Fantasist's Scroll

I’m writing this in response to the person who e-mailed me asking for instructions on how to use my Conlang Word Maker.

Now, without any intended smarmy-ness, I really thought it was self-explanatory, but, then again, when I wrote this webapp, I was steeped in conlanging. Also, it was based on another program called LangMaker by Jeffrey Henning, which a lot of people had been using at the time. And, duh, I wrote the app, so of course it seemed obvious to me how to use it!
So, in an effort to make things clearer, here are some more detailed instructions.

First, let’s define a few terms. Please note that these may not be how things are defined in a good, clear, linguistics sense, but, rather, how I thought of them when I wrote this program. Also, keep in mind that this was all inspired by an article in the now defunct Dragon Magazine about how to create a simple language for your Advanced Dungeons and Dragons campaign by Clyde Heaton titled Even Orcish Is Logical. Yes, that means it’s far older than even the third edition. And, yes, many conlangers my age deride this article as being linguistically inaccurate. But, I say “Phooey” on all that. That article is what got me interested in conlanging, so it did its job.
Now, keeping that in mind, go look at the page, then come back. (If you click the link, it will open the Conlang Word Maker in a new tab or window.) Go ahead, I’ll wait.
Okay, so the first column you saw was labeled Word Patterns/Formulas. Underneath that was a series of apparently nonsensical strings of capital letters, like “CV” and “CVCC” and so on. The next two columns are labeled Vowels (V) and Consonants(C) respectively. Those are what will fill in on the formulas, replacing the “V” with a randomly chosen letter from the Vowels(V) column and replacing the “C” with a randomly chosen letter from the Consonants(C) column. So far, so good, right? At this point, you actually have just about enough to generate the words for you language. All you need to do is choose which vowels and consonants you want to use in making your words and how you want those to be arranged. In fact, if you want to keep it simple, just use those three columns and leave everything else blank. Then, when you hit the generate word list button, the app will use those simple settings to generate a list of words.
If you look closely at the default data in those columns, though, you’ll see that you can also use multiple letters, like “sh” and “ch”, for consonants. You can do the same, like I’ve done with the “ee” and “oo” for vowels.
Please note that it’s important to keep the formulas in upper case and the letters you want to use in your language in lower case.

Now, you’ll notice several other columns, one of which I’ve also filled in. The column labeled “T” variable has both more complicated syllables, made up of consonants and vowels, and some formulas. In the default formulas that I started the web app with, you’ll notice that several of the formulas include a variable T, as in TVC and CVT and so on. In those formulas, the T variable is replaced by the syllables listed in the “T” variable column.
Okay, so far, so good, right? Well, the columns starting with T all have what I think of as an “advanced” feature. If you put a simple formula into them, it will treat the results of that formula as a syllable. So, you’ll notice that I have several CV and VC formulas in there. When the web app hits those, it will treat them first as standard formulas, making a word or syllable from the consonants (C) and vowels(V) randomly, before using it like a “T” variable in the formulas found in the first column, labeled Word Patterns/Formulas. It sounds more complicated than it is.
Again, though, this only works for columns starting T and beyond.

So, the trick is to choose letters and syllables that combine in ways which sound like you want your language to sound. Also, you’ll need to create all the other rules for your language, like sentence structure and verb conjugation and the like. So, I guess I lied a little in the title since you do have to do most of the heavy lifting yourself.
In any case, I hopefully have answered the e-mailed question. The real thing to do though is just play with it and see what happens!

I’m always looking for new twists on old themes.

And, frankly, the whole “alternate Earth” thing is a very old theme. But, I have to admit, it’s one that I can’t get away from in my own head. One of the alternate Earths that I contemplate on a regular basis is an inverted Earth. An Earth with its North and South poles swapped. I guess it’s an idea that grabbed me when my mother told me that people think at some point in the future, the magnetic core of Earth is going to, well, flip and send all our compasses out of whack, among other things.
Well, apparently, I’m not the only one who’s fascinated by this. Chris Wayan explores it all quite fully on a page titled Welcome to Turnovia.

Check it out.

Today is C.S. Lewis’ birthday.
For those of you who don’t know him, C.S. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, which has been made into movies and mini-series several times. Lewis was a contemporary of J.R.R. Tolkien and, in fact, was part of the same writing group, the Inklings. It was there that the two became fast friends, until their falling out. Lewis, or “Jack”, as he preferred his friends call him, was a convert to Catholicism and became a prolific Christian apologist, penning such gems as The Screwtape Letters, The Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity. He was a remarkable author and an interesting man.
You can read more about Clive Staples Lews at the website endorsed by his step-son, Douglas Gresham, called Into the Wardrobe.

According to the Writer’s Almanac, today is Bram Stoker’s birthday.

If you’ve been living under a cultural rock for the past hundred years or so, you might not know that Bram Stoker wrote the now infamous Dracula. He wrote other books as well, and was quite well known in his own time for his work in the theatre, but he’s most famous for that title character, Count Dracula. At the time, this was quite a novel subject, though, since then, vampires have become rather standard fare in literature, as well as movies and TV. But, it was Dracula that made them, and Stoker, famous. It came out in 1897 and got mixed reviews. It only became a minor best-seller in Stoker’s lifetime. When he died in 1912, the obituaries about Stoker focused on his career in theater, and not a single one mentioned his authorship of Dracula. It wasn’t until 1922, when Dracula movies started to appear that Bram Stoker’s novel became widely known, and, of course, has since become considered a classic.

