How To Invent Sci-Fi Languages (And get paid for it, too)

[Tab]

Just thought this was interesting. I'm not a linguist, but I'm fascinated by "manufactured" languages, probably started by Tolkien, and evolving (so to speak) into Klingon. I'd like to create my own, and I've played with it, but I don't really know what I'm doing.

As a college freshman, David J. Peterson became fascinated with languages. He then began inventing his own words and grammar. “It was kind of like crocheting,” he says. “Except you can make money with crocheting.” Peterson finally hit payday in 2009, when he won a competition to design the Dothraki language for Game of Thrones. Soon, he was crafting fictional tongues for TV shows like Defiance and The 100.
How do you start inventing a language?

I separate the process into three distinct branches: sounds, word meanings, and grammar. I usually start with the sound system, which affects grammar, and also with nouns. Then I base the language on whatever desire I have for the grammar’s shape to take.
In the real world, languages evolve over time. Do yours?

I am creating the language to look as if it evolved in the real world, so it has to have a realistic character to it. But since I am emulating thousands of years of linguistic evolution on paper, it is a monumentally difficult task.
Is there anything you try to consciously avoid?

I don’t like articles and verbs. Languages like Russian, which have no definite or indefinite articles, get on fine without them—and that’s wonderful.

http://www.popsci.com/inventing-sci-fi-languages

[frogmarch]

1. Neat!

But how could there be a language without verbs? Articles (a, an, the) might be fluff, but verbs would be important in any language, real or fictional, I'd think.

[Autumn Colors]

2. I'd say thank you for posting this ...

but there is no word for "thank you" in the Dothraki language.

Winter is coming ....

[NV Whino]

4. Perhaps "Summer is coming," is the thank you.

[Krytan11c]

11. Oh my sweet summer child

You've never experienced the harshness of winter.

Jk, of course, all in good humor.

[NV Whino]

3. Ursula Le Guin was a master of alien languages also.

[longship]

5. IIRC, James Doohan invented the first Klingonese for Star Trek.

Last edited Sat Feb 27, 2016, 11:10 PM - Edit history (1)

That's right Montgomery Scott himself. For Star Trek -- The Motion Picture. (The Director's cut, produced by director Robert Wise before he died, is better than the rushed to the screen original. Available on DVD.)

Doohan's Klingonese was later expanded on in subsequent Star Treks films and programs.

But how cool is it that apparently Doohan started it?

[longship]

6. A language without verbs? You're shitting me.

Name one! Just one. I'll expect academic citation, BTW.

Addressed to the article's author, not to the DU poster, obviously.

[eppur_se_muova]

9. Nowhere in the OP is it stated that such a thing exists, or could exist.

He just said "I don't like ... verbs". Presumably he doesn't invent any more than he has to, or keeps the conjugations simple.

[longship]

10. Well, how else would one interpret "I don't like verbs"?

Pretty simple. Actually. Okay?

[backscatter712]

7. The true master was J.R.R. Tolkien.

He invented not just the Sindarin tongue used by the Elves in Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, he also invented it's "Latin", the older Elvish language Quenya.

He invented dozens of languages, for Elves, Dwarves, humans. He invented the Black Speech used by Sauron and his minions. And he invented a whole bunch of other languages.

[eShirl]

8. Land of the Lost's Lost Language

http://io9.gizmodo.com/5283736/land-of-the-losts-lost-language

Series co-creator Marty Krofft, speaking to British magazine SFX in 1997, said the initial impulse to create an artificial language for the show came from the network, which, hoping to appease the FCC, wanted to ensure that the kids' show had a positive educational component. Sid and Marty Krofft hired linguist Victoria Fromkin to create the language.

In the same issue of SFX, Fromkin said that she developed the language to be revealed over time in the series, so that kids watching could learn new words every week the same way Will and Holly did in their attempts to understand Cha-Ka, by picking up the Paku vocabulary and grammar in context as Cha-Ka used them. (Unfortunately, Fromkin said, the episodes would frequently air out of sequence in reruns, spoiling her lesson plan.) "Since I did a lot of work on West African languages, particularly Akan, the major language of Ghana, Paku appears to be in the Kwa family of Bantu languages," she said. "Or at least if some linguist 2000 years from now would find excerpts of it, through reconstruction methods they would probably conclude that."

Not only was Paku the first artificial language created for a kid's show (according to Stephen Corley and Tim Cain's Encyclopedia of Fictional and Fantastic Languages), but it was also the first instance of a television show hiring a professional linguist to develop such a language. Fromkin went on to invent the far less extensive vampire language spoken in the 1998 film Blade.

Fromkin created a 200-word vocabulary for the Pakuni. A good chunk of which survives in this Pakuni-English dictionary reconstructed by LOTL fan Nels Olsen. So if you're watching the reruns again on SyFy, you can consult the list and learn not to confuse an aganka (iguana) with an agamba (dinosaur).

[Lydia Leftcoast]

12. Gee, I invented a language when I was eleven years old

[Tab]

13. Yeah, but you didn't market it, did you?

That's the other missing piece.