By now you may have seen my “How to Make a Language” Series.
The information presented in those videos represents what took me years to learn through
pure trial and error, and it was intended to give any beginners a head-start by outlining
all the steps to take when creating a naturalistic conlang.
However, just as important as discussing the things you should do when making a conlang
is detailing what you shouldn’t do when making a conlang, as there are a number of
common perils that beginning conlangers might fall victim to.
And what better way to teach you how to avoid these than to let you learn from my mistakes.
Today, we’re going to have a look at Thandian, the first conlang I ever made… and, I’m
not going to lie, this is going to hurt.
This thing has been collecting dust on my harddrive for years now, and to this day I
still can’t stand to look at it.
But now, I’m finally going to put aside my shame and look back through this ill-begotten
mess in the hope that anyone watching this may avoid suffering the same fate that I did…
and before Conlang Critic can somehow get his hands on it.
But before we get to the language itself, let’s start with a little stalling – I
mean, background.
I first had the idea to make my own language about 6 years ago.
I was reading the Silmarillion by J.R.R.
Tolkien, and the thing that caught my attention most of all was the portrayal and application
of the elvish languages, which were featured pervasively throughout the text.
I had already known that Tolkien had created his own languages for his legendarium, but
this was the first evidence I had that there was actual structure behind it.
It clearly wasn’t random gibberish, there was very apparent systematicity to it, and
it reinforced the feeling that Middle Earth had an intricately fleshed-out history and
background of which the reader was being exposed to only a small fraction.
And so I thought to myself, “wouldn’t it be cool if I could do something similar?”
At the time I had a worldbuilding project I was working on for an RPG group I was involved
with, and I thought I would try my hand at creating a language for the setting to pull
off a similar effect.
Now, by this point, the only language that I understood the grammar of on a technical
level was Latin, since I’d studied it in High school and tried to teach it to myself
for a few years afterward.
And so when it came to my own language, I kept all the grammar of Latin intact and just
changed the phonological form of the roots and affixes, producing a one-to-one relex
of Latin.
The only aspect of grammar that I changed was reducing Latin’s five declensions and
four verb conjugations down to exactly 1 noun declension and 1 verb conjugation, because
why would I possibly want more than one?
That would just be confusing.
And so I happily went along coining new words as I needed them and working with a grammar
that I was familiar with.
But that all changed when I went to Turkey for the first time in 2013.
It suddenly struck me one morning about 3 months before the trip, that I should try
learning as much Turkish as I could in the time I had, just to see how much I could actually
accomplish.
I had mixed success, but I kept on with it even after I got back home and I’m still
steadily learning it to this day.
But in studying Turkish, I was exposed to linguistic features and structures that I
never would have thought possible; things like agglutination, negative conjugations,
question auxiliaries, and evidentiality.
This totally revolutionized my view of how language could work.
So I naturally decided to take all the new features I’d seen in Turkish and include
them in my language as well.
As I continued learning Turkish, I started developing interest in other languages, Greek,
Finnish, Mandarin, and Classical Nahuatl to name a few.
And all the new grammatical concepts I came across were copied whole-sale into my burgeoning
language.
And as I did this, I found more and more satisfaction in developing the language further, to the
point of neglecting all the other elements of the world I was creating.
My language was no longer just a small facet of the worldbuilding process, it became a
hobby independent of the project it was a part of.
I would spend hours ravenously searching through Wikipedia pages looking for new pieces of
grammar, and every time I came across something I’d never seen before, I said to myself
“well, I’ve gotta put this in there too…” even if it made absolutely no sense with how
the language worked already.
Oh, what’s this?...
Switch reference?
That’s neat, I’ll throw that in as well, even though I already have multiple systems
of referent tracking...
And what’s that?
Some languages distinguish alienable and inalienable possession?