So, remember the Count and his creator this horrific holiday season. Happy Birthday, Bram!

Today is J.K. Rowling’s Birthday!

If you don’t know who J. K. Rowling is, well, you certainly haven’t been paying attention. She is, in short, the creator of Harry Potter and crew. As a divorced, single mother struggling to scrape by on public assistance, aka “the Dole”, in the UK, she wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone which she sold astonishingly quickly for a first time author. The book went on to become a wonderfully popular hit with adults and kids alike. At the same time she wrote the first book, she plotted out the rest of the series and started drafts of those books as well. Each year after that first release a new book in the series has come out, for a total of seven.

I know many people who dislike the books for their simplicity or how they handle magic or any of a number of reasons, but, as far as I’m concerned, anything that can get so many kids reading books again, instead of suckling at the glass teat, is okay with me.

I hope Ms. Rowling will keep writing after the series is done. She’s a good one, even if she does write kids books!
Happy Birthday, Ms. Rowling!

Three birthdays today, all brought to you by way of the Writer’s Almanac.

Today is the birthday of Carl Jung, who was born in Kesswil, Switzerland in 1875. His father was a pastor who was losing his faith. This so shocked Jung as a boy that he decided to become a scientist instead of a minister in order to scientifically prove that religion was important. He is considered the founder of analytic psychology.
More importantly to writers, he noticed that myths and fairytales from all kinds of different cultures have certain similarities, which he called “archetypes”. He believed that these universal archetypes come from a collective unconscious that all humans share. He said that if people get in touch with these archetypes in their own lives, they will be happier and healthier.
He and Sigmund Freud were contemporaries and they even collaborated for a few years, but finally decided that they disagreed with each other’s ideas. Jung thought Freud was too obsessed with sex, and Freud thought Jung was too obsessed with God.

It’s also the birthday of science-fiction writer Aldous Huxley, who was born in Surrey, England on this day in 1894. Huxley wanted to be a scientist like his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, but a childhood disease left him almost blind, so he became a writer. His first successful novel was Point Counter Point, which was an extremely ambitious book. Huxley decided that his next book would be something light. He had been reading some H.G. Wells and thought it would be interesting to try to write something about what the future might be like. The result was Brave New World, about a future in which most human beings are born in test-tube factories, genetically engineered to belong in one of five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. There are no families; people have sex all the time and never fall in love, and they keep themselves happy by taking a drug called “soma.”
Brave New World was one of the first novels to predict the future existence of genetic engineering, test-tube babies, anti-depression medication, and virtual reality.

And, finally it’s also the birthday of playwright George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin, Ireland in 1856. He wrote dozens of plays, but he’s best known for his play Pygmalion, about what happens when a phonetician named Henry Higgins teaches a cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle to pass as a lady.
Shaw had an opinion about everything, and eventually became famous more for his personality than for his writing. He was a vegetarian and a pacifist, he didn’t drink, and he believed Christmas should be abolished. In 1925, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died 25 years later in 1950 at the age of 94.
He is now one of the most widely quoted writers in the English language.
He said, “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” And he said, “All great truths begin as blasphemies.” And he said, “Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”

Today is the birthday of Robert Heinlein.

Mr. Heinlein was born on this day in 1907 in Butler, Missouri. He wrote numerous novels and collections of short stories. He is best known for his novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, about a boy born during the first manned mission to Mars. It’s filled with values from the 60’s, including free love, new religions and “different” views on marriage. It was quite ground-breaking in its day and can still be startling to our modern, but still quite Puritanical, society. Heinlein called his books “speculative fiction” rather than “science fiction” because he liked to emphasized the idea that he was writing about things that could, possibly, come true. He tried to stick to only the scientific laws that we knew and their reasonable extrapolation. I think that’s why his work stands the test of time.
So, go read some of his work today, in celebration of his birthday.

Happy birthday, Bond!
Well, it’s more accurate to wish his creator, Ian Flemming, happy birthday.
Yes, today is Ian Flemming‘s birthday, according to the Wikipedia. Born in London, England in 1908, Flemming wanted to be a diplomat, but he failed the Foreign Office examination and decided to go into journalism. He worked for the Reuters News Service in London, Moscow, and Berlin, and then during World War II, he served as the assistant to the British director of naval intelligence. After the war, he bought a house in Jamaica, where he spent his time fishing and gambling and bird watching. He started to get bored, so he decided to try writing a novel about a secret agent. He named the agent James Bond after the author of a bird-watching book.
After a several books that sold less and less well, Flemming started to write with the movies in mind. He wrote more sensational books filled with a larger than “normal” helping of psychopathic killers, beautiful women and bizarre plots to conquer the world. Though his books began to sell better, it was only years later that the movie industry took an interest, thus sealing the hopes of budding novelists everywhere of selling the movie rights to their novel.

Well, happy birthday anyway.