Some Preliminary Thoughts about a Twi'lek Conlang
I participated in a sadly short-lived play-by-post game of Age of Rebellion on RPG.net, where two of the PCs were Twi'leks. There was some brief discussion of Ryl (the Twi'lek language), which has been fleshed out a bit in various novels and other EU sources. But so far there's just some random words and a brief note that the written form is pictographic.
Which led me to speculate a bit on how I'd do a Ryl conlang. The first thing I decided was that, since the Clone Wars cartoon gave them a French accent, I'd use the French phoneme set:
For reference, here's English:
Another idea I had, inspired by (mis)reading about partitive articles, is the idea of a specific extra plural form that means "two of something". I've already done something similar for Esti. Given what a big deal lekku are to Twi'leks, I thought it would be characterful for them to have a special way of talking about pairs of things.
The written language is said to be pictographic (annoyingly, Wookieepedia does not cite a source for this). I had the idea, inspired by some medieval Islamic calligraphic seals I saw in the SCA, that the pictograms should be round, each one consisting of lines drawn within a circle. Mostly curving lines, too. I think that fits with the Twi'lek tendency to be indirect, to go around problems instead of straight at them, and also it would look original and different from real-world pictographic languages like Japanese and Korean, which tend to be very angular.
These are just some crude hand-drawn ideas, to illustrate the concept:
Anyway, those are the thoughts I've had so far.
Which led me to speculate a bit on how I'd do a Ryl conlang. The first thing I decided was that, since the Clone Wars cartoon gave them a French accent, I'd use the French phoneme set:
For reference, here's English:
Another idea I had, inspired by (mis)reading about partitive articles, is the idea of a specific extra plural form that means "two of something". I've already done something similar for Esti. Given what a big deal lekku are to Twi'leks, I thought it would be characterful for them to have a special way of talking about pairs of things.
The written language is said to be pictographic (annoyingly, Wookieepedia does not cite a source for this). I had the idea, inspired by some medieval Islamic calligraphic seals I saw in the SCA, that the pictograms should be round, each one consisting of lines drawn within a circle. Mostly curving lines, too. I think that fits with the Twi'lek tendency to be indirect, to go around problems instead of straight at them, and also it would look original and different from real-world pictographic languages like Japanese and Korean, which tend to be very angular.
These are just some crude hand-drawn ideas, to illustrate the concept:
Anyway, those are the thoughts I've had so far.