Notes on Language for Pendleton's
Pendleton’s World Design Notes
Languages
J. Comer
In celebration of Worldbuilding Week, I have a note here on languages. I would like to remark before we start that, though we are a group of LGBT and friends, I don’t say anything specific about gender or sex in this note; it ought therefore to be safe for work. As for gender and sex, I encourage them.
When designing Pendleton’s World, or HD 114783 c1, as it is known at the time of writing, I had already resolved to create languages for the setting, as I had done earlier for the World of Abanar project in which Chad Imbrogno and Mike Brown were co-creators. When working on Urasti and one other language for that world, I had used Proto-Nostratic and Tocharian as bases for the vocab, and then constructed the verb conjugations and noun declensions for myself. The result were languages which gave the world a great deal of flavor and color, but which dissatisfied me in two ways.
One was that despite choosing a proto-languages reconstructed from its dysfunctional descendants, the two languages had visible roots in them which were easy to recognize. “Pur” for fire and “akwa” for water displeased me, even though I love the curse “Puyurh baVasola!”, or “by the flames of Paradise!”, with the plural y infixed into the word. I realize that most people won’t recognize this unless it is pointed out, and that, in addition, there is a population of fans who say that they don’t like made-up words.
The other thing was that the languages didn’t make use of the vast majority of the design features of natural human languages. There were no non-English sounds, no noun incorporation, and no clicks or tones. The languages were workable, but they were tiresome. I resolved to do two things differently, the next time I designed languages.
One was that *all* of Pendleton’s languages are derived from what on Earth are called language isolates. While Korean is the best known of these, numerous other isolates are documented from various places on Earth. Therefore, there would be a minimum of recognizable cognates to Earth languages (at least languages anyone is going to know). The roots were put through vowel and consonant shifts as well, to make them look less like an Earth language and more like themselves. Likewise, none of the cultures on Pendleton’s use coins, simply because I am sick and tired of ‘gold pieces’. The faNurro use beads and strands of cloth, and the other cultures do similar things.
The second thing that I did was to use more of the full potential of human languages. While Farash, the main language of the characters, has only one sound not common in English, it has very recognizable gendered endings and is heavy on prefixes. Rhuthuok, the language of the “natives”, is a click language with noun incorporation(that is, the noun crawls inside the verb and a sentence can be one word, although it’s a long one). The Safalo language, the language of the ancient empire of this setting, is a language with triconsonantal roots, along the lines of Arabic, but its basic vocab was pirated from the Malay Archipelago. Likewise, Fayesh, which is related to Farash, has a huge list of words borrowed from the Ihunro (islander) dialects concerning sea, sailing, ships, and so on.
So, the sixty-four moneybead question. How do you make a language? Well, Mark Rosenfelder’s website, Zompist, http://zompist.com/ and his websuite
http://zompist.com/kit.html
and book The Language Construction Kit,
https://www.amazon.com/Language-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfelder/dp/098447000X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1469546845&sr=1-1&keywords=language+construction+kit
will get you started. Rosenfelder has a short chapter on constructing a ‘name language’, which uses the inscription on the One Ring to show how a language is made, and then helps you construct a language for doing things such as naming cities or features on a map, and so on. Then he goes on to show how to generate vocabulary, which can be done randomly (I don’t like it that way myself) or done by design, or borrowed (this is what I do) from an Earth language, natural or constructed (The Old Tongue on the World of Abanar was based on the Analytical Language of Bishop Wilkins, a 17th century cleric). Then he shows the reader how to construct grammar and so on. This website and book are invaluable if you have never built a language from scratch, and even if you have done it before, it will be easier and loaded with more options. (For the record, Mr Rosenfelder is not paying me to say this, and doesn’t know who I am.)
There is a fast way to do this: I call it “clanglanging” as opposed to true conlanging. This is to take an extant language, such as Russian. Do a series of vowel and consonant shifts, or make the nouns into verbs, and just use this as the language. Often readers see through this, and find it tiresome. It will do when you have nothing else, but I far prefer a writer who uses a conlang.
There is also the gibberish option. Take Words With Friends letter combos, or roll Boggle dice. Unless your goal is humor or some sort of meta-statement on the genre, avoid this. And, of course, you can use English for everything, but this leads to ridiculous inconsistencies. Why are people named Philip and Lydia, on worlds unknown light-years gone, or in settings thst never knew the Bible at all? This is what lazy writers do. Avoid it unless you have an explanation: In Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, the texts are ‘translations’ from the original ‘text’ penned by Severian, and as such, the use of Latin reflects the use of ancient languages in the far-future world which the characters inhabit. If you can pull this off, then go right ahead, but writers such as Dennis McKiernan have done it and simply looked lazy.
