Bits and Pieces and Particles-oh my!
30 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Creating grammar/vocabulary Tags: grammar, language, particles, reflection, reflections, rishlao, transitive verbs
Grammar section Particles up.
When I was considering function words for Rishlao, I had to take into consideration things like determiners and stuff. There are lots of systems for doing things. For example, where one puts the particles and determiners. Some English function words will go in front of the word, like “the” and “a”. Other languages will have them come after (Nihon ni, empitsu ga in Japanese).
For word order, I decide that particles come after the word, like in Japanese. Furthermore, while there would be no words like “a” or “the” in Rishlao, there are two particles that serve to indicate the subject and object of a sentence. Because of this, I don’t think I’ll have to worry about transitivity because it’ll all be about the same anyway since the subject is the subject, and the object is whatever is being acted upon by the subject (some languages will have different verbs for whether it’s transitive or intransitive-I don’t really have the patience for that). The lack of transitivity is a good thing for me, because I’ve never really liked figuring out the difference between Japanese transitive and intransitive verbs. I’m not going to put myself through that torture in my own language!
Anyway, Rishlao is coming along nicely. I’m almost done with the very basic grammar, though I want to get a little further before I post a bunch of new grammar. It’s a bit annoying to have to go through and fix my old posts.
New Sounds and Recordings
26 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Lessons Tags: audio, links, sound files
As a note, I have started recording sample words, sentences, etc. for Rishlao. However, due to weird WordPress format issues, I have to host the audio downloads offsite. You can get them here.
New Grammar Post
26 Sep 2011 1 Comment
in Creating grammar/vocabulary, Creating grammar/vocabulary, Uncategorized Tags: grammar, links, reflection
Basic Rules: Pronouns and Lexical category has been added.
When I started coming up with the grammar rules of Rishlao, I had to consider many things. One of the most interesting things I found about doing this was the circular nature of doing so. I would come up with something only to circle back and edit another thing. The rules were always changing, always being revised as I saw weaknesses in the structure.
For example, I revised my rules of gender to be simpler. Originally I had a really convoluted way to express the gender of a possessed animate object (such as saying my cat, my girlfriend, etc.). My rules were so complicated that when I explained them to my advisor, I left her with her head spinning. My original intent was to embed more meaning into specific words, thus allowing the ability to cram more information into a sentence.
The rule was thus: adjectives have gender when attached to animate nouns, providing that the gender of the object is known. Furthermore, all adjectives end in -e, such as luve(lovely), ridre(beautiful), etc. To indicate a gender on a pronoun or adjective, then you insert the vowel for the respective gender before the -e in an adjective (with -a being masculine and -i being feminine). Mass objects, such as all humans, have neutral adjectives though if referring to only female humans the adjective can be feminine. Therefore, luvie kaco would show that the cat was lovely and female.
The complicated part that I dropped was thus: if a person or animal possessed another person or animal, and they were of different genders, then both genders were indicated in the adjective. However, the subject or one doing the possessing had their gender inflection first followed by the inflection of the subject or possessed. Thus, luvaie kacosu would indicate that the cat was lovely, female, and possessed by a male.
Now personally, I thought this method would lead to some nice lovely vowels and diphthongs blending in a beautiful harmony, but the thing was that this was apparently difficult to keep straight when I was explaining it, both to my advisor and some friends I showing it to. While I have no doubt that a native speaker of Rishlao would be able to easily decipher this rule, the point of the matter is that I’m trying to make this language somewhat learnable by just about anyone. To this end, I’ve tried to keep the spelling and pronunciation relatively regular, and those perusing the grammar of Rishlao may find it similar in structure to languages such as Japanese.
And so, I found myself going back and simplifying it.
Interestingly enough, this has shown me that while I may not trying to make Rishlao the next great contender for the position of the International language, I am trying to make it somewhat accessible. I don’t know how many other languages might have such a feature as what I tried to do with Rishlao’s possessives, but the truth is that the majority of languages probably don’t do this. Rather than pander to my desire to be unique, I decided to cater to my audience and think about what my possible audience would need.
Which raised my next question. Who am I writing this language for?
I have already stated in earlier posts that I am writing this language as a project to fulfill requirements to graduate college. However, that does not mean that there is no audience for my language. Obviously, there is my advisor, who must judge me on the practicality and usability of my language. I am also writing this blog and getting my ideas on conlanging out into the world, in hopes that other might see it, and be inspired-inspired to learn my language, invent their own, or go out and seek more knowledge about the wide world of conlanging. So I must also write this language in regards to them as well.
