How to Make a Language: Complex Conlangs
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- Опубликовано: 4 июн 2024
- It's time to talk about the heavier side of conlanging. If you want to go a bit more detailed than a naming language, you'll need to consider things like the phonetics, grammar, syntax, and build your lexicon with a bit more care. There's a lot to consider when creating a language, and we've broken it down to few steps to help you wrap your head around it all!
There's plenty more to discuss beyond what we had time for here, so if you're interested to learn more, check out the links below. Or, if you;re already well-versed in conlanging, drop a comment telling us some tips of your own!
Script and VO by Adam Bassett
Animation by Cole Field
Special thanks to Slorany for helping draft the script and providing some of their resources for conlanging (see them below!)
#conlang #writingcommunity #authortube #writingadvice
Check out Campfire, a customizable tool for writers to plan, organize, and share their work:
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-References-
An interactive IPA chart: www.ipachart.com/
ASHA Phonemic Inventories: www.asha.org/practice/multicu...
IPA Chart: www.internationalphoneticasso...
Conlangs: How to Construct a Language MIT lecture notes: ocw.mit.edu/courses/linguisti...
David Peterson's Conlang Lessons on RUclips: • The Art of Language In...
William S. Annis' Conlanger's Thesaurus: fiatlingua.org/wp-content/upl...
-Also Check Out-
Other videos we’ve made about conlanging: • How to Make a Language...
Artifexian's RUclips Channel: / artifexian
Biblaridion's RUclips Channel: / @biblaridion
Conlangs University (Community-Made Resource): sites.google.com/view/conlang...
Vulgarlang (Word Generator): www.vulgarlang.com/
-Social Media-
Adam's Twitter: / adamcbassett
Cole's Art Insta: / acolefield
Campfire's Twitter: / campfirewriting
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Facebook: / campfirewriting
Reddit: / campfiretechnology
Instagram: / campfirewriting
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"Just look at English this isn't conjugation this is madness"🤣🤣🤣
your gawd damn right (splits English into a further 400 dialects)
I love the little hehehe 🤣
Me too
I'd like to elaborate a bit more on sound systems.
- An important aspect of a good phonetic inventory is balance. Try to make sure that you have sounds that fit together, and avoid having sounds that just exist in isolation. For example, don't just add a palatal sound, but a palatal series. If you have aspiration and pharyngealization, then you can try and put the two together.
- Something even more important than sounds is phonotactics, which is how languages decide what can and cannot be a word. For example, take the below words:
tamenikapilu
and
pluskelklidn
They sound very different, despite having similar sounds. This comes down to phonotactics. What kinds of consonant clusters are allowed, if any? Are some sounds not allowed to be at the beginning or end of syllables/words? Could a word not have any vowels and have a syllabic consonant? If phonemes are words, then phonotactics is what gives those words life.
- And lastly, and you mentioned this in your video, but I want to reiterate as it is extremely important. Look at real languages in the real world. Look at what is often together, and what sounds are more common. If you like the sound of a language, then take a look at its phonetic inventory and phonotactics.
Love this, thanks for sharing!
-A
I would also add that your Phonotactics **and** Phonology is also influenced by your desired phonoaesthetics, how you want your language to sound. You wana make a language that sounds gruff and coarse? Add /χ/s and /q/s and string a lot of consonants together, and so on.
Ai hav kreated Winglish, hwich bi based on Inglish ande Romance lingwajes. It hav simplifiked gramatik, pronunciation ande speling. It bi veri izi tu lerne.
@@juandiegovalverde1982 bət iz it əz cu̬l əz ðis laŋgwəǧ hwič əͅ défənətliͅ inventid?
(jes it’s ǧəst ə rəͅtiŋ sistəm fər Iŋgliš. bət aal məͅ əðər stəf iz a priͅoriͅ. gi’miͅ ə breͅc)
For just about every stage of language creation explained here, there are _much more interesting_ options, but for which you need to step away from English. But for a quick naming language I reconmend a couple things:
1. English has about 20 vowels, not 5. Strip the way down, it’s going to be much easier to spell and read.
2. Chuck every new word you add into Google Translate, translate it into a random language, click the reverse button and see what other meanings that word has in the irl language. You may find interesting connections that you can steal
3. Awkwords. It’s a word generator. Saves a lot of effort :)
english doesn't have that many vowels, general american english only has i ɪ u ʊ eĭ ɛ ə oŭ æ ɑ æŭ ɑĭ ɔĭ m̩ n̩ ɫ̩ ɹ̠̩ = 17
okay maybe it actually does have that many vowels
@@cellularautomaton. "only"
@@cellularautomaton. In the example, we have to consider what we mean by "vowel" because diphthongs and syllabic consonants were added.
