The Constructed Languages, Fictional Linguistics and Idioglossia Thread

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AsenRG said:
Install Czech on your PC:tongue:?
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Actually, that just works. You can install a different keyboard language, choose the onscreen keyboard and you can type any characters. That's what I do with Trans-Cyrillic, I have Russian and Bashkort keyboards installed and just use them for characters. It's far easier than copying and pasting the Unicode characters. If you do it in Android,you can press and hold the key and it gives you variants, so, for example, you could use H key to get Ḫ. Presumably, choosing a Czech keyboard allows you to type them really easily.
 
Giganotosaurus said:
Oh! Duh! I'm leaning towards having a Case system so I don't create another English clone. I'm a little hesitant because my understanding of the case system is limited to a first year German course that I took several years ago.
I have just read that there is a language (Tsez) that has 64 cases compared to the 4 in German.
Edit: Also does anyone know of a way to type Ḫ, Ṣ, Š and Ṭ? I've just been copy/pasting them and it's tedious.
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64!! Wow, didn't know that one. That's insane, I read an account of its grammar there the case system is actually two dimensional like a matrix :ooh:

For case system in linguistics you usually have dictionaries list the basic form and then the major case forms like:
familia, f. (gs. familiae, npl. familiae)

Where f. = feminine, gs. = genitive singular, npl. = nominative plural

Or just the gender and the declension, i.e. which family of nouns it belongs to, each family having its own rules for how the cases are formed
familia, f1.

f1. = feminine first declension
 
I don't know how he does it, the amount of languages he has a good grip on the phonology and grammar of is insane.
 
I think if Tolkien saw my gonzo linguistics and wanton abuse of machine translation software he'd be turning in his grave. Unless you actually have multi-lingual players (and my second languages are limited to basic touristy Italian and a few words of Cantonese and Bhasa Indonesia) it's almost a moot point, although some folks like to geek out on languages.

Having said this, if you want a quick and dirty way to emulate someone speaking a language with the wrong idiom you can round trip it through a machine translation system like google translate. For additional fun, you can do it through more than one language - e.g. English - Czech - Simplified Chinese and back to English. This gives you your starting text but with the idiom and grammar all wrong.

For example:

I think you need to get in touch with Okon Derryl. He might have some idea. They might also be after him. If Lar and Okon really have found Elgin's site and somebody's got wind of it the wastes will turn into a brawl. If Zawi gets involved ... Allah have mercy."

becomes this when translated to Finnish

"Mielestäni sinun on otettava yhteyttä Okon Derryliin. Hänellä voi olla idea. He saattavat olla myös hänen jälkeensä. Jos Lar ja Okon todella ovat löytäneet Elginin sivuston ja joku saa siitä tuulen, jätteet muuttuvat räjähdykseksi. Jos Zawi tulee mukaan ... Jumala on armoa. "

And then to Bhasa Indonesia

"Saya pikir Anda perlu menghubungi Oko Derryl. Dia mungkin punya ide. Mereka mungkin juga mengejarnya. Jika Lar dan Okon benar-benar menemukan situs Elgin dan seseorang mengetahui hal itu, limbahnya akan menjadi ledakan. Jika Zawi datang ... Tuhan adalah rahmat. "

And then back to English

"I think you need to contact Oko Derryl. He might have an idea. They might as well chase him. If Lar and Okon really found Elgin's site and someone found out about it, the waste would become an explosion. If Zawi comes ... God is a mercy. "
 
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Giganotosaurus said:
Oh! Duh! I'm leaning towards having a Case system so I don't create another English clone. I'm a little hesitant because my understanding of the case system is limited to a first year German course that I took several years ago.
I have just read that there is a language (Tsez) that has 64 cases compared to the 4 in German.
Edit: Also does anyone know of a way to type Ḫ, Ṣ, Š and Ṭ? I've just been copy/pasting them and it's tedious.
Click to expand...
The letters you want may have valid Alt-codes. If they do, you might be able to key them in this way. Some of these characters may not be available in particular fonts or ANSI or ISO8859 series code pages (character sets designed to shoehorn various languages into 8-bit encodings.

