New CBB

I was thinking on this today. While it’s all well and good to be trying to create a fully fleshed out language that could theoretically have thousands and millions of speakers, on the small scale, if your just needing a conlang for a book, and you want it to be authentic, how much do you actually have to do?

I know that questions kinda up for interpretation. Others will say more, others will say less. So instead ill ask for your opinion:
When you encounter a conlang in a book or story, by what qualities do/can you judge it as being well rounded?

It depends. If translations aren't provided, you can get away with an english cipher quite easily. If translations ARE provided, you need to be more clever. How clever depends on the amount of material provided: The less of the language appears in the work, the less you need to develop. If you have only, say, 2-3 sentences in your conlang in the entire story, then you don't need to develop much at all.

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If it's not an English cipher with an English alphabet/phonology. And in reality with even extremely little knowledge of Linguistics, it's possible - just add or remove a couple of sounds from English, change around the grammar a bit through simple means (such as having no tense, or where adjectives are placed in relation to the noun), and voila, something that would normally be a s****y conlang but is probably better than 90% of all so-called "languages" in your average fantasy novel. And you can do it all in less than half an hour! My cousin did - I helped him, since he wanted something that wasn't an English cipher but didn't want to bother making an entire language for his novel. Sure, the sounds are all found in English, but it was a very minimalistic phonology (like /p t k m n r l s ng/ or something if I remember correctly) so it does the job.

As long as the author clearly tries to not make an English cipher and does something other than English's phonology, I'm more than happy. Of course if they manage to not make it kitchen-sinky, that's even better.

But even if they don't make a fully-fleshed conlang, as long as they don't use apostrophes, that's good enough for me.

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I now have a blog. Witness the horror.

I think I think, therefore I think I am.
- Ambrose Bierce

You only need a few nouns (place and people names mostly) and a few odd phrases, maybe a (very) brief conversation that a character overhears but doesn't understand, to give some 'flavour' to the work.
This tends to require a little more work than one might expect (if you want a consistant language at least), but usually not much more than a sketch.

A fully-fleshed out conlang's probably overkill unless you're putting it into a large RPG game or something.

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

Probably not even then: Kingdoms of Amalur is a pretty big RPG, and it has a conlang for the Alfar, but only three words are ever said in it. Probably just gibberish. It's a generic elvish ripoff anyway.

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But what if the apostrophes are used to indicate glottal stops or ejectives?

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Banami bhjaddhos rafi mau cy vyaja cecerror.
Fools do not see the sun nor sail the seas
-Azenti Proverb

I suspect he means the Marvel Comics Apostrophe Shaker, rather than orthographic convention.

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

Just wondering, have you played Amalur yet? And if so how was the lore compared to the Elder Scrolls? I was wondering about that, and whether its lore was anywhere half as decent as the Elder Scrolls, but I can't really tell because 1) most game reviewers aren't really into conworlding anyways; and 2) I keep getting "it's another stupid woohoo elves and evil dark lord" vibes. EDIT: Thought this was amusing.




Yeah, usually most "conlangs" in Tolkien/D&D ripoffs don't even know what glottal stops are ejectives are. If they did, I'll probably forgive 90% of their other silliness.

Frankly for the Khajit I don't think this covers them per se, but I'm sort of giving the Elder Scrolls a break on conlanging since everything else is relatively well-developed for a game (arguably, in my opinion, even better than some books out there). EDIT: I mean if I remember correctly the apostrophes they had were for <m r j z s> or something, which most likely aren't ejectives per se. Now if they had just <p t> or something that'd be awesome, but oh well.

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I now have a blog. Witness the horror.

I think I think, therefore I think I am.
- Ambrose Bierce

When I first saw this topic, I thought it was about Micronesian languages.

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"Wait for the starvation of glaciers, chicken hamburger Noel Weber Arthur."

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I have a mostly finished essay on this sort of thing that I'll get round to publishing online sooner or later. Basically, I argue that, as far as novels go, less is generally more when it comes to including conlangs. Like Lodhas says above, names and a few short phrases are basically sufficient. (There are exceptions, however, such as The Lord of the Rings which gets away with including quite a bit of the Elvish languages, and of course it's always good to know more about the world you're writing about than you actually put into the book, and that goes for languages as well.)



(I raise two other points in my essay which might be of interest: first, despite the conlanging community's liking for "exotic" phonologies, ultimately your priority has to be accessibility to the reader; second, aesthetics is an important consideration - I think in the context of a novel a language does have to "sound right" for the people who are supposed to speak it, and names have to sound right for the characters or places that possess them, although that's not to say you have to go with the usual cliches.)