@@cellularautomaton. Ai hav kreated Winglish, hwich bi based on Inglish ande Romance lingwajes. It hav simplifiked gramatik, pronunciation ande speling. It bi veri izi tu lerne.
@@juandiegovalverde1982 easy to learn for whom? in your example, i notice the digraph "hw", possibly representing /ʍ/, a very rare sound cross-linguistically and one not even included in many dialects of english
I've been working on Atynese for a while. In fact, I just posted an instructional video in just Atynese (no other language is spoken). So proud! I have a long way to go and picked up some ideas here. Thanks for the tips!
Where is it?!
@@Writer_Productions_Map if you type "Atynese" in the search, videos should pop up
"Comido" isn't the past tense, it's the past participle. There are two past tenses, the preterite and the imperfect, and a perfect tense formed, as in English, with the participle. They are:
Preterite: comí, comiste, comió, comimos, comisteis, comieron.
Imperfect: comía, comías, comía, comíamos, comíais, comían.
Ah, thanks for the clarification! I should have caught that.
-A
English is madness just really sums it up. I started learning Japanese a while ago, then realised how horrible our language really is lol
The one thing I struggle with is the phonetic and sound theory of languages, so I decided to just keep to what I know and just use the English phonetics from the IPA. Although, I feel like I'm just cheating and being lazy. It's fascinating stuff, but I just can't figure out all the different phonetics lol
One set of books I've found useful are the ones by Mark Rosenfelder. As they explain a lot but also stuff like how a culture will impact the language. I've found myself building onto my own lore as I work on the language as well.
Dedicated conlangers might yell at me for this, but I don't think you're being lazy! If at the end of the day you've created something that helps people suspend their disbelief, and you're happy with how it works for your project, you can approach language creation however you want. The suggestions in this video were meant more as a guide than a list of rules. Thanks for checking it out!
@@AroundTheCampfire Yeah, some people may disagree. But I've found a way to make something work for me, not overly complicated but not too simple. Or at least I think I have anyway.
I think the best advice I often hear or read for fiction, regardless of if it's for a film, book, game or whatever is mostly staying consistent. Even if my language may not be the best, it is consistent with its rules (so far).
@@AroundTheCampfire dedicated conlanger here! in the conlanging community, we tend to believe that the most important judge of how "good" a conlang is is whether it meets its goals. if the goal of a conlang is to help immerse readers in the world it's set in, realism might not be the most important factor, so using an english phonology is perfectly fine!
by the way, this is a pretty good overview! i wish you'd said a little more about syntax and about sound changes, but both of those are sort of background machinery which the reader won't likely pick up on, so idk
@@cellularautomaton. I totally agree. Also, perhaps syntax and sound changes will make a good follow-up video in the future! Thanks for watching. :)
Ai hav kreated Winglish, hwich bi based on Inglish ande Romance lingwajes. It hav simplifiked gramatik, pronunciation ande speling. It bi veri izi tu lerne.
It just looks like improper english
The translation feature on Google works for your language lol
If you missed Part 1 (How to Make Naming Languages), where we discuss the basics, check that out here: ruclips.net/video/wGgIyfwG0oY/видео.html
Part 3 on Scripts: ruclips.net/video/2tRK1JjxC4g/видео.html
The Spanish spanish grammar is really weird from a peruvian-spanish-speaker's perspective
"He comido" = "I've eaten" common SPANISH spanish
"Comí" = "I've eaten" common in peruvian spanish and I think we usually skip the pronoun because it's already in the word, but we usually put "Ya" before "Comí" which is like "Ya comí" = "I've already eaten"
neat
When I was young and read Tolkien, I always dreamed of being a linguist and making up my own languages. But really there seemed no point to it, no future in it, no market for such things. I was clearly born too soon, without any foresight into what was to come in the relatively near future. I still loved languages, and I studied several, but I never took that great leap into mastery. It's still an enjoyable pastime.
I just made one anyways🤷♂️
English has the 2nd person singular form "thou art" (since Fowler says "art" has replaced "beest", which he considers archaic).
The other 2nd person plural pronoun is "ye".
Thank you for the phonetics help
5:26 - This is Early Middle English, with a modern accent.
Beowulf is what you're looking for: ruclips.net/video/9LPqLNr6O4o/видео.html
I just thought it might be helpful to make an alphabet song for your language, wondering if it might help to develop sounds that are natural to speak
What software do you recommend using?