Ḫ, for example, is ALT+7722. You can see a list of the alt codes at https://altcodeunicode.com/

Note that the editor on Xenforo didn't like the straight alt-code, although it worked fine if I keyed it in MS-word and pasted it in.
 
Séadna said:
I don't know how he does it, the amount of languages he has a good grip on the phonology and grammar of is insane.
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Some people really have a facility with it. My wife speaks half a dozen languages and she just picks them up like that. She learned Dutch on the fly while working as an au pair.
 
Nobby-W said:
The letters you want may have valid Alt-codes. If they do, you might be able to key them in this way. Some of these characters may not be available in particular fonts or ANSI or ISO8859 series code pages (character sets designed to shoehorn various languages into 8-bit encodings.

Ḫ, for example, is ALT+7722. You can see a list of the alt codes at https://altcodeunicode.com/

Note that the editor on Xenforo didn't like the straight alt-code, although it worked fine if I keyed it in MS-word and pasted it in.
Click to expand...
Before I had to temporarily shelve the language due to moving (and then getting a job and then school starting) I was looking into making a couple of custom keybindings for the special letters. I think I'll start looking into that again.
 
I recently picked up my conlanguage that I originally started last year. Here's a preliminary picture of the Alphabet I made for it:
Alphabet pic.jpg
Each letter has 3 versions, a top, middle and bottom, that is dependent on where in the word the letter is placed.
I'm planning on specializing some letters, so that some are only used in the middle or top, for example Ḫ, which I plan to have only used after other letters like KḪ or ZḪ. When written out, it is read from top to bottom, left to right.
 
This was something I wrote about 6 years ago, and mostly forgot about it...

The Skaven Alphabet

The Skaven writing system developed as a series of runes or pictograms. These grew in number as time went one, now numbering in the thousands, though only a few Skaven can identify more than a few of the most important ones. The runes tend to have complex meanings and associations, encompassing several related concepts.

The most frequently used and easily identifiable is the Symbol of the Horned Rat, which signifies not only the deity of the Skaven but also the Skaven race as a whole.

1.gif​



Other commonly identifiable symbols include the runes of the four greater clans, and a fifth rune denoting the order of Grey Seers:

skaven clan symbols.png​

As the Skaven developed in the use of magic and technology, the utility of a standardised alphabet would have quickly been apparent, especially among the Warlock Engineers of Clan Skryre.

The Skaven alphabet is comprised of 13 letters, approximated in a Latin-based writing system as 8 consonants, 4 vowels, and the 13th letter, "X", which primarily serves as an unvoiced mutation.

Skaven letter-runes are represented by both a Formal and Informal symbol. While its tempting to compare these to upper and lower-cases in English, their application in Skaven writing is nowhere near as consistent. Though it is standard practice that any nouns (proper or otherwise) are begun with a Formal letter, beyond that both symbols are used pretty much interchangeably, seemingly at whim.

Another peculiarity of Skaven writing is that, in the case of nouns where a commonly used pictographic symbol already exists, the rune commonly replaces the first letter of the word when written out. This is also the case insofar as when the names of Skaven personages are written out, the first letter is often replaced with the symbol for their clan.

FORMAL LETTER RUNES

3.jpg

INFORMAL LETTER RUNES

5.jpg

Skaven will also often use shorthand symbols for letters that are Doubled

DOUBLED LETTER RUNES

6.jpg
​
Each Skaven letter rune has a single associated sound ("phone"), unlike less regimental languages (such as English), where any one letter is used to represent a variety of phones. However, the phone associated with a letter rune may be modified in one of two ways; by Doubling the letter, or with the addition of the 'X' mutation directly preceding a letter. In this manner, the Skaven alphabet is much more versatile than the small number of letters implies.

The following guide provides the closest English equivalents of the Skaven letter rune phones. The structure of the Skaven mouth produces a variety of sounds generally foreign to human speech. Just as there are a number of palatal and palatal-alveolar phones used by the Skaven that humans can, at best, only approximate, Skaven themselves are unable to accurately reproduce the common English labials (p, b, m, w). Much like a ventriloquist, the Skaven must resort to approximations, often by way of labio-dentals.

