We’ve had various conlang discussions previously, most of which stemming from JRR Tolkien (Patron Saint of Conlangers) but I was just curious if any new ones had joined us.
For those not in the know, A Conlang is a Constructed language created usually for personal amusement or enjoyment. There are offshoots of this, but conlang is the overarching definition usually.
So who here has an interest in them? Made your own language? Learned someone else’s? (Including Quenya / Sindarin etc.)
I’m currently working on at least a limited subset of one for use in my LARP games. It’s the language of a felinoid race, similar to large panthers, but with high intelligence and extensible “fingers” for fine manipulation. The phonemes are generally based on catlike sounds–hisses, soft yowls, and the like. The script superficially resembles Ogham, written vertically, but with more variety of shape and angle.
They’re a very old race, with a system of transportation that long ago broke down most regional and cultural distinctions. The result I’m aiming for is a dense, highly rationalized language that uses phonetically simple roots with a system of affixes to convey complex concepts. If you translated it literally, it might read something like the newspeak from 1984.
I don’t know how far I’ll take it. I don’t have a complete syllabary yet, let alone an extensive vocabulary. It doesn’t have to be fully defined for my immediate purposes, but I want the concept clear in my mind to help avoid mistakes. Besides, I like imagining my world more fully.
I do the SCA stuff but have never checked out LARP. I had never even thought of using Conlangs in a LARP. That’s pretty cool! I’m toying with a new language for use in modern day, the ideas are still very sketchy and I don’t know how I want to pursue it. I’ve always wanted to try and do a syllabically written language but I have a love for adjacent vowels so it tends to not work out so well - lol.
I don’t expect it ever to be spoken in-game–a lot of it would be hard to pronounce–but the script will appear here and there. It’s already made one appearance, as a few words engraved on the stone pillars of a Gate.
Well that’s still cool. I’ve been playing around with a very unusual alphabet idea. It started off as a syllabic system but then it branched into something else completely. What I did was break down the language’s phonology into 3 categories. Vowels, Liquids, and Consonants. The Liquids are a set of consonants which are combined with other sounds like “l, r, s, n…” and there are others but I don’t have my list in front of me. And then for writing the system revolves around the active consonant, with a vowel mark being either on the left or the right of the consonant and the liquid being above or below.
It’s still very much a work in progress but it is making for a very interesting writing system.