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Conlanging – My history with the world of constructed languages - By Harry Cook 10.12.2020

Ever since I first watched and subsequently read the Lord of the Rings when I was about twelve, I became infatuated with the idea of creating languages. I remember watching the extras on the extended edition of the films and finding out that the languages spoken in the films were not meaningless gibberish, but an actual functional language. After that I wanted to make my own languages too, just like Tolkien did.

I had loved languages for a while at that point, I could not speak any other than English and did not really understand how they worked. I had not heard of the IPA, I did not know about language families, the fact that languages change and many other things. I just knew that the world was full of languages, and most of them were quite different to English.

The conlangs (con – constructed, lang – language) I have made have pretty much all been artlangs (art – artistic). These are languages made for artistic purposes, such as existing in a world for a book for example. These are conlangs such as Quenya, Sindarin, Dothraki, Na’vi, etc. I specifically try and make naturalist artlangs, this means I want my conlangs to pass as real languages; I will talk about some ways to do this later. Another common type of conlang is auxlangs (aux – auxiliary) also called IALs (international auxiliary languages), this includes most famously Esperanto and a whole grab bag of other failed descendants.

Within the conlang community it is commonly joked that all conlangers go through the same or similar phases of conlanging: firstly you make your derivative language, a conlang that essentially steals its features wholesale from languages that already exist (in the community we call these natlangs, natural languages, in order to distinguish them from conlangs). Then after you learn a little bit more about natlangs and linguistics you will make your kitchen sink language, a conlang with as many features in it as you can think of, regardless of whether they fit together or not. Then after this you start to make more naturalistic languages and from there you improve. This isn’t the same for every conlanger, but I would hazard to say that many conlangers go through a similar process.

With this in mind I will briefly explain the history of my conlangs:

Litenok – I made my first language Litenok when I was about thirteen, at that point the only language I had studied in my life was German. So for the grammar I copied many elements of German whole sale, like the cases and the verb system but I made my own forms for the suffixes. I removed the genders and any irregularity because they just make languages difficult and awkward! Then for the vocabulary I replaced the German words with Finnish, Latin and Arabic ones, completely at random. As you can imagine it was not very good.

Romansi – After Litenok I read more about other languages, namely Finnish and Sanskrit. The language that came of this was Romansi, I started it when I was about 15, I made my own words instead of taking them from other languages and I tried to make my own grammatical features that were inspired rather than stolen. Then I started reading more and added as much as I could to the language to make it seem more complex, because in my mind that made it more realistic. I didn’t understand half of these features I was adding but thought I should add them anyway. In the process of making Romansi I discovered the IPA, but I did not learn how to use it yet.

Pagadian/Paghade – I abandoned Romansi after a year and a half, realising it was stupid. I started a new language called Pagadian when I was about 16. It was based partly on Persian and Welsh, two languages I had been reading about at the time. In the process of making it I stumbled across the IPA again, so I learned how to use it (yes I learned the IPA at 16). I also found out that many famous artlangs were made with the historical method; you make an older form of your language, the proto-lang, and then evolve it forward in time. This sounded like effort, so I did not do it. I still wanted to make my languages naturalistic though, but the more I worked the more I started to realise that using this historical method was the only way to get the results I wanted, my languages to this point weren’t satisfying me, they felt empty. So I remade Pagadian, renaming it Paghade (its endonym) and tried to make it naturalistic by using the historical method, I worked on it until late 2019 (so overall I spent nearly two years on the language). I was semi successful but there are many things in the language I am not happy with, and I will go back and remake the language next year, but Paghade taught me a great deal about conlanging and linguistics, so it is arguably my most important language.

Kowa – As I was now using the historical method I decided to create a fictional world in which my conlangs could exist. All my conlangs from Paghade (so Paghade was the first conlang in this world) feature in this world, and all the languages I will work on for the foreseeable future will too. The next language I made in this world was Kowa. It was based mostly on Swahili, Nahuatl and Ojibwe and it was the first language I started with a plan in mind instead of just blindly trying to work out what I wanted as I worked. I started it late in 2019 and finished it over the first lockdown. I say finish, but many elements of Kowa are in fact extremely unfinished but I will go back and add to it next year most likely.