As a general rule of thumb, Skaven vocalizations are higher pitched than English is typically spoken, & most consonants are palatalized, giving the tongue a guttural inflection.

skaven phenomes.png


The Skaven also utilize a simple but effective base 3 numbering system

SKAVEN NUMERALS

7.jpg


​
 
That's fantastic. I was planning to put some Ratfolk in my Swords of the Serpentine campaign, so this will get some use.
 
Only language thread I remembered.

If anybody wants to learn a language, I’d recommend the following. I’m basing this on learning Swahili over the last year compared to previous languages I learned and altering my methods as a result of reading research on language acquisition:
  1. Obtain an old “Teach Yourself” book. I mean the editions from the 60s and 70s with the blue or yellow covers. These tend to cover grammar in a terse accurate form you can reference. Older reference grammars can work as well. Obviously "old" isn't strictly required but modern grammars assume basically nothing from the reader and ultimately by being so "friendly" end up with little info.

  2. Sign on with a native speaker on italki. It can take a while to find somebody you have the right chemistry with. Reviews are generally accurate, though biased toward being kind to the teacher. All my Kenyan teachers were superior to any formal language instruction I've received here in Ireland (and paid far more for). My brother is with a Persian teacher who has taken him to B2 level in a year. I think this is one of the best steps you can take.

  3. Get into reading as quickly as you can. Reading in most studies comes out as the fastest method to acquire vocabulary.
Hope that helps.
 
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Séadna said:
Only language thread I remembered.

If anybody wants to learn a language, I’d recommend the following. I’m basing this on learning Swahili over the last year compared to previous languages I learned and altering my methods as a result of reading research on language acquisition:
  1. Obtain an old “Teach Yourself” book. I mean the editions from the 60s and 70s with the blue or yellow covers. These tend to cover grammar in a terse accurate form you can reference. Older reference grammars can work as well. Obviously "old" isn't strictly required but modern grammars assume basically nothing from the reader and ultimately by being so "friendly" end up with little info.

  2. Sign on with a native speaker on italki. It can take a while to find somebody you have the right chemistry with. Reviews are generally accurate, though biased toward being kind to the teacher. All my Kenyan teachers were superior to any formal language instruction I've received here in Ireland (and paid far more for). My brother is with a Persian teacher who has taken him to B1 level in a year. I think this is one of the best steps you can take.

  3. Get into reading as quickly as you can. Reading in most studies comes out as the fastest method to acquire vocabulary.
Hope that helps.
Click to expand...
And just like that I'm looking up learning Mongolian again!
 
Séadna said:
Only language thread I remembered.

If anybody wants to learn a language, I’d recommend the following. I’m basing this on learning Swahili over the last year compared to previous languages I learned and altering my methods as a result of reading research on language acquisition:
  1. Obtain an old “Teach Yourself” book. I mean the editions from the 60s and 70s with the blue or yellow covers. These tend to cover grammar in a terse accurate form you can reference. Older reference grammars can work as well. Obviously "old" isn't strictly required but modern grammars assume basically nothing from the reader and ultimately by being so "friendly" end up with little info.

  2. Sign on with a native speaker on italki. It can take a while to find somebody you have the right chemistry with. Reviews are generally accurate, though biased toward being kind to the teacher. All my Kenyan teachers were superior to any formal language instruction I've received here in Ireland (and paid far more for). My brother is with a Persian teacher who has taken him to B1 level in a year. I think this is one of the best steps you can take.

  3. Get into reading as quickly as you can. Reading in most studies comes out as the fastest method to acquire vocabulary.
Hope that helps.
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I would add to that "sign up for Duolingo, no, you don't need paid membership". I have basically learned Portuguese to a satisfactory level at this point (and looking to get better), and most of it was via the app...well, I also spent EU1 for a Humble Bundle with "learn in 30 days" books. I finished the Portuguese one in 4 days, though, seeing as I already know other Latin-derived languages.
I need too start reading. Might even be an RPG, though a martial arts book or a historical one are just as likely with me (depends on what free stuff would capture my attention, basically:thumbsup:)!

I also agree with the recommendation towards old manuals when it comes to languages, and would like to emphasize it. The new stuff...well, I agree with you, is all I'm going to say. Friendliness is overrated with teaching:grin:!
 
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