The Anxious Beginning

Hi, I'm Caz -

- Hi, Caz -

- and I've decided to make a language.

I've had an interest in creating conlangs on and off for several years now, making up a few words here, doodling an alphabet there; but I've never made a real project out of it. That is - at the risk of perpetuating a clichéd phrase - until now.

A couple of things have inspired me to start again. Chiefly: (1) this thread on the NationStates forums, where people are translating crap into their own conlangs and impressing the hell out of me, and (2) I'm starting writing again in a fictional country I made up, which needs at least some kind of rules for naming characters.

And I've always thought that making up a language for someone can tell you a lot about their culture, hence helping with some much-needed worldbuilding: you get to learn what words are important to them, what associations they make, what slang is informed by their priorities. Let's start with a really, really simplified summary of the worldbuilding done so far for these guys.

The basics of this culture: the country is called Voraki, and the people, accordingly, are Vorakish. The landscape they call home consists of snow, forest, tundra and a frozen shoreline. The longest day of summer can go on for months, and the longest night of winter is no different. A hard, clear wall, the colour of frost patterns on a pane of glass, as tall as the sky and as broad as the horizon, separates this civilization from the world of the elves. (Their elf neighbours are well-known as vicious inhuman baby-snatchers with terrifying powers; they do not sparkle.)

I've forgotten most everything about the conlangs I made when I was little, except for a bit of wordplay that I thought very clever as a child: "milk" would be derived from the word "mother" and then from either "food" or "nourishment", so that it would translate literally as "mother-food". It's as good a starting-point for a language as any; let's pick some syllables out of the air, with a vaguely Germanic sound in mind.

Mother can be wurm, because I like dragons and it sounds kinda comforting. Yes, that's kind of random, but bear with me. Milk can be...

Hang on. I've just had an idea. Goats are pretty important to this culture, seeing as they're the Voraki version of cattle. They provide meat, cheese, labour ... milk. So let's say that there are two distinct kinds of milk: milk from humans, wurmlat, and milk from goats, haglat. Goat, by process of elimination, is hag, and lat means food.

Yes, it amuses me to recycle mythical species as the first few words in my shiny new language - whyever do you ask?

Right, let's call that a day for now. One post, and we already have five distinct words. I am suitably impressed. Tune in next post for a selection of the notes I have scrawled in my itsy bitsy teeny weeny pocket-sized conlang notebook!