Tanol and Hazari’i – These are the languages I’m working on at the moment. Tanol is the conlang that is further along development and I will focus on it for the rest of the year. I have many other languages that I want to create and I have many ideas and sketches so I don’t think I’ll stop conlanging any time soon.

So what makes a conlang naturalistic? There are in my opinion three things that can make a language appear more naturalistic.

1. Irregularity – All natural languages exhibit irregularity in some regard, and the mistake a lot of beginner conlangers make is not including any irregularity. Irregularity can be pretty simple to make, and usually arises as a result of the sound changes you apply (although things like suppletion can also be used to create irregularity). Methods for creating irregularity is beyond the scope of this article though it is something I am more than happy to discuss in another article.

2. Etymology – Creating words without etymology is like building a building without foundations. Etymology gives depth to your conlang; words in natlangs seldom come from nowhere, so why should the words in your conlangs? Let’s look at the word “light” (as in bright) in English. This word didn’t materialise from the aether, it comes from the Old English word “lēoht”, which came from the Proto-Germanic word “*leuhtą”, which came from the Proto-Indo-European root “*lewk-“ also meaning “light”. This root gave birth to Welsh “llug” (to gleam), Latin “lūx” (light), Persian “رخش” (rakhsh) (light), Old Church Slavonic лоучити (luchiti) (to accopmplish), Sanskrit रोचते (rócate) (to shine) and Ancient Greek λευκός (leukós) (shining) among others.

3. Variation – Pretty much every language exhibits some kind of variation; accents and dialects and such. There is again an element of history in developing accents (sound changes that affect one group of people but not another) but it isn’t that difficult to add sociological variation. Let’s say in the world where your languages exist there is a prestige language like Latin in medieval Europe. Only the nobility have the access to learning this prestige language and so words from this language enter their speech, but not the speech of the commoners. Boom! We have sociolects… of a sort. This really helps to add depth to your conlangs.

So where can you start? Creating a language is a huge undertaking there’s no denying it but luckily you’re not the first person to make a conlang. A few people have written books that are directly aimed at conlangers or can be used by them. I recommend reading:

• The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson

• The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder

• The Unfolding of Language by Guy Deutscher

• Historical Linguistics: An Introduction by Lyle Campbell

• The World Lexicon of Grammaticalisation by Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva

• The Unfolding of Language by Joan Bybee, Revere Perkins and William Pagliuca

• There are a few other resources I recommend checking out too:

• Biblaridion – The best conlanging YouTuber in my opinion

• Artifexian – A fantastic place to go for an introduction to linguistic concepts (and other world building stuff)

• The ConWorkShop – A really useful resource for recording your conlangs

• The Index Diachronica – An indispensable resource containing pretty much every documented sound change in most of the world’s languages

And I would be more than happy to help with any conlanging questions you might have, I wouldn’t call myself a master conlanger but I like to think I am pretty good.

Woulda coulda shoulda – A defence of “could of” and related “errors” - By Harry Cook 31.10.2020

Language pedants, grammar Nazis, English teachers, whatever they may call themselves or be called have many linguistic pet peeves. They will often dub these so-called mistakes as grammatical errors, although many of them have nothing to do with grammar in the slightest and are merely orthographical rules (comma and apostrophe usage come to mind). There is one mistake that is often lamented by these critical capeless crusaders of correctness that is proclaimed to be grammatical.

“I could of gone to shops,” I’m sure this sentence made some of you cringe instantly. “Have!” no doubt you shall cry, “you mean have! How dare you use a preposition in place of a verb!” And when I was younger and pedanticer I would of totally agreed with you. It makes no sense to use a preposition in this position, this construction calls for an auxiliary verb. However, I have since changed my mind on this matter and now dear reader I will explain to you why “could of” and “coulda” should be seen as perfectly legitimate ways of writing “could have”.

