in writing, but that came only after contact with the West.) No one should take this as a sign that Chinese society considers a person's sex unimportant.

It sounds more the reverse; having some knowledge of the culture and then using that to analyse word orgins. The writer knew already that eskimos come from a place where there is lots of snow.