Fantasist's Scroll

The Rosetta Project is really rolling now.

I first read about this in a news story in Wired. Their goal is to create a permanent, or near permanent record of dying languages. Their goal is to preserve at least a thousand of the roughly 7,000 languages on the planet. They expect more than 80% of those languages to die out due to globalization and modernization. What Wired talked about was the method they plan to use for preservation. Somewhat suprisingly, they don’t plan to use a computer-based technology. Rather, they’re going with a low-tech, but durable and easy to use, disk etched with examples of the same text in all 1,000 languages, just like the famous Rosetta Stone that allowed us to dechiper ancient Egyptian. (The text, incidentally, is the first book of the Bible, Genesis.)

But, what interests me the most is the on-line language search engine and the Comparative Word List Generator. With this bad-boy a person can generate lists, or tables, of the translations for the 207 most widely used and important words in language. Now, not every language listed has this table compiled, but the major languages all do and quite a few of the less major languages do, too. In any case, it sure is cool to play with when thinking about creating a language. Shoot, they even have grammars and phonologies and orthographies for hundreds, in some cases thousands, of languages. It’s well worth checking out!

What does a soldier need to know how to say in a foreign language?

It’s an interesting question, I think. I actually hit on it by accident. I was looking for an Arabic phrasebook, just because it’s one of the world’s major languages that I don’t have a phrasebook for yet. While I was searching, I came across a book that was an Iraqi Arabic Phrasebook for Military Personnel. That got me thinking… What do those soldiers need to know when they’re talking to the natives? What kind of questions and answers are expected at check-points? How does one tell an enemy soldier that their surrender has been accepted? Do soldiers make small-talk with the natives? What about intelligence gathering? Or, bribes?
Unfortunately, the book was unavailable, so I couldn’t see what the authors thought military personnel should know. In any case, it sure is something to consider when building a language, a world or culture, or a story about international war.

Well, I’ve finally updatd the Language Generator.

I added several new base language files. Several of them are mashed together from a couple of different sources to get meta-language base files. Things like several East Asian languages together to form a NeoAsian base. And several of the Near, or Middle, Eastern languages mashed together to form a Middle Eastern base. Of course, I also added an Egyptian file, an Albanian file, a very large Japanese file, a Polish file, and a Turkish file as well.
My favorite, though, is a combonation of Latin and Tsolyani. It makes some really interesting output.

Enjoy!

Just added!

I’ve actually had these around for a bit now, but I finally got around to uploading them to my webserver. There are two phrasebook templates.
The first is a generic phrasebook similar to the Lonely Planet series of phrase books. It’s fairly safe and standard stuff. Pretty much everything a traveler could want to know how to say. And, I think it’s a fairly good introduction to a conlang!
The second phrasebook is a little more adult. It’s more along the lines of Howard Tomb’s “Wicked” phrasebook series or
Zakennayo!: The Real Japanese You Were Never Taught In School!. It’s more irreverant and has terms that only very naughty tourists would know or want to know!! But, it’s a good place to start if you want to figure out how someone would curse in your conlang. Of course, the idioms used are all particular to a conlang that I’m working on at the moment, but at least it gives you a place to start.

You can find the phrasebook templates on the World Building Resource page.

Well, I’ve finally done it!

I’ve been working on this for about a year and I finally got it done. I took a script from Chris Pound’s Name Generation page and made into a CGI script. It took a little bit, but I finally worked out how to use the CGI library in PERL to the point that I could both make proper HTML tags and include the same style sheet that the rest of the site uses. So, now, even if I change the styles, the whole site will change with one file edit. Horay!
Oh, and the script, which can be found here , is pretty cool, too. Of course, I still need to add a bunch of text files for data, but I’ve got a pretty good start here already.
Have fun with it!

Does it really exist?

It seems like the wrong category to put with this title, but it really fits. I have several half-baked ideas for stories, but they’re all set in fictional worlds filled with people and places that don’t have names. Why don’t they have names? Because, I want to make their names new, original and not quite like anything that already exists. I want to, at least partially, dislocate the reader from their usual preconceptions about fantasy literature. So, I invented a continent that is in the Southern hemisphere. That inverts the standard Euro-centric notions of hot and cold, not to mention civilization and barbarism. But, that’s still not enough. So, names…
I want names that sound like they come from an asiatic land of some kind, but not one that can be easily identified. Not quite China or Japan, or even India, but close to all three. Now, I could just use names from each of those cultures and sort of mash them around to get something “new”, but that seems too much like cheating. The alternative I came up with, though, is so much harder: a set of invented languages. In fact, a whole set of interrelated and interdependant created languages. Yes, yes, “just like Tolkien”. Except, of course, I’m not a linguist and I don’t know Welsh.
And, therein lies the rub, I am, in fact, not a linguist. I don’t know hardly a thing about linguistic rules for sound change or grammar or morphology or phonology. Frankly, the whole process is so intimidating that I’m just about at a loss for where to begin. I tried using several different language creation programs, but they never quite produced good enough results. Close, but not quite as good as a natural language. I tried using software that just created words from source data of various kinds, but that fell short, too. The words came out okay, but how should I use them? How should they be related? Eventually, I stopped trying to make a whole language and focused only on enough words to make some meaningfull names. But, even that seemed to get bogged down in the manipulation of the software and data, ultimately producing no results.
So, in a way, I’ve come full circle. I’m back to simply not knowing how to start. I’ve been reading the various e-mail lists for ConLanging and come to the conclusion that a hybrid method might suit me. Generating series of words to choose from, but determining my own relationship between them, if any. And, I can use a spreadsheet to track them all. Or, perhaps, a simple database. But, of course, that puts the work back on me.
Now, I have to figure out how to be creative and original. I have to hear the language and the names people call each other in my head. I have to not only see the destinations that my characters are headed toward, but what they’re named on a map.
Can it be done? Yes. Can I do it? Maybe.