Well I’m going to use that too… even though I’ve already got three different ways of
marking possession…
And this went on and on and on, until eventually the language became so bloated and unwieldy,
such a patchwork monstrosity crammed with as many features as I could possibly squeeze
in, most of which I didn’t even fully understand, that it became impossible to keep track of
which strategy to use in which instances, and even very simple sentences became difficult
to translate, until finally, I had to take a step back and see my beloved creation for
what it had become – utter trash.
And after investing a year’s work into it, I was forced to consign Thandian to an isolated
corner of my conlanging folder where it has festered ever since…until today.
So lets take a closer look and dissect the hulking corpse of this linguistic abomination
to see what went so horribly wrong.
Oh boy… what have I got myself into?
Let’s start with the…uh… phonology, if you could even call it that.
This is the consonant inventory of Thandian.
Does that seem familiar to you at all?
Here, maybe this will help.
Yep.
Exactly the same as English.
And the vowels aren’t much better either, basically English’s vowel inventory with
a bit less variation.
This seems to have been one area where I was apparently reticent to deviate from English.
At the time my understanding of phonology more or less boiled down to “there’s all
the sounds we have in English, and then there’s a couple of other weird ones, but I won’t
include any of those because I don’t want my language to be weird.”
And of course, there was no allophonic variation of any kind, at least none that I defined
explicitly, and there were no rules defining syllable shapes or phonotactics.
I didn’t even know how the IPA worked at the time, so all that was well beyond me.
I would have thought coming up with a bad romanization system for a language that has
pretty much exactly the same phonetic inventory as English would be basically impossible,
but somehow I managed it.
E, I, and O, for [ɛ], [ɪ] and [ɔ] makes enough sense, as does using a schwa for /ə/,
but the good stuff ends there.
[æ] contrasts with [a], so I decided to represent the former with an A, and the latter with
a double A.
And if there were ever any doubts that I’m a native English speaker, I decided to Romanize
[u] and [i] with a double O and E respectively.
And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I chose to represent the diphthongs ei, ai, and ou
with macrons.
My god.
But the worst part was actually in the consonants.
Clearly, I was influenced by Klingon’s use of mixed case for its romanization, so I decided
to use the same trick for any consonants I didn’t know how to Romanize, which turned
out to consist of exactly one sound: the voiced dental fricative [ð].
I wanted a way to differentiate it from the voiceless dental fricative, which English
spelling doesn’t, so I decided to Romanize it… with a capital TH.
Yeah.
Again, this was the only place where capital letters were used to distinguish sounds, so
when looking at the language written down, you’re immediately confronted with all the
capital THs that stick out like a sore thumb and it looks atrocious.
What was I thinking?!
The only part of the language that at least kind of holds up is the script.
It’s got a fairly consistent aesthetic to it, and I went to the trouble of adding serifs
to make it look like it was carved into stone, which is what I was going for.
You can tell I was trying for a sort of featural script, where sounds with similar phonetic
characteristics are represented with similar-looking characters… except it’s kind of hard to
encode phonetic information in symbols when you have absolutely no idea how phonology
works in the first place.
So you can see that the sounds are grouped based on which corner the intersection occurs
in, so top left is post-alveolar fricatives and affricates, top right is dental and alveolar
fricatives, bottom left is alveolar and velar stops, and bottom right are labial stops and
fricatives.
Of course, I just made these groupings based on how similar I subjectively felt the sounds
to be.
I could have easily taken a quick glance at the IPA to get a clearer idea of how the sounds
were related, but for some reason I just didn’t care to do that.
I was far more concerned with expanding the grammar.
And speaking of the grammar, that’s where things get even worse…
After all the innumerable additions I pulled from every language I could find resources
for, this is how the grammar ended up.
Yep.
A list of stems on one side, and a list of affixes on the other.
Of course, it was all perfectly regular, and didn’t have any features that I deemed “irrational”,
like grammatical gender or any form of agreement, but damned if it didn’t have everything
else under the sun.