English isn’t eternal. The English of 1000 CE is incomprehensible to us today. The English of 3000 CE will be equally so.
http://jbr.me.uk/futurese.html#6
Assuming that English is eternal is laziness.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EternalEnglish
and it drives me crazy. We can assume, of course, that everything is translated, but NAMES don’t translate. Why are people given Biblical names on worlds that never saw or heard of the Bible? You aren’t thinking. That’s all.
So build a language for your world. Of course it’s work. So is writing, silly. And this is part of worldbuilding, which we are discussing.
What do I do, when I build a language, then?
I begin by getting my mitts on a Swadesh List, a list of the words that every language has, because it has to have them. This is where we always begin the study of any language.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Swadesh_lists
If you want to, then generate the Swadesh list randomly. This is easy to do:
http://zompist.com/gen.html
Of you can grab a Swadesh list for a language from Earth:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Uto-Aztecan_Swadesh_lists
If you don’t know the language, don’t worry. The point is to use these words from old Earth as building blocks and to make something new! So then you will need to add words for concepts unique to your setting, such as “spin gravity”, “malevolent artificial intelligence”, or “womens’ magic”, which are phrases in English but may be short words in your language. Remember that Japanese, for example, doesn’t have a phrase for “peeping tom” and that defining this concept takes several sentences in that language for cultural reasons. So you will end up with a list of some basic words. Combine words to make other words: if “when” is hisat and “stick” is hupi, then a hisatupi is a sundial, a “when-stick”! You can generate names from your vocabulary as well.
Now, you can of course just use these as naming terms: “Batharkh” means “sunrise mountains” and “Chartha” means “sunset mountains” in Farash. But you could also make up a verb conjugation and noun declension system if you want to, which makes more possibilities for you. If “he” is apo, and “buy” is jino, and if verb endings are suffixes, then jinapo is “he buys”, perhaps. Or do it your own way! Here, I’ll reiterate that knowing more than one language will help you. Even if it’s Italian. :D
You can make a language as elaborate as you like, and you can load it with private jokes, as I’ve done. An especial pleasure of mine is the way that unintended false cognates show up in my work. What’s an example? I ran the words for Buddha into my vowel-and-consonant shift, and the word came out as Dhai. The Dhai is the Buddha-like savior of the FaTheyist religion, but Dhai was not meant to sound or look like Dios, and faTheyism was not intented to look or sound like Theos or Theism. Some readers at first assumed that the Farash words were grotesque typoes; another reader told me that Khozhatsch was an unpronounceable mess. He has, I assume, heard or said the word “achoo”, which has the same consonant cluster in it!
Features of the language will shape the world and the story. I didn’t intend for the faVashala religion to have a female deity, but the word for Sun is grammatically feminine, so the Sun Lord is female, and is referred to as she. Likewise, the language has four genders: masculine, feminine, sacred and profane. Lots of fours showed up during the design of the language, so I let the prevalence of the number say a lot about the language and the people. There are four grammatical numbers also: singular, dual, a few, and a lot. These are features I liked, so I used them.
I do realize that overusing a constructed language makes the story into a slog through (usually) badly realized ethnography. There are novels which do a terrible job of this. I would therefore advise writers, once they have used either Rosenfelder’s or their own resources to build a basic vocab, to use the language as *flavoring* in the setting. On Pendleton’s, readers can read about Sirat, the hero, without knowing that the name means “marsh-lion”, but when Sirat, Charthat, and Hilojat’s names all end the same way, while Mrs Shaunatsh, Sister Khozhatsch, and other females have consonant clusters at the ends of their names, the reader will painlessly learn about gendered endings in Farash. By the way, the faNurro, the Farash (language) and the faTheyists (a religion) all have a prefix which means “the people of”. See how this works? A few examples can enliven a world a great deal by making it seem real and lived-in. Even using a ‘name language’ makes a world much more real.
In closing, I encourage writers to consider building languages for their world, and whether they do so or not, to question their assumptions about whether baby names which are fashionable now, or were two decades past, will still be fashionable eons backwards, forwards, or sideways in time. I would strongly suggest that writers at the very least look carefully at the processes of linguistic change before assuming that words and names are always the same. In doing so, we make our worlds unique and interesting, and this is the whole point, now, isn’t it?
