World Building, Part 2: Creating Language

World Building

Creating a language when you have terrible grammar

In my quest to emulate my chief inspiration, the late great Professor Tolkien, I aspire to create a language for use in my book.  That said, I know I will not be able to do even close to as good a job as the Professor, primarily due to the fact that he wrote his great works as a linguistic exercise.  Tolkien was fascinated with languages his entire life, teaching himself Finnish and Welsh and going on to study old Norse and Latin and Ancient Greek as he studied works such as The Kalevala and Beowulf.  He studied the old Welsh Arthurian legends and most of his scholarly work was based on this, while his creative works were a way for him to come to terms with a fantasy he held of what Britain might have been like if the Frankish Normans did not invade and conquer Britain in 1066.  So Quenya, and Sindarin, Black Speech, and a few others from the LotR related works he created, and he created the world of Arda (the planet Middle-Earth is on) around these exercises.  So, while I do not have the linguistic skill or desire to do quite the same as Tolkien, I wanted to at least create one language for my own use.

The Bible
(Of made up languages)

Now this practice of creating fictional languages is not limited to Tolkien's genius. In fact, I possess a book called "The Dictionary of Made-Up Languages: From Adunaic to Elvish, Zaum to Klingon -- The Anwa (Real) Origins of Invented Lexicons."  And yes, that says Klingon.  Qu'pla!  Authors of Science Fiction and Fantasy have been creating languages for decades, and even some were meant to be used in everyday speech (such as Esperanto).  Why not try my own hand at it?  So I tried.  And failed.  Because I had no idea where to start, at first.  This book is actually what got me started.  In the back of the book is a section about creating a language with some very generic advice.  Nothing world shaking, and definitely less impressive than a linguistic textbook, but part of this section is a list of about one hundred words that a common across most languages.

Having a list of words to make, I had to decide what the language would sound like.  Deciding that the longer snouts and the more limited motion of lips, there were certain phonemes I decided probably wouldn't be common, or exist at all.  Sounds like bah, mah, puh, fuh, poo, boo, moo, foo, etc., considering those sounds require the pursing of lips.  "But Shane, you characters speak Engl-" Suspension of disbelief, darn it!  To be fair, Tolkien thought of "The Lord of the Rings" and "The Hobbit" as being part of a fictional historical text called the Red Book of Westmarch, originally written in the language of "Mannish" and translated 'by' Tolkien in the modern era, making his works a pseudo-history of England.  (I may write another blog on this concept and what Tolkien was trying to do some time.)  Tangent over, moving on.  So my language would lack certain sounds, but I still had no idea what the words themselves would be.  While I studied Latin in high school and Italian at Rutgers University (Go R U!), those who took the class with me could tell you how terrible my understanding of grammar is, and therefore aside from vocabulary, anything besides English makes me sound incoherent.  So instead of using a real language and bastardizing it to fit my needs, I decided a more noble course.  I bastardized a fictional language instead.  My choice, quite fittingly, was dovahzul (literally Dragon Voice), also know as The Dragon Language.  And if that name sounds familiar, it should, if you've played as the Dovahkiin in "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim."

Learn more about the Dovahkiin at
the Elder Scrolls Wikia Page

Using the website www.Thuum.org as a starting place, I read through their lexicon of words both from the game and invented by the fans to see what words might sound like in a draconic language.  And then I began to either mutate an existing word from dovahzul or made up my own, basically by making noise until something sounded good.  Not the most elegant strategy, but I also used their website to understand the supposed grammar of dovahzul, giving me a template of sorts to work from.

At the moment, I have less then 20 words.  Most I came up with myself, but a few are mutated dovahzul words.  Everything else has some place holders taken right from the dovahzul dictionary that I just haven't gotten around to creating proper words for.

So that's it for this part of world building.  I've seen other fantasy worlds steal straight from old norse or other dead languages, which makes me feel less bad about co opting some words for the time being, but make no mistake about my intentions.  Linguistics is not my strong suit by any means, so working from an existing language is some what my only option.  Besides, imitation is the finest form of flattery, right?

Leave a comment!  I would love to hear from my readers!  What do you think of my strategy?  Stay tuned for more world building!