create a language

I’ve been busy moving myself across the country lately, which has really left little time for language-ing. But last night, when Boyfriend and I went over to a friend’s house to hang out for the evening (we do this three or more times per week with this particular friend, usually staying from around 8 pm to sometimes as late as 3 am, never earlier than 11 pm) I brought with me the notebook in which I’d been constructing my language.

Since I decided that my language was going to have a new script, and a syllabary one at that (not like English, but more like Chinese or Japanese, where each character represents a syllable rather than a sound), I had to create the script. After a few haphazard attempts two nights ago, I decided to create it systematically. First I separated the consonant inventory into four groups, then assigned each group a “base” design. Each phoneme within the group has a different flourish at either the top or the bottom of the base design. Then, to create the syllable, the vowel is added with one of six separate horizontal strikethroughs. Together, each symbol gives the initial consonant sound, and the vowel that follows it, which together make the syllable; at the end of a word, the bare consonant symbol may be used to indicate a coda on the previous syllable, but only on nouns.

I’ve begun transcribing the lexical items I’ve already created from IPA, in which I wrote them, into script, and am toying with names for the language. Squee! I’ve got a couple thousand more lexical items to add, but that’ll take time.

Oh, and I started on the grammatical features, too. VSO order, and verb affixes to indicate which speech act is going on (statement, query, imperative) and a couple of those have nuances which require multiple distinct affixes. I get the feeling I’m going to have to pare down in a while, but I’m just having such fun playing with devices and it’s hard to stop. grin

I think this is probably a thing quite a few trained linguists have a problem with if they create a language of their own; because we KNOW so many devices that languages can make use of, we tend to try to use too many of them just for the fun of it. At least, that’s the problem I’m having. Particularly where it relates to vowels – okay, I know that’s not a device per se, but it’s similar in that as a linguist I know all the useful vowel sounds, not just the ones in my native language. And I’m inserting two vowels that aren’t present in English ([y] and [oe] – pretend the oe is one character, I don’t remember how to make that character).

The problem is, [oe] is giving me trouble in my own pronunciation. I know theoretically how to make the proper sound, and can do it if I think about it, but it requires thought in a way that none of the other vowels do. (I can do [y] because it’s a common vowel in French, which I learned in high school). I’ve used [oe] in some very vital lexical forms, and it sounds much better in those spots than any of the other possibilities, but it’s frustrating that when I’m saying something I have to pause and do it very deliberately. Not natural flow at all. Argh.

Practice, I guess. Le sigh.