Languages
J. Comer
In celebration of Worldbuilding Week, I have a note here on languages. I would like to remark before we start that, though we are a group of LGBT and friends, I don’t say anything specific about gender or sex in this note; it ought therefore to be safe for work. As for gender and sex, I encourage them.
When designing Pendleton’s World, or HD 114783 c1, as it is known at the time of writing, I had already resolved to create languages for the setting, as I had done earlier for the World of Abanar project in which Chad Imbrogno and Mike Brown were co-creators. When working on Urasti and one other language for that world, I had used Proto-Nostratic and Tocharian as bases for the vocab, and then constructed the verb conjugations and noun declensions for myself. The result were languages which gave the world a great deal of flavor and color, but which dissatisfied me in two ways.
One was that despite choosing a proto-languages reconstructed from its dysfunctional descendants, the two languages had visible roots in them which were easy to recognize. “Pur” for fire and “akwa” for water displeased me, even though I love the curse “Puyurh baVasola!”, or “by the flames of Paradise!”, with the plural y infixed into the word. I realize that most people won’t recognize this unless it is pointed out, and that, in addition, there is a population of fans who say that they don’t like made-up words.
The other thing was that the languages didn’t make use of the vast majority of the design features of natural human languages. There were no non-English sounds, no noun incorporation, and no clicks or tones. The languages were workable, but they were tiresome. I resolved to do two things differently, the next time I designed languages.
One was that *all* of Pendleton’s languages are derived from what on Earth are called language isolates. While Korean is the best known of these, numerous other isolates are documented from various places on Earth. Therefore, there would be a minimum of recognizable cognates to Earth languages (at least languages anyone is going to know). The roots were put through vowel and consonant shifts as well, to make them look less like an Earth language and more like themselves. Likewise, none of the cultures on Pendleton’s use coins, simply because I am sick and tired of ‘gold pieces’. The faNurro use beads and strands of cloth, and the other cultures do similar things.
The second thing that I did was to use more of the full potential of human languages. While Farash, the main language of the characters, has only one sound not common in English, it has very recognizable gendered endings and is heavy on prefixes. Rhuthuok, the language of the “natives”, is a click language with noun incorporation(that is, the noun crawls inside the verb and a sentence can be one word, although it’s a long one). The Safalo language, the language of the ancient empire of this setting, is a language with triconsonantal roots, along the lines of Arabic, but its basic vocab was pirated from the Malay Archipelago. Likewise, Fayesh, which is related to Farash, has a huge list of words borrowed from the Ihunro (islander) dialects concerning sea, sailing, ships, and so on.
So, the sixty-four moneybead question. How do you make a language? Well, Mark Rosenfelder’s website, Zompist, http://zompist.com/ and his websuite
http://zompist.com/kit.html
and book The Language Construction Kit,
https://www.amazon.com/Language-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfelder/dp/098447000X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1469546845&sr=1-1&keywords=language+construction+kit
will get you started. Rosenfelder has a short chapter on constructing a ‘name language’, which uses the inscription on the One Ring to show how a language is made, and then helps you construct a language for doing things such as naming cities or features on a map, and so on. Then he goes on to show how to generate vocabulary, which can be done randomly (I don’t like it that way myself) or done by design, or borrowed (this is what I do) from an Earth language, natural or constructed (The Old Tongue on the World of Abanar was based on the Analytical Language of Bishop Wilkins, a 17th century cleric). Then he shows the reader how to construct grammar and so on. This website and book are invaluable if you have never built a language from scratch, and even if you have done it before, it will be easier and loaded with more options. (For the record, Mr Rosenfelder is not paying me to say this, and doesn’t know who I am.)
There is a fast way to do this: I call it “clanglanging” as opposed to true conlanging. This is to take an extant language, such as Russian. Do a series of vowel and consonant shifts, or make the nouns into verbs, and just use this as the language. Often readers see through this, and find it tiresome. It will do when you have nothing else, but I far prefer a writer who uses a conlang.
There is also the gibberish option. Take Words With Friends letter combos, or roll Boggle dice. Unless your goal is humor or some sort of meta-statement on the genre, avoid this. And, of course, you can use English for everything, but this leads to ridiculous inconsistencies. Why are people named Philip and Lydia, on worlds unknown light-years gone, or in settings thst never knew the Bible at all? This is what lazy writers do. Avoid it unless you have an explanation: In Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, the texts are ‘translations’ from the original ‘text’ penned by Severian, and as such, the use of Latin reflects the use of ancient languages in the far-future world which the characters inhabit. If you can pull this off, then go right ahead, but writers such as Dennis McKiernan have done it and simply looked lazy.