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Twitter: @jsbaker750

That's exactly what it is. The only twist is that the game distinguishes between elves and "fae", where Elves are just point-eared humans who are supposedly better at magic (though the only difference between the playable races is mostly cosmetic) while "Fae" fit the standard Tolkienish Elf template with actually being immortal and being connected to nature and blah blah blah. Interestingly though, the evil overlord and his army in this game are Fae. As in Tolkien, the arrival of mortals signals the decline of the fae, and their society is waning due to the balance of magic shifting (or something like that). Rather than peacefully leaving to make way for the mortals as Tolkien's elves did, the main villain wants to reverse the trend by genociding all the mortals away. Unfortunately that's the only real deviation from the standard Tolkien-ripoff the game world is.

Also, instead of Dwarves, there are "gnomes" who live in a society that's a weird combination of ancient rome and the soviet union.

As for the game itself, I enjoyed it for the gameplay (though it does have a major flaw in monster variety), but if you're only looking for conworld inspiration, look elsewhere.





Apostrophes in Ta'agra (the Khajit conlang) indicate morpheme boundaries.

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Figures. I don't trust anyone who says "It has 10000 years of lore of course that means it's better than Elder Scrolls!" I don't give a flying @#$% about gameplay (well, not that much), but I really care about conworld inspiration (and general awesomeness of conworlding in general) so I suppose my gut-instinctual reservations were right. I mean I was already kind of turned off during the demo when they had the opening cinematic and all I basically retained was "there is an EVIL DARK LORD who's out there to KILL EVERYONE and he's saying "MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA TROLOLOLOL IM THE DARK LORD"". Especially when he did the evil laugh, I started rolling my eyes. All of the Elder Scrolls do a much better job of subtly introducing the story and world.

Maybe one day the guys who made it will flesh the thing out like what happened with the Elder Scrolls.

Or maybe they won't.



Really? I thought they were just used in some of the naming prefixes (I vaguely remember "S-" was for... something like "adult"). Well, thought granted by conlanging standards that's only so-so, in comparison with your average apostrophe catastrophe that's pretty good.

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I now have a blog. Witness the horror.

I think I think, therefore I think I am.
- Ambrose Bierce

Ah, fair enough. At least I can stop being annoyed that people keep missing the 'glottal stop' in S'krivva.

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I speak English and a touch of Gàidhlig.
I am creating a conworld, which I refer to as the Carrion Series, that will contain three languages, Iriex, Dvoen and Maxna.

As far as I understand it, Reckoning was an attempt to test the waters for an MMO they want to release in the same world, called Copernicus. Maybe there'll be more fleshing out in Copernicus, but this won't change the fact that the world hardly has a shred of creativity in it.

By the way, I have paid close attention to all the in-game books and such (TES style, but not nearly as many) and there's a couple of decades worth of lore, at most. Yes there are some events that took place thousands of years ago but there's gigantic 7-century-long gaps of nothing. Most of the world's history is nowhere close to fully detailed, at least not in the stuff we can see in Reckoning.

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Never ever trust somebody who claims to have 10000 years of lore. That already raised my suspicions when I first came across that. I tried reading up on the lore they had on the website, and by the time I got to the Dark Elves (well, looky here, more seductive "dark" dark elves... at least Elder Scrolls put in some interesting cultural and historical flavors) I kind of just phased out. Oh well. Maybe the combat will interest me, but I already find TES's combat engaging enough, contrary to what everyone says... (maybe that's because I suck at it?)

But anyhow, are the in-game books reasonably decent?

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I now have a blog. Witness the horror.

I think I think, therefore I think I am.
- Ambrose Bierce

They're alright, but there's nothing as good as A Dance in Fire, Mystery of Talara, or The Argonian Account. Probably the best-written books in KOAR are Brother Til's collection, which are honestly generic and could have been copy-pasted into any setting and would have fitted just as well.

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captostrophe, if you will

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

More or less; several apostrophes seem to be in random places sometimes, though. For example, in the word do'shurh'do, which means something along the lines of "good to be brave". In my reconstruction, I analyzed the first apostrophe to be the morpheme boundary indicator between the adverb dos, "good", and the infinitive shurh'do, "to be brave". shurh seems to be the root and do seems to be the infinitive suffix. However, this doesn't make sense as the other available infinitive doesn't sport the apostrophe as a morpheme boundary indicator (lhajiito, "to run away"). There are other examples where the morpheme boundary indicator use for the apostrophe doesn't quite make sense, so I wouldn't jump to that conclusion.
I use the apostrophe in my Ta'agra reconstruction as an intervocal glottal stop (c.f. Ta'agra) and as an indicator of a dropped vowel (c.f. q'zi (qa-zi), "when", and t'siichosizz (ta siichosizz), "I cannot sit down").

On a side note, an interview with a Morrowind game designer (I forget the name) implies that there is more structure to Ta'agra than has been released; however, I think it was because of time constraints that they did not write a book about it.

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