This week I've been concentrating on conlanging, starting with the ancient language of the Antilians, Avirmalyi. Truth to tell, I haven't had much time for writing, since work has been busier than usual: a website release to get out, the campus Christmas newsletter to edit, the office Christmas lunch to attend (not as ghastly as it sounds!). However, being busy has given me a chance to let the ideas mull in the back of my mind instead of trying to force them into existence, so overall it's been very successful. More info on my wiki!

Posted by Anne at 6:55 AM | Permalink

Despite thinking I was almost done with Kialrrna last week, I find I'm still fine-tuning the syntax. Implementing all my ideas for morphology in an aesthetically-pleasing way has proved harder than I expected (especially whilst also trying to avoid anything too European-looking) - a set of suffixes that looks fine in a grammar can turn out butt-ugly when actually attached to root words :(

Continue reading "The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly" »

Posted by Anne at 2:27 PM | Permalink

My two languages, Kialrrna and Tradetalk are coming along nicely - I have most of the Kialrrna grammar pinned down, the dictionary has a search function, and there's even the beginnings of a Tradetalk phrasebook :)

Read more about them in the Conlangs in Secret Theatre section of this site.

Posted by Anne at 7:45 AM | Permalink

Well, I've spent the last ten days beavering away at the basics of my wolfkin language, such as phonology and simple grammar, and have finally come up with a name that works - Kialrrna.

I've realised that I really don't have time to complete two parent languages and then realistically meld them into a hybrid child language, so I'm just going to take a whole load of ideas from the partially-developed parents and make the child language out of that :)

Continue reading "Kialrrna is born" »

Posted by Anne at 7:29 PM | Permalink

I fear I'm getting a bit bogged down in this conlang project. Just when I thought I was making some progress, I've fallen out of love with my main conlang, Mirmali :(

Continue reading "Getting bogged down" »

Posted by Anne at 4:04 PM | Permalink

Although electronic dictionaries are a really useful tool in conlanging, the old-fashioned side of me longs for a paper version that I can thumb through. To that end I've bought three lovely linen-bound notebooks from Paperchase; the only problem now is that I'm almost too scared to use them!

Posted by Anne at 1:14 PM | Permalink

Having done some work on the phonology of my second conlang, I realise that the name doesn't really work, at least not for a language - palatalisation marks diminutives, which seems unlikely for the name of a fierce mountain realm. So, the conlang Cjrtswn will henceforth be called Chltqonyk, from the name Chltqan meaning something like "emaciated land", presumably from its raw and rocky terrain.

Posted by Anne at 2:52 PM | Permalink

I'm off work today with a tummy bug, so I've been doing some work on my second conlang, provisionally named Cjrtswn. Yes, it is deliberately consonant-heavy!

Continue reading "Introducing...Cjrtswn" »

Posted by Anne at 8:04 AM | Permalink

Oh dear, I think I've been badly bitten by the conlang bug!

Continue reading "Second Conlang" »

Posted by Anne at 1:38 PM | Permalink

Well, I'm not going to complete the InCoCreMo challenge - but I got most of the way there :)

Continue reading "Nearly made it" »

Posted by Anne at 6:09 PM | Permalink

After a lot of thought, I've changed the name of my conlang...

Continue reading "Language Rename" »

Posted by Anne at 5:02 PM | Permalink

To help me get my conlang in order, I've added a dictionary database and PHP page to my website.

Continue reading "Online dictionary" »

Posted by Anne at 1:21 PM | Permalink

Whilst mooching round Borders before the CWIL meeting yesterday evening I came across a not-overly-expensive edition of this linguistics classic, so of course I bought it.

Continue reading "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" »

Posted by Anne at 4:57 PM | Permalink

I've had to redo my pronomial system this week, because I realised it was far too clunky - too many syllables for affixes that are used on every single verb plus many adjectives and adverbs!

Continue reading "Another revamp" »

Posted by Anne at 1:39 PM | Permalink

Well, the first week of InCoCreMo is drawing to a close, and I've managed to translate two whole sentences!

Continue reading "Two sentences done" »

Posted by Anne at 2:07 PM | Permalink

Since my last post, I've been in grave need of a project to distract me, so I'm very glad InCoCreMo came up. Sadly my cat Saturn went missing on Christmas Eve, and by her continued absence we can only assume she was run over :(

Continue reading "On your marks..." »

Posted by Anne at 1:14 PM | Permalink

Since I want my conlang to be fairly naturalistic, it needs complexities and irregularities - and rather than just think up "random" irregularities, I'd like them to arise from former regularities. That means I need to come up with the bones of an ancestor language, as well as the current language!

So, I've spent the last day or so working on regular, contextual sound changes that will produce seemingly arbitrary grammatical variants such as declensions. Some of the work I did by hand, painstakingly, but the final stage - parsing the file and outputting English-to-Conlang and Conlang-to-English dictionaries - I did with Perl. Actually the word-to-meaning match is still the random one produced by my original script, but with a two-way "dictionary" I can more quickly look up words and assign new meanings.

Also, yesterday evening I typed up the sample text for InCoCreMo. It's going to be quite a challenge to produce a sufficiently extensive syntax and vocabulary to translate it all - especially into the language of an alien culture which lacks some of the concepts covered in the excerpt, like marriage!

Posted by Anne at 9:14 AM | Permalink

Even before I discovered Tolkien, I was inventing languages. Most of my attempts have fallen by the wayside, but it keeps pulling me back. As a change of pace from my novel, I've decided to work for a while on some languages for a non-human race who probably won't even appear in the first book - but then it's a major task, so needs to be done well ahead of time.

I'll be putting together a new section of this site devoted to language construction, or conlang as it's known amongst its practitioners. I've also just joined a forum started by Mark Rosenfelder, writer of the essential conlang guide "The Language Construction Kit". Through the forum I've discovered that some of the members are planning the conlang equivalent of NaNoWriMo - InCoCreMo, or International Conlang Creation Month! As it's in going to be in January, I'm going to give it a go. The idea is to create a conlang capable of translating the first 3 pages of "The Hobbit" (and, optionally, doing the translation) within the month. I think it'll help me get the conlang bug out of my system and thus free me up to get back to fiction-writing in February. Either that or I'll get so absorbed in it that I start writing a novel, Tolkien-style, about the people who speak the language I've just invented :)

Posted by Anne at 5:40 AM | Permalink