English isn’t eternal. The English of 1000 CE is incomprehensible to us today. The English of 3000 CE will be equally so.
http://jbr.me.uk/futurese.html#6
Assuming that English is eternal is laziness.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EternalEnglish
and it drives me crazy. We can assume, of course, that everything is translated, but NAMES don’t translate. Why are people given Biblical names on worlds that never saw or heard of the Bible? You aren’t thinking. That’s all.
So build a language for your world. Of course it’s work. So is writing, silly. And this is part of worldbuilding, which we are discussing.
What do I do, when I build a language, then?
I begin by getting my mitts on a Swadesh List, a list of the words that every language has, because it has to have them. This is where we always begin the study of any language.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Swadesh_lists
If you want to, then generate the Swadesh list randomly. This is easy to do:
http://zompist.com/gen.html
Of you can grab a Swadesh list for a language from Earth:
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Uto-Aztecan_Swadesh_lists
If you don’t know the language, don’t worry. The point is to use these words from old Earth as building blocks and to make something new! So then you will need to add words for concepts unique to your setting, such as “spin gravity”, “malevolent artificial intelligence”, or “womens’ magic”, which are phrases in English but may be short words in your language. Remember that Japanese, for example, doesn’t have a phrase for “peeping tom” and that defining this concept takes several sentences in that language for cultural reasons. So you will end up with a list of some basic words. Combine words to make other words: if “when” is hisat and “stick” is hupi, then a hisatupi is a sundial, a “when-stick”! You can generate names from your vocabulary as well.
Now, you can of course just use these as naming terms: “Batharkh” means “sunrise mountains” and “Chartha” means “sunset mountains” in Farash. But you could also make up a verb conjugation and noun declension system if you want to, which makes more possibilities for you. If “he” is apo, and “buy” is jino, and if verb endings are suffixes, then jinapo is “he buys”, perhaps. Or do it your own way! Here, I’ll reiterate that knowing more than one language will help you. Even if it’s Italian. :D
You can make a language as elaborate as you like, and you can load it with private jokes, as I’ve done. An especial pleasure of mine is the way that unintended false cognates show up in my work. What’s an example? I ran the words for Buddha into my vowel-and-consonant shift, and the word came out as Dhai. The Dhai is the Buddha-like savior of the FaTheyist religion, but Dhai was not meant to sound or look like Dios, and faTheyism was not intented to look or sound like Theos or Theism. Some readers at first assumed that the Farash words were grotesque typoes; another reader told me that Khozhatsch was an unpronounceable mess. He has, I assume, heard or said the word “achoo”, which has the same consonant cluster in it!
Features of the language will shape the world and the story. I didn’t intend for the faVashala religion to have a female deity, but the word for Sun is grammatically feminine, so the Sun Lord is female, and is referred to as she. Likewise, the language has four genders: masculine, feminine, sacred and profane. Lots of fours showed up during the design of the language, so I let the prevalence of the number say a lot about the language and the people. There are four grammatical numbers also: singular, dual, a few, and a lot. These are features I liked, so I used them.
I do realize that overusing a constructed language makes the story into a slog through (usually) badly realized ethnography. There are novels which do a terrible job of this. I would therefore advise writers, once they have used either Rosenfelder’s or their own resources to build a basic vocab, to use the language as *flavoring* in the setting. On Pendleton’s, readers can read about Sirat, the hero, without knowing that the name means “marsh-lion”, but when Sirat, Charthat, and Hilojat’s names all end the same way, while Mrs Shaunatsh, Sister Khozhatsch, and other females have consonant clusters at the ends of their names, the reader will painlessly learn about gendered endings in Farash. By the way, the faNurro, the Farash (language) and the faTheyists (a religion) all have a prefix which means “the people of”. See how this works? A few examples can enliven a world a great deal by making it seem real and lived-in. Even using a ‘name language’ makes a world much more real.
In closing, I encourage writers to consider building languages for their world, and whether they do so or not, to question their assumptions about whether baby names which are fashionable now, or were two decades past, will still be fashionable eons backwards, forwards, or sideways in time. I would strongly suggest that writers at the very least look carefully at the processes of linguistic change before assuming that words and names are always the same. In doing so, we make our worlds unique and interesting, and this is the whole point, now, isn’t it?