I see conlangs - and worldbuilding as a whole - as something like putting together a puzzle. You put the corners in, then you can place the edges, and those allow you to fill in adjoining details; before long, each new piece you add helps you to put in its neighbour. When building a language, words demand etymologies, and sentences, and associations, and then those suggest a list of common sounds, and before you know it you've put together your very first workable sentence.
But I'm getting way ahead of myself here - I only have five words so far, and all of them are nouns. I still need to put those edges in.
That's where the thread I linked to in my last post comes in. It has three example phrases (in English), and despite all being questions, they cover a pretty wide range of topics. I gotta thank Northern Danoc for posting these, because they're gonna come in very handy indeed.
Let's tackle them one at a time. The first:
"How has your day been going?"
I've decided that I want a word which will stress the importance of a question; let's call it goddeno. I originally envisaged goddeno as going before questions of fact ("is granite a strong material?") but not questions of opinion ("is conservatism the way to go?"). See, I figured that this would reveal something about the character's viewpoint or even allow them to crack a subtle joke ("factually speaking, are bunnies simply adorable?"). But the fact that this first question about your day confuses the issue is definitely a bad sign. Is it factual - based only upon the events of the day? Or is it asking solely for an opinion - what are the person's feelings about his day? Is it really necessary to segregate the two questions?
I decided that it's more confusing than it is useful to use goddeno in this way - and confusing quirks of language would soon be weeded out of common usage. So let's say hello to the word's new and improved meaning: "the answer to this question is very important to me".
Well, that's a useful word. But before I pull any more syllables out of my arse, I'll sketch out a sentence structure for this translation. Then I'll know where to put my words, and exactly what they'll mean.
How about this:
[The] [day] [belonging (to)]-[you] [this was] [pleasant]?
The can be thu, pronounced something like "thoo", but with slightly more emphasis on the T than the H - and on a whim, let's declare that there's no such thing as a. So there's no such thing as "a pot": it's either just "pot", with the "a" taken for granted, or (if we're talking specifics) "the pot".
(Pot, while we're on the subject, can live out its life as neidl. That's the thing you put soup in, not the thing you get high on.)
Day... hmm. That one would be old and get used a lot, so it's not gonna be a million syllables long. I wanted okbar, but that would probably have gotten corrupted and simplified over the years. Let's take out the most troublesome constonant, that pesky B, and soften the K to a sort of gutteral GH sound. That sound can be represented by the letter G; may as well sort out some fledgeling pronounciations while we're here. So now day is the one and only ogar.
Hey, that looks like "ogre". I even name stuff after mythical creatures by accident.
What are we on now? Oh, the sort-of-conjoined belonging (to). I'm going to borrow the English word "possess" and a bit of French remembered from secondary school, and combine them into the Frankenstein possehtor.
...Hmm. Reading that aloud a few times, I'm really not convinced by it. The hard "ss" in the middle has failed to win me over; I want this language to sound soft, even at the same time as it's kind of gutteral. Let's use the same half-closed-throat GH sound from before, and make the word pogehtor.
Much better!
You should be easy; I'm just gonna lift an unrelated word from the real German language, da, because it's simple and I like it.
This was is another compound word, and I kind of want to make it even shorter than the last one. In fact, let's have little tiny words for variations in all three tenses. We'll start with a for the present tense (this is), move on to ak for the past tense (this was), and finish with af for the future (this will be). If the word before them ends in a vowel, they become ha, hak and haf respectively, but that's only verbal: I want them to be written the same way regardless of what vowels may be taking them in the manly fashion. Because I'm so totally nonconformist and stuff, yo.
We're on our final word already? Man, that was fast. Okay, pleasant. With da and hak immediately before it, I kinda want it to echo them with a nice open-mouthed "ah"-sound; I'm a sucker for audible symmetry. One nifty word that comes to mind is adtul, but this suffers from the same problem as okbar: it's awkward to say, so we need to wear it down a bit. The tricky "dt" combination can give way to the TH sound from thu, rendering this word as athul. I think that sounds pretty good.
And that's our question, folks!
"How has your day been going?"
"Goddeno thu ogar pogehtor-da ak athul?"
Ace.
Let's take a look at the second sentence.
"Are you gay, my friend?"
Good question. Let's work out how we're gonna answer it. I'll tackle the word gay first, because I don't want to just copy the entymology of the English word; the Vorakish word for homosexual ain't gonna derive from "happy". I want to do word-association with some kind of animal. In fact, I'm going to make up a little chunk of myth to explain the word for gay, because I'm just cool like that.
First, I need an animal which (a) the Vorakish people would be familiar with, and (b) which doesn't have much physical differentiation between the sexes, or at least nothing obvious. Let's go big and impressive and say polar bear, because working out whether Frostie is a mummy or a daddy bear probably requires a closer look than most people in a pre-rifle society are willing to take. A myth that the polar bear species consists of all-male animals bonking each other would not go un-busted forever, but let's say it survived long enough for "polar bear" to become slang for "gay person".
If you don't know why this amuses me, go and google it. It's okay, this post will still be here when you get back.
