How to create a (fictional) language in one day | Hacker News Reader

How to create a (fictional) language in one day

sicher.org

81 pointssicher19 comments

Perhaps I'm missing something, but rather than actually being a new language, this seems to be a simple and direct transliteration of English into a different encoding.

Am I missing something?

PS: I should add that I've up-voted this because it is interesting, just not really a new language.

You're not. There are actual fictional languages that are constructed at the syntactic level instead of just as a series of shallow modifications to an underlying English sentence. This is a neat little project and dead-on for what it needed to do, but you're right in that it's not a whole language.

There are fictional languages, like Klingon and Na'avi and a raft of others, but they take more than a day and some Python to do right.

Tolkien did a bunch too. But I think that's overstating the case. The fact that we're drowning in these things in popular fiction is an existence proof that all you need is a linguist with too much time on her hands.

I see it the same way. It's interesting, but it's "just" an advanced transliteration mechanism. It would be even more interesting (and more fitting for this headline) to make a language generator outputting unique words that are not based on a known language.

For example, one might take an english dictionary and isolate word cores, then generate a different word for each core and apply rules to those in order to make nouns, adjectives, and verbs. Of course, it gets more complicated with custom sentence structures and grammar...

It might be easier to use Esperanto as an "intermediate form" for this, since it's easier to split words into their roots and grammatical components.

Hence the adjective "fictional". :) He just needed something that sounded and looked cool enough for his work of fiction. and yes, you're right - new language would have its own set of grammar rules, vocabulary, etc. Still, quite cool for a quick hack like that.

It qualifies as a "fictional" language because Colin is right: it's just an alternative encoding of the English translation. There's no nuance to it at all, even the Star Wars "language" Mando'a (or however you spell it) is better. Mando'a isn't high on my list because it's not really a language, just an English lexicon of alternative spellings. But at least there are rules to the composition of the words!

Sorry to geek out for a second, I've been studying conlangs and considering making one. I suggest use of a real word generator, like my Werd script[1] (a translation of the original), that generates words based on rules.

[1]: https://github.com/rk/werd

The word mando'a bounced around in my head for a while, then I remembered that mandu'a is Guarani[1] for 'to remember'.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guaran%C3%AD_language

Sure, but there is a difference between a "fictional" language such as this encoding and a synthetic language like Tolkein constructed (as I understand it).

Cool... and a fun code to crack for the average person.

Yeah, it's basically just a cypher of English. Still cool though, and a good way to approximate a fictional language in a short amount of time.

If this interests you, there is an entire hobby that consists of inventing constructed languages. For example, check out this guy's web page, featuring a lot of languages he personally constructed, each with really creative grammar, phonology, and writing systems: http://dedalvs.conlang.org/ That guy is so talented that the makers of the HBO series "Game of Thrones" hired him to create the "Dothraki" language used in that show. (I think James Cameron also hired a linguist to create the alien language in Avatar).

I will avoid getting into a debate about whether replacing phonemes with other phonemes really makes a new language. But I will say that taking English and coming up with replacements for English words means that you are locked into an English conceptualization of the world. In English, we have a word, "go," that stands for a huge set of concepts; other languages conceptualize the concept of movement completely differently. http://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/verbs_motion.php . If you treat creating a conlang as a creative endeavor, somewhere in the creative neighborhood of writing a sci-fi or fantasy novel, then a big part of the creativity comes from these types of decisions.

I find one of the disproportionately hardest things in fiction is coming up with names for things. Now I'm writing a thing where people cast magic spells and I find myself needing a boatload of original fictional words which read like they have a common syntax and origin. So this should be useful!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markov_chain http://www.asha.org/practice/multicultural/Phono.htm

I don't write a lot of fiction anymore, but one of the best ways to generate names is to create a phonemic inventory and use markov chains to generate names from it. there are a couple such generators online that use established corpuses, but it shouldn't be too hard to write.

Yeah, I was thinking up some groups of brand names. It's not much pressure since it's for comedy, so the brands can be stereotypically lame. I picked a restriction or two for each set, such as a certain number of letters or syllables, or always starts or ends with the same letter or letters.

If you want to create a complete language (or just understand what would go into such a process), I cannot recommend this book highly enough:

http://www.amazon.com/Language-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfe...