Sunday, September 27, 2015

Creating a language

Especially when it comes to fantasy and science fiction, some of the biggest names in fiction are those stories that have an entirely new language contained within them, from the ancient elvish languages of Lord of the Rings to Klingon in Star Trek. The fact that the languages are consistent words meant to mean specific things is impressive enough, but that they can be fully translated and learned is another thing entirely. Granted, in at least a few of these instances the author was in fact highly trained in linguistics of these natures, but regardless. It is quite the feat.

I and several people that I know would love to be able to implement that kind of system in our own stories. But unfortunately, more frequently than not that just ends in the author spending all of their time developing a language, and little to no time writing a story in which that language can even be used, much less implementing that language into the story in any meaningful way.

The easiest way to create a language is to simply develop a new alphabet, and continue to write in English (or whatever your language of choice may be) but with said new alphabet when the chance arises. However, this is both a weak cipher, as well as considerably less interesting. Not to mention finding a way to put that new language into a computer so that it can be recognized and used for typing, and then be recognized by a secondary software or a printer so that it is not lost in any part of the process.

On the other hand, you can go through the effort to fully develop a new language, with its sounds, inflections, words, and word order. If you've ever studied a secondary language, there's a good chance you've found that the order of their nouns, verbs, and objects are not the same as your home language. And when developing an entirely new language, you have to consider that part alongside the words themselves. After all, a language is not only defined by its words, but by the way those words interact with each other in order to form sentences.

But of course, none of this is even necessary. It's simply flavor that is added to the world one's story takes place inside of. You can go not only entire books, but entire series without ever stepping into this realm of writing. There are far more stories that only contain really world languages, after all, then there are ones that have brand new languages. Readability is the least of the reasons for that.

In fact, you could simply make sounds in your head, transcribe them onto paper, and arbitrarily assign meaning to those sounds if you saw fit to do so. If that secondary language is used sparingly, and only for specific situations, such as spell casting for instance, then who cares about forming sentences? You don't have to say "I summon thee, the power of fire!" when just shouting "Fire!" works just as well.

But as soon as a reader realizes that there is no discernible pattern to that secret, ancient language, it becomes significantly less fascinating. That's something I can say from personal experience. Both from losing interest in the language of a story I am reading, and seeing people reading my own stories lose interest in the strange words that I seem to use needlessly. It only serves to confuse, rather than expand.

It's a situation where adding a spice to a recipe can certainly help, but adding too much will simply ruin the entire thing.

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