Of course, "polar bear" is an English word, and it only has that "polar" modifier because we here in the world's #1 country were already familiar with grizzlies and brown bears long before we set foot anywhere with more snow than rain. Vorakis would just know them as "bears", or, ooh, say... jehten. Singular jeht.
Might seem a bit odd at first to ask someone if they're a bear, but think about some of the words Western society uses as code for "gay" - "fruit", for example, or "faggot" (a bit of slang which has both amused and frustrated me since I read Lord of the Rings and realised it meant a bundle of firewood).
I think jeht has more in common with the former than the latter. "Faggot" tends to be used as an insult, at least by people who aren't gay themselves, but when I hear "fruit" I tend to think of something more genteel and jovial and non-judgemental - which is probably entirely wrong of me, given the stupid views on homosexuality that plagued the Good Old DaysTM, but my point still stands. Jeht is an informal statement rather than an accusation.
Oh, crap, we haven't made up a sentence structure yet.
[You] [(this is a question)] [resembling] [bear], [friend] [belonging to]-[me]?
Yeah, that second bit is another instance of me making up words that have no direct translation into English. Basically, I want the word projeh - which I pulled out of my growing list of this language's sounds, a list I'll share in a later post when I feel it's complete enough - to slip in after a sentence's subject ("you", "me", "she" or whatever) and indicate that what follows is a question. The rest of the sentence plays out like a statement, but projeh indicates that you're asking if this statement is correct. Essentially, it changes "the sky is blue" into "is the sky blue?".
We already know that you is da, so that's easy enough to repeat. Likewise progehtor for belonging to. And let's make me a two-letter word that pairs up with da without sounding too similar: I vote for jo (with the footnote that the letter J in this language is pronounced like the Y of "yellow"). It goes consonant-vowel, and on a purely visual level I like how the downspout of the J is like a reflection of the D's stem... arm... thing.
I'm having the language use "resembling" instead of "resemble" because whenever I try to learn a language, sorting out the verb tables was alway the part that made my brain crawl into a corner and cry. I hereby declare this language simplistic and easy to learn, with only "[verb]ing" and possibly "to [verb]" to worry about, huzzah!
Anyway, resembling will need the same suffix as belonging, but I don't want it to sound too similar otherwise. Let's call it thlutor.
Friend can be teis (pronounced like "mice"); it has an appealing kind of sound.
Let's take a look at what we've got:
"Da projeh thlutor jeht, teis progehtor-jo?"
Hmm. It's a bit of a mouthful; I'm gonna shorten down progehtor-jo to pro-jo on the arguments that (a) belonging to me (or "mine") would be said often enough to justify a corruption of the phrase, and (b) pro-jo is catchier, which always helps a bit of slang to endure. You know, among the cool kids. Progehtor-jo would still be the go-to phrase for formal situations, but in everyday chatter, pro-jo is the bit of slang that everyone's talking about.
And, just for fun, let's say that this isn't a casual question; it has the subtext of "I want to hit on you but I'm not sure if you might reciprocate". This, of course, means that we get to stick goddeno on as a prefix. This is an urgent matter of life or death, people. Or at least of laid or not-laid.
Are we done? I think we're done!
"Are you gay, my friend?"
"Goddeno, da projeh thlutor jeht, teis pro-jo?"
I'm gonna go right ahead and type that out phonetically, too, because it's even making me tongue-tied and I'm the one who invented it. "Hoh-deh-no, dah proh-yeah thloo-tore yet, ties proh-yo?"
Go ahead, roll those Rs!
Third and final question, which thanks to all our new vocabulary probably won't take all that long:
"Was Michael Jackson a weird person?"
Hmm. A real person's name; that might not translate so well, since we're missing a lot of those sounds from our fledgeling alphabet. The closest thing we have to a K sound is the gutteral gh sound G, so that'll have to sub in. And there's simply no Varoki answer to the English J. I'll take pity on it, though, and give it CHA, rhyming with the "wra" of "wrangle". That syllable could come in handy later, and it fits with the slightly lazy feel of the sounds Vorakish is composed from.
I'm putting my foot down about the K sound, though. It's all hard and stuff and it has no place in my language, dammit.
The next post, I think, is going to have to be that syllable list. I have a sinking feeling that my posts will make less and less sense without it. For now, you'll just have to trust me that Michael Jackson translates roughly as Meigel Chason, or (phonetically) "My-ghell cha-sun".
Sentence structure time!
[Michael Jackson], [question] [this was] [person] [weird]?
We already have this was (ak) and the word that signals this is a question (projeh). So the only new words we have to invent are person and weird - and you'll notice that I've placed the adjective after the noun which it is modifying, a technique which I underhandedly stole from French. I've also decided that the subject of the sentence will always, always go first, unless it's superceded by some kind of "this is super-important!" modifier (say it with me: goddeno.)
Person is a word that will be used a lot, so it'll have to be short and sweet and not too much of a tongue-twister: let's say it's jad. Weird will be less commonly used, but it still has to be easily pronouncable; I was thinking onlohs, but I've decided that this would erode over time into onlas.
The result?
"Was Michael Jackson a weird person?"
"Meigel Chason, projeh ak jad onlas?"
Thank you and goodnight!
Halo dunia!
1 week ago
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