Language pedants seldom actually know about linguistics. They have no knowledge of syntactic analysis or phonology or the idea of language variation. All they know is a list of rules they learnt at the end of their English teacher’s cane. So let us look at “could of” in a linguistic way, with sound and morphological change in mind.

This may seem unrelated but bear with me, the Future tense in French is formed from an old construction in Latin of an infinitive verb + the relevant conjugation of “habēre” (to have). The relevant form of “habēre” was eventually reduced and suffixed to the lexical verb.

Latin

(Ego) cantāre habeo – I have to sing

French

Je chanterai – I will sing

There is a strong cross-linguistic tendency for words of high frequency and low semantic strength (ie they do not carry much meaning) to be reduced a lot. While there were numerous other sound changes that occurred in the thousand and a half years or so from the decline of Classical Latin to Modern French the reduction of auxiliaries and other semantically weak function words happened independently of these other sound changes due to how prevalent they are in the language.

Now to return to our own beautiful bastard tongue English. We have a similar situation, where an extremely common and semantically weak auxiliary verb meaning “to have” is being used to form a new aspect or tense. Let us take one of our modal auxiliary verbs and add “have” to it. This gives us “would have” which creates the conditional perfect, a useful construction when one wishes to discuss hypothetical past events.

So how do we get from “have” to something that sounds like “of”? “They look and sound nothing alike!” you might be saying. And you would mostly be correct, but as I said, common words tend to be reduced. These two words are pronounced in isolation like this:

Have – /hæv/

Of – /ɒv/

These transcriptions have shown us that these words do in fact have a sound in common, the voiced labio-dental fricative /v/. Next we have /h/, /h/ is a very “weak” sound, it tends to be lost in most languages, especially when it’s in an unstressed syllable, in fact some languages do away with /h/ entirely, to reference Latin again, /h/ was lost in most of its daughter languages; “Hispania” became “España” in Spanish (there are other changes going on there too but the loss of /h/ was the main one). And in many dialects of English, my own included, the same thing happens to the /h/ in “have” in this construction and similar ones.

So now we have:

Have – /æv/

Of – /ɒv/

Except there is one more piece to the puzzle: the vowels. The most common vowel in English is the schwa, written in the IPA with /ə/, look in any English word with more than three syllables and you are almost guaranteed to find a schwa or several there, and it’s in a lot of two syllable words too. The schwa is also what vowels in words of high frequency words tend to be reduced to, including “have” and “of”.

Meaning we are left with:

Have – /əv/

Of – /əv/

Yup. For most English speakers, these words in every day use tend to be reduced to /əv/. So when people write “should of”, they are not using a preposition in place of a verb, they are still using a verb they are just writing how they think they hear it (because English doesn’t have a character for the schwa most speakers write it as “o” or “a” because that’s what they think it is).

This whole situation is somewhat analogous to complaining that in the expression “I will bear it in mind” people are using a noun in place of a verb, when “bear” the noun and “to bear” the verb are just homonyms. If you go back to Old English these words were different, the noun was “bere” and the verb was “beran” and if you go back further into Proto-Germanic and Proto-Indo-European the words start to differ further.

Some English speakers go the full route and do something similar to what happened to “habēre” from Latin to French and remove the /v/ and suffix the schwa (written “-a”) to the modal auxiliary verb.

Standard English

I would have sung

Colloquial English

I woulda sung

Personally, I think this is really cool. English is so dull in its inflectional morphology (in that it barely has any) the fact that some speakers have an inflection that they put on some modal auxiliary verbs to make them perfective is so cool to me. And yet English teachers will draw an arbitrarily coloured line through this word and then most likely write something condescending in the margin.

This change is just one of many small phonetic changes in English that is a part of the ever-changing shape of the language. English is not the same as it was five hundred or a thousand years ago and in five hundred years’ time it will look completely different again (if English is still a language and it hasn’t done what Latin did and given birth to several daughter languages).