Thandian has 6(!) different grammatical numbers: singular, dual, paucal, plural, distributive,
and collective, and these were marked on both nouns and verbs.
The verbal affixes include markers for the subject and the object, and the object markers
can also be used for indirect objects and I guess other roles as well if you wanted.
But all those same roles are also marked on nouns via case marking, so there’s a whole
lot of double-marking going on.
Nouns are marked for one of 15 cases.
I remember seeing Finnish’s grammar for the first time and being blown away by the
sheer number of cases it had.
Latin’s case system, the only one I’d known until that point and the one I had copied
one-for-one, was miniscule by comparison, so, not to be outdone, I decided I needed
to have at least as many noun cases as Finnish.
It’s a good thing I didn’t know about Tsez at the time... for the sake of my own
sanity.
The cases include two separate genitives, one for alienable possession and one for inalienable
possession, one specifically to mark the topic and comment of a copula, and two opposing
trios of cases for discussing position and motion in space, and the other for position
and motion in time.
This disentangling of time and space is actually quite a persistent feature across the whole
language.
Like, for every adjective to do with dimensionality there are two separate roots, one for space
and one for time, which seemed like a good idea when I first made it because they’re
two different concepts and therefore they should get two different words.
Which would be fine, and in fact even kind of interesting for an auxlang or an engelang,
but not for a naturalistic language; I’m not sure if a natural language has ever even
existed that doesn’t describe temporal relationships in terms of spatial ones.
And there’s a bunch of things like that that just come across as artificial, like
how there’s three different words for good: one that means morally good, one that means
well or favorable, and one that means adept or skillful.
Now this isn’t necessarily unnaturalistic and could be an interesting feature if there
was etymology behind these words and how they came to coexist, but here it just feels so
forced and inorganic.
I was clearly putting these differences in just because I felt obligated to create as
many distinctions as possible.
Along those same lines, when I first made the verb system, the past tenses consisted
of the perfect, the imperfect, and the pluperfect, ported over exactly as they were in Latin.
But then I realized I didn’t know whether to use the perfect or imperfect to translate
past simple sentences in English, so I made a separate past simple tense to cope with
that.
And then I realized that I had no way of handling past perfect continuous sentences, so I made
a new aspect for that, and then I learned about languages that have tenses that distinguish
between the near past and far past, so then I had to make those tenses as well, and the
simple, completed, and continuous aspects could be applied to all of those too… again,
it’s not necessarily unnaturalistic to have a language with all these different tenses,
but I wasn’t thinking about things in terms of their evolution or usage, I was just shoehorning
in as many affixes as I possibly could just for the sake of it.
The derivational affixes are remarkably English-y, with many of them being labelled in terms
of their English equivalents.
There’s a nominalizing suffix that’s supposed to mean the same thing as the ‘-ness’
suffix in English, so, turning adjectives into nouns, but there’s another suffix that’s
supposed to mean the same thing as the ‘-tude’ suffix, and another for the ‘-ity’ suffix,
even though all three of these do basically the same thing in English, and the only reason
we have them all is because of various historical shenanigans.
And, looking at these notes now, I have no idea whether any of these suffixes can be
applied to any adjective, or if a given adjective can only take one of the three.
Speaking of adjectives, they might be the most embarrassing element in all of this.
From my countless hours spent pouring over Wikipedia, the only real thing I learned about
adjectives beyond the basics was that they sometimes agree in case and number with the
nouns they modify, which I knew I didn’t want to do because that was, in my mind, “irrational”.
But I felt like I had to have some sort of special morphology for them, so I did a google
search and found a powerpoint from a middle school English class that claimed there were
four types of adjectives: descriptive, resultant, limiting, or verbal, so I just made an affix
for each of those.
And likewise, adverbs are classified as either adverbs of time, space, manner, degree, or
frequency, all of which get their own affixes.
*sigh*… dear God, that is painful.
And by the way, the verbal adjective is apparently different from the participle, which is also
different from the gerundive, and I couldn’t tell you for the life of me what the difference
is supposed to be.