How pronounceable is my language? Is the grammar convoluted and ridiculously hard to learn? Is it impossible to say basic and complicated concepts in my language? What am I aiming for, a language that is super hard to learn or easy to learn? Am I aiming for a language that is beautiful, or harsh sounding? Should I use loanwords and grammar from natural languages?
These are all questions that were raised by this part of my little experiment in conlanging. What sort of questions would you have if you were inventing your own language?
Name of the Game
12 Sep 2011 3 Comments
in Reflections Tags: grammar, language, name, reflections, rishlao, roots
Quick update: I’ve come up with a name for my new language. I now introduce to the world the language
Rishlao
I may have to change the spelling when I figure out the diacritics of the langauge, since “sh” might become one character. The roots are “ri” (beautiful, pleasing) “shla” (tongue, language, words) “o” (noun lexical indicator). Yes, I rather egotistically named it “the beautiful language”. I don’t feel guilty though, because when designing the language I meant for it to sound “pretty”.
Anyway, because of the “sh” it sounds sort of slushy, but also very pretty. The syllables are ri-shla-o and the -ao becomes a diphthong when pronounced at normal speaking speed.
Now I am happy, because at the very least, I’ve come up with a name for my language, so now I have something to refer to it by. 
Getting to the Root of the Matter
12 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Reflections Tags: language, reflections, roots, tips
One of the next concerns I had in creating my new language was “How do I create roots and words?”. It’s a very important question. I can’t just throw out words willy-nilly. For one, it’s too tedious. Sitting and trying to come up with hundreds and hundreds of random words would tax even the most talented of conlangers. For another, there would be no system of things. I might have two words that are very similar and mean two totally different things. But by having roots that have meaning, then it makes it easier, both on me and anyone that might learn this language, because then you can make connections.
All humans tend to make connections. We categorize things automatically. It is both a blessing and a curse in our species, because we can use it to learn language and science and stuff like that easier, and a curse because people put other people into categories, sometimes to their detriment.
In a conlang, it’s good to have common roots because it makes it easier to learn a language, especially if you’re trying to create an auxiliary language (or auxlang). Auxlangs are created mostly to under the theme of an international language that many can learn, and they tend to take common roots from many languages. For example, in Esperanto the word for friend is “amiko”, which shares a common root of “ami” with French and Spanish, and likely this root is shared in several other languages. This makes it easier for speakers of these languages to learn Esperanto.
Roots also make the language look and sound more natural. In a natural language there are often roots that make many connections. For example, one root in English is “biblio”. You can find this root in words like Bible, bibliophile, bibliomaniac, biblioteca. In Japanese, it’s a little easier sometimes to see the root, because often the word will have the kanji that makes up one of the roots. For example, 人（hito/kata, person） makes up several other words, like 人間 (ningen, human)、三人(sannin, three people)、人気(ninki, popular)、人々(hitobito, many people), etc. Because of these categories, both native speakers and students of the language can learn the language more easily because then they have memory helpers to learn the many thousands of words that are in any given language.
Roots also allow for further evolution of language. Scientists often use Latin roots to name new species and diseases. Entrepreneurs use roots to make up new names for products and technology (I was amused to get my new laptop and discover a free e-book reading program on my computer named Blio. It is very easy to see that the creators of the program shaved down the root biblio to get their name). Slang is often invented by combining words and roots.
Because of all these reasons, you can see why coming up with roots are very important to the conlanger.
To get my roots, what I did was start by inventing words. The first set of words I invented was a list of colors. The very first word I invented was “neje” or black. Therefore the first root I had was ”ne” for black or dark. “Je” ended up being a root for color, and I ended all the other colors I invented in “je”, coming up with a list of colors like aje (blue), porije (green), and koje (red).
From there, I was actually able to expand the roots quite naturally. The roots for porije meant “green, greening” and “color”-this led naturally to the word for grass, poro (all nouns end in -o, and thus making “green” into a noun also turns it into grass).
As I went through my new list, I would make up words that I thought were important, and then using the roots from these words, try to make up other words that could be connected with the roots. “Tulo”, for eat or consume, thus became tuloku (eat) and tuloheo (meal), and so on and so forth.