I think this will help in creating of my language :))
My language is use syllabary system so it's a little hard to find some or more information about it😅..... I just look at Japanese or my native language sometime to create word or find something useful for it..
From experience, it is not easy to make naming langs. Getting words that sound just right for your culture is such a pain.
My advice as a random person, go to the IPA Help page on Wikipedia to get sounds, make symbols based off an existing alphabet, and make a few root words, that’s what I’ve been doing
So, unsurprisingly my biggest problem was about the basic, as I never fully comprehend the phonetics and how they work
When you didn't check the phonectic part and get straight to root and conjugaison/rules, can you say it's because there are multiples races and they mixed all their tones etc ? Asking for a friend
If we look at the major languages there are a ton of them that have adopted non-native sounds via contact with other languages and cultures. For example, English is built upon Germanic, Saxon, and French speaking languages, so it has some sounds from each. And in Japan there are some speakers who pronounce borrowed words from western languages with more western pronunciations. Languages change and borrow from each other all the time-but this takes a very long time. Those influences on English are old enough that many are just part of the language now, but in Japan's case it's still transitioning. Those western words are mostly pronounced with Japanese sounds, which is how you get the accent (the same way any Spanish speaker would cringe at my attempts to remember what I was taught back in grade school).
All that said, this is a rough guide, not a rulebook. As far as I'm concerned, everyone needs to do what works best for their own projects. If you decide to take another look at how each group pronounces things, that's cool. If you want to say it's been long enough that it's all kind of homogenized, that's cool too. I think with the former you get a richer world-but if the purpose is to tell a story then that might be distracting as well.
So I'd tell your "friend" to give it some thought, but not to stress about it if they like what they have, or just don't want to worry about it. :)
-Adam
@@AroundTheCampfire The conlang of my "friend" (well okay, I admit, it's me, don't judge me) is based on a real old langage, and is not from scratch. So I may take a look in some time to see if the story and the conlang get along well, I seem to be all over the place and didn't write a lot (too much fun creating words and trying some sentences), so I'll let this rest in a place in my mind and maybe re-doing all of it. But I'm reassured about the adaption of the sounds, and the mixing of words. Another view on my vision of this is very valuable ^^ Thanks !
@@Lyrya The biggest thing is consistency! The stuff I talked about in this vid is all *technically* stuff that should be done if you want a more complex conlang, but at the end of the day that doesn't matter if your audience doesn't notice.
What they will catch is if the language has no consistency. They might not know what's wrong but they'll know something's off. If you can create a few rules for yourself that you can stick to (exceptions are fine if they're purposeful-look at all of English's exceptions!) then you'll be just fine. :)
Can I use unexciting consonant sounds? those who are possible but non found in any language
You can use whatever sounds you like in your conlang-I'd just make sure you're adding them for the right reasons. Whatever you add should still help you fulfill the languages' goals. Otherwise you're just adding more complexity for the sake of it.
You could dispute that with the rule of cool, but personally I think conlangs are complicated enough. Adding more complexity like rare consonant sounds should be done so with care. But that's just my two cents!
I have been creating a language since August 2022, and it has been an incredibly curious, interesting, fun, yet frustrating and boring. Making tons of words (I've made around 1500) might be really boring, since you may run out of creativity or something. The phonetic inventory in my language is HUGE (i don't know if palatalised, aspired, etc. are distinguished as separate or the same, if it's separate, then it is huge, but in the opposite cas,e it is kind of big), around 192 phonemes (including qualities, 48 withouth them), although I decided to consider consonant clusters to not be illegal, so it might sound a bit like Russian, Georgian... It is kind of predictable in terms of grammar.
What's it like?
I have everything else but grammar and I need help so I can move past middle y`oldn. I am making this for myself so I can write down something and not have anyone else read it and trying to make English grammar work with this thing is somewhat of a pain.
Some day
5:30 that’s Middle English
I am still confused about phonetics. I just started grasping the concept, but I don't even know what any words on the phonetic charts are supposed to mean! This is gonna take a while.
We threw a ton of great resources in the description for you if you'd like to learn more! I'd suggest the phonology lesson from Conlang University (a community-made resource on all this sites.google.com/view/conlangs-university/lessons?authuser=0#h.p_jfIsYVl3ra51) and once you've done that there's a great interactive chart here www.ipachart.com/ that lets you actually hear the sounds of each symbol. Hope that helps! Thanks for checking out the video. :)
@@AroundTheCampfire Thanks!