All of these decisions were simply motivated by my insatiable compulsion to throw in as
much morphology as I could, the end result of which was essentially a poor man’s version
of ithkuil if it was made by someone who had no idea how language works who simultaneously
insisted that it was all perfectly naturalistic.
So, what can we take away from this?
Number 1, Always keep your goals in mind.
Whenever you set out to make a new conlang, it’s critically important to establish your
goals from the very beginning and let them dictate every decision you make.
The only objective measure of how “good” or “bad” a conlang is how well it fulfils
its stated goals.
If your goal is to make a naturalistic language, like mine supposedly was, then your number
one priority should be to ensure that everything you put in the language could plausibly occur
in a natural language.
This was my first mistake.
Thandian was supposed to be a naturalistic language, spoken by a fictional population
of native speakers, but I didn’t actually do anything to make the language appear naturalistic,
and indeed, did things that made it unnaturalistic.
I assumed what I was doing was naturalistic because I was copying these features from
natural languages, but that doesn’t make a feature naturalistic in and of itself.
For example, when I learned that in Latin, the suffix “-que” conveyed the same meaning
as the word ‘and’ in English, that was all the justification I needed to make a whole
series of “conjunctive affixes”, after all, Latin does it, so why can’t I?
But what I didn’t know was that the Latin ‘-que’ suffix was just the result of a
separate word being spoken in the same breath as the noun it goes with, which isn’t too
different from what sometimes happens in English.
Knowing this, my “conjunctive affixes” now look entirely nonsensical.
As you might expect, the best way to combat things like this is to learn as much as you
can about how natural languages work, not just what their features are, but how those
features come to be.
Number 2, in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery “A designer knows he has achieved perfection
not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”
This applies especially, though not exclusively, to naturalistic conlangs.
This is actually a common pitfall of many beginning conlangers, sometimes called a Frankenlang,
where one throws in everything they know about language into one hideous amalgamation, and
this is exactly the trap that I fell for.
I was under the impression that putting more structures and features into the language
would make it more interesting, but that’s really not the case.
In fact, you can actually make a conlang more interesting by omission.
For instance, what if when making your language, you decide that verbs aren’t going to have
a morphological future tense?
How will the language cope with future statements?
Maybe it uses an auxiliary verb, maybe just uses adverbs or time phrases, or maybe some
combination of particles.
Any of these would be much more interesting than just making another affix.
For every feature you introduce, always consider how it interacts with what you’ve already
created.
And when encoding grammar, try seeing if you can find a way to convey the meaning with
what you’ve already got before creating something brand new.
And number 3, Practice makes perfect.
Just like learning any new skill, when you first get into conlanging, you’re more than
likely going to struggle, but don’t let that discourage you.
It’s pretty much inevitable that you’ll eventually have to seriously overhaul or even
completely scrap a project you’ve invested a lot of effort into.
But it’s not a waste of time, because you’ll have learned what to do differently for the
next project.
After I realized how terrible Thandian was, I started a new language, one where this time,
I was a lot more selective in what I decided to include. and I knew from the outset that
I wanted it to be as naturalistic as possible It had things like irregularity, multiple
paradigms for nouns and verbs, and a gender system, … and it also sucked, but it was
definitely a major improvement, so I made another language, and then another, and another,
and with every new project I got slightly less terrible.
Even today, while I have four or five languages that I’m pretty satisfied with, I still
have to go back and make revisions periodically.
It’s a long, long learning process, but if you stick with it, you’ll ultimately
reach a level where all the innumerable facets and decisions that once seemed so daunting
become second nature to you.
So, beyond any of the technical details, these are perhaps the three most important adages
for a conlanger to live by.
Unfortunately for me, I had to learn them the hard way, but hopefully you’re now better
equipped to do what I could not.
So go forth, then, and conlang!
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to do something I should have done a long time
ago…
Ah… good riddance…