An interesting note is this: if running low on ideas for new vocabulary, it helps to consult some basic vocabulary lists consisting of common words in any language. Mark Rosenfelder includes a nice set of lists in the back of his book, The Language Construction kit, and you can find a good list in Ogden’s Basic English (a link is in Resources).
Also, make sure to create a list of all your roots as you go! This is pretty important because it will keep you from repeating things, and makes a good reference for later.
Sounding It Out
12 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Grammar and Vocabulary Tags: grammar, language, morphemes
I’ve finished making the sounds of my new language, but there is still a small problem. I’d like to use some sort of diacritic for a few of the sounds (like “th”) but I don’t know where to get a keyboard that will type them (the keyboard I use now, the International English keyboard, only has a few diacritics outside of vowels). It would be a lot easier if I could put an umlaut over the t or something.
Anyway, the available sounds are:
A as in padre
C as in chat
D as in dog
E as in hay
F as in front
H as in who
I as in eat
J as in jungle
K as in cat
L is Japanese R, as
in ringo,
M as in man
N as in not
Ñ as in ring
O as in boat
P as in putt
R as in round
S as in sat
SH as in ship
T as tank
TH as in thing
U as in poop
V as in van
Y as in it
Since I’m an American, the sounds are how they would be said by an American (unless otherwise noted). I also made a couple of charts that show the sounds of the language. Interestingly enough, though I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Japanese for the sounds (like using Japanese vowels generally), I’ve been told that the words sound a bit Slavic. Very interesting indeed. I’ve also been told that the language also sounds very soft and melodic when I practiced saying some words out loud.
This was mostly intentional. I didn’t want a very harsh or guttural language so I deliberately aimed for a language heavy on the vowels and softer consonants. To do this, I made the structure of the language something like C(r,l)V(CV)(CV). It is pretty much impossible to have two consonants in a row, though it is possible to have a glottal stop (indicated by an apostrophe). Because of this my new language sounds a lot lighter and fluid.
Anyway, so these are the sounds. I’ll post a chart of all possible sounds in the Grammar section.
Conlang Newbie
07 Sep 2011 Leave a Comment
in Reflections Tags: language, links, reflections
So here I am, about to post my very first post on conlanging. I can’t help but feel a little sentimental. Sigh.
So here’s the deal. I’ve been working on my conlang for about a week now. I still haven’t named my conlang yet, but I want to add a few more words to my base vocabulary (got about twenty-six words now) before I do. Might be nice if the name of the language had some sort of meaning. I’ve managed to come up with a nice little set of morphemes for my new language (though it’s not finalized yet. I want to find diacritics that I can install on my laptop, but so far it’s slow going finding the perfect ones). It’s harder than I thought to settle on my complete list of morphemes. Questions plague me. Should I include a Q (like in queen) sound? Should I have a “b” sound? What’s zh good for anyway? What about adding sounds from other languages? I’ll tell you this, I spent a good couple hours perusing the International Phonetic Association (IPA) chart listening to the available sounds.
I did get some decent work done though. I decided that my language could allow a C(r,l)V (CV) pattern, and that glottal stops are indicated with an apostrophe. I also decided on basic gender rules, pronouns, and some grammar rules like subject/object markers.
I have definitely learned a lot so far, in just a week. Not just about how to create the actual language, because that goes without saying. I’ve also learned a lot about the conlanging community online. At first, I was having a hard time finding resources on invented languages. It’s not like there’s a ton of books easily available. My campus library, though nicely sized, still only had about six books on the subject, and they mostly dealt with just Esperanto.
Conlanging online is a totally different thing though. I’ve found forums and organizations devoted to conlanging, as well as many sites about various conlangs. I’ve even downloaded a free program to each yourself Esperanto in “twelve easy lessons!”. One of my favorite online finds is Awkwords, a generator for invented words, and I can already tell that it’ll be a godsend when I’m lagging behind on invented words.
I’m looking forward to this conlanging project. I can tell it’ll be a challenge, one that I must be ever ready for. I’ve already had to backtrack and fix little details already, such as a stray morpheme there, a root that didn’t make sense here…and I think I might have frazzled my advisor (part of my motive in conlanging is credit for a college course) with my slightly convoluted rules for gendered adjectives. Well, maybe more than slightly convoluted. Maybe massively convoluted.
But at the end of the project I’ll have something that is uniquely mine. I don’t have much expectation that it’ll become the next best thing in conlanging, but maybe at the least I’ll be able to keep a journal without nosy family members reading it.
Signing off,
Heather
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