One more important thing would be phonotactics
FEEDBACK request: My story has 2 mortal races who have been separated for centuries (say... 800 years). They still war outside the major cities, but they don't speak with each other. Currently, I have them speaking the same language (English in my book). I have a few, relevant nuances, like the "barbarian" race doesn't use the word "city." And I have a spot where the MC asks one of them, "how do you speak our language?" and the other is like, "you're language? wtf do you mean?"
I wasn't planning to create a whole language for this, and I still don't intend to. I'm hesitant to do something as simple as the one race not speaking with contractions or something... and I would want any difference to be true to the story and world...
Where do all you writers draw the line? How do you know what is going to add depth and meaning to your story and what is a waste of time?
I'd say like usual that it depends onw hat you want to do with the story. Realistically, after 800 years, the languages would have diverged a fair bit. I'm not sure if they'd be totally unique from one another but I think the nuances you're already doing are a great start. I might personally push the differences a bit further (have they borrowed any unique words from other cultures, created new worlds for themselves, the mannerisms might even be different) BUT if you're goal is more on a character and language doesn't have a big impact on them--it's probably best to keep it simple.
My suggestion would be to play with the idea of making them more unique from one another. Give yourself a week or so, see how you like it, and by the end of the time you make the call. If it works great, keep it! If not, you only spent a week on it and now you know. :)
@@AroundTheCampfire THANK YOU such good advice. Kind of how I was thinking, but honestly I was trying to avoid work that I knew I needed to do. After 800 years, there would be more differences, and I just need to hone in on a few key ones that fit with my narrative and world really well. I can do that, thanks!
That's way too oversimplified. 3:43 "We could create irregular verbs". Fine. And how do those appear in natural languages? Which verbs are irregular? How irregular verbs differ from regular? If interpret your words literally, you can just change whatever you like in whichever verbs you like and say "that's just irregularity, get this over with". That's not how languages work, people
Yeah there's a lot of nuances that we really didn't have time to cover here. That's part of why I included a bunch of extra resources and more dedicated conlanging channels in the description.
Stovish and brvhshkaya 😃
fun related fact: the most complicated language in the world is a conlang! it is called ikthuil
*Ithkuil
Iţkuîl
I've made a more "easier" version to make conlangs more easier , in this system you do need your sounds and create root words and filler words like re for ed to add to the end of words and then you need to join root words to create more complex words example :
Ge for power and ro for danger so gero is electricity or if you add Another letter to signify a synonym like Geroi and I is to signify a synonym (note : idk a synonym of electricity and this is just and example so don't be rude)
that definitely won't lead to a realistic language of the kind that could actually be spoken, but i suppose it works well enough for a book if you don't show too much of it
@@cellularautomaton. PIE word for 'for' was per the PIE word for sky was Dyew. The PIE suffix to turn a noun into an agent was -yus so God in PIE was Dyeus, which turned into Greek Zeus, Proto-Germanic Tiwaz, Latin Deus... You said random roots, combining them and using random affixation to change the meanings wouldn't make for a realistic language... concatenating roots often makes for new words. Heck the word New, comes from an old word meaning to nod / assent to...
@@livedandletdie hey, just to clarify, the thing that looked unrealistic to me was not the existence of derivational mythology
emusoga yidjkalo (totally not gibberish and random sounds)
I only make languages for fun
How many phonemes are in ur conlang?
Mine has 12, (acutally, it techincally has 9 cuz 3 of the phonemes in my conlang are just long varients of my 3 vowels)
My consonants: /p/, /t/, /k/, /m/, /n/, /j/
My vowels: /a/, /ā/, /i/, /ī/, /u/, /ū/
27
neckbeard bitmoji
2:25 I sure will make my verbs a closed class and make sure NOT to have a healthy mix of nouns and verbs.
Not all languages are SVO or SOV. There are more interesting options
For sure! These videos are intended to be short so I can't go into all the details, but I did say there were more than just those options. Those are just some of the most common ones. I definitely would encourage people to play around with word order more if they're up to it.
Why learn other languages when you can make your own?
Hehehe.
came to learn how to make a programming language
the instructions were unclear, I made ancient greek instead
I tried creating a simple language. It now has 150 letters in it. Lol.
Classic.
@@AroundTheCampfire It is kind of fun too. Each letter is a letter combined with a vowel. Like Ba, Be, Bi, Bo, Bu. I am not sure if that would count as 5 different letters but a friend of mine said that it is technically 5 letters. not the letter b combined with a vowel.
My language's alphabet was inspired by Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and runes... I thought that my 34 letters was a lot