Conlang sharing

Hm, I don't think I can give so detailed examples. In several chapters of "When They Shine Brightest" I have a man meeting a woman and a kid from a different race and learning to speak their language, but therefore he only learns some basic words that I give to the audience bit by bit, not as a direct translation. Often times I leave some parts untranslated and just show what the man thinks they mean or not even that. After all, it's a situation where they can't communicate and understand each other, so that's all the reader needs to know as well.
If I have to pull several phrases however:

“Arty, veina ail oiiana,” - "Arty, get in quickly,"
“Odaia Arty… Alta… Alta, namair sayta…” - "Don't worry Arty... Alta.... Alta will be alright..."
"Da shaar!” - "You - here!" (simplified for "You stay here!")
“Koate, Arty, doian!” - "Stop, Arty, stay!"

My conlang is still a work in progress, but it's supposed to be an ancient language that, when written or spoken with specific key phrases, allows the user to perform magic. It's intended to be very specific in how it's said, or the user can have rather nasty things happen to them.

This is the first one that might appear in my fantasy novella:

Be la sican eh tirileht ma titoran ma li drus’micrif la be.

Roughly translates to: (Open spell) May the gods grant that any who intend to harm me see me as the air surrounding me. (Close Spell)

It's more-or-less an invisibility spell.

At some point I'd love to make the language more functional and translate poems or songs into it, but right now the rules are still a bit rough.

At the present moment, I don't have overly much to show for my conlanging efforts, but I am starting to get somewhere now. As far as the written word goes, the primary purpose of any conlang I create will be for naming conventions - it's no use incorporating that much of a conlang into my work because it'll go right over the audience's heads (unless it's a television show/movie/computer game, in which you can get away with more).

What I have thus far:-

Nouns
Fyrù /fɪ.ruː/ Animate Noun Fox

Articles
Fen /fɛn/ Animate Definite Article (singular)
Fënaí /fə.naɪː/ Animate Definite Article (plural)

Suffixes
-an /an/ Plural Suffix

Numerals
Am /am/ One (1) OR Í /iː/ One (1) *Cannot decide on which is better, or if one or the other is used depending upon the situation
Doe /dəʊ/ Two (2)
Tëthérë /tə.θɛ.rə/ Three (3)
Ëdérë /ə.dɛ.rə/ Four (4)

Examples
Fyrù /fɪ.ruː/ A fox
Í fyrù /dəʊ fɪ.ruː/ One fox
Fyrùan /fɪ.ruː.an/ Foxes

Fyrù fen /fɪ.ruː fɛn/ The fox
Í fyrù fen /iː fɪ.ruː fɛn/ The one fox
Fyrùan fënaí /fɪ.ruː.an fə.naɪː/ The foxes
Ëdérë fyrùan fënaí /ə.dɛ.rə fɪ.ruː.an fə.naɪː/ The four foxes

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The noun classes I am still undecided on, so take the 'animate' reference with a whole truck load of the finest salt money can buy. Things I am certain of include there being no indefinite article, the definite article following the noun, and also that I love the counting system known as 'Yan Tan Tethera', and hence wish to use that as inspiration for my conlang's counting system.

I'm not going to develop my foreign race into a whole working language. It's not that integral to the story. However, there is one scene where the MC gets jailed with a foreigner and they try to speak. Communicating is a big failure, mostly because my MC isn't educated very well.

There is one sentence that her foreigner friend keeps repeating over and over. Enrasa. Pico pico astana y enrasa The MC memorizes this sentence because he says it so much. Later, they escape but he is recaptured in the jailbreak. He is executed the next day. One of the first things she does with her freedom is find a bilingual man and ask what that sentence means. The guy tells her literally translated it means, "My brother. My god, my god hold my brother." Colloquially translated it means something slightly different: My brother, I will see you when I die.

I have no idea how this language works. I know small things, like the prefix en- is male and el- is female. So while enrasa is brother, elrasa is sister. I want to make one for gender neutral because this culture is cool like that, but I haven't discovered what prefix that is yet. It will surface when I need it, thought. Most details in the story usually do that.

I'm not that into creating a working language. It isn't featured much in the story and I need to concentrate on how I spend my time with this story. Time management is a struggle for me.

Zaris said:

For developing the language and translating whole chunks of text, I used this tool. Maybe you might find it useful, too.

http://sulmere.tumblr.com/PolyGlot

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Interesting. I might have to look into that. Thanks for sharing.

I'm just reacting to the thread title--I've never had an urge to create a language for any reason--but have any of you considered using an existing conlang in your work? Esperanto and Lojban come to mind. You wouldn't have to identify the languages, so you wouldn't have to explain why your dragon speaks Lojban, but it seems like a cool exercise.

For people who want a quick solution:

My brother had to create a detailed "foreign" map for a training exercise. He had access to a GIS. He took an existing map, rotated it 90 degrees, and then used letter-level replacements - consonant for consonant, vowel for vowel - to turn the existing names in the electronic file into the new ones. There may have been a little hand patching for funny clusters.

The result was impressively different.

fivetoesten said:

I'm just reacting to the thread title--I've never had an urge to create a language for any reason--but have any of you considered using an existing conlang in your work? Esperanto and Lojban come to mind. You wouldn't have to identify the languages, so you wouldn't have to explain why your dragon speaks Lojban, but it seems like a cool exercise.

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For people who don't know Esperanto and Lojban that wouldn't matter - it'd seem like a fantasy language the author has created. But for the rare few that do, it would take them away from the book, so I wouldn't do it.

Plus, it's fun to make up a new language, or at least a part of one.

fivetoesten said:

I'm just reacting to the thread title--I've never had an urge to create a language for any reason--but have any of you considered using an existing conlang in your work? Esperanto and Lojban come to mind.

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I'm actually using lojban as the official language of the community in my current novel. It's not a fantasy setting, just a made-up experimental community in what is otherwise the current, real world. The population is international, so I figured they'd want to use an official language that's equally accessible (or inaccessible) to everyone, and I picked lojban since it's based on the six most common world languages. It's been interesting learning it. I'm not going to use the actual lojban words in my novel though. I'm "translating" it into English, hopefully set off by a different font or something, but I want to mimic the cadence and expression of it as much as I can while making it still easily comprehensible.

fivetoesten said:

I'm just reacting to the thread title--I've never had an urge to create a language for any reason--but have any of you considered using an existing conlang in your work? Esperanto and Lojban come to mind. You wouldn't have to identify the languages, so you wouldn't have to explain why your dragon speaks Lojban, but it seems like a cool exercise.

Click to expand...

For me, the fun is in creating the language - most of it will not get used, which is fine as it's a means to an end in itself. It's the same with fantasy mapping - the act of cartography itself is justification enough.

My approach to conlangs is to take a real-world language (preferrably one that is not well-known) and then mess with it using this linguistic Sound Change Applier (It's not as complicated as it looks, once you figure it out) For my current WIP I'm starting with Ojibwe and morphing it. Often it's useful to use the Swadesh list for the language I'm playing with as the starting point since it's a manageable number of words.

I don't usually create full languages this way, but it's a good way to make names (I have this compulsion that all my names have to mean something and not just sound right).