Do you like inventing languages?
Talk about 'em here.
Anything from simple codes to fantasy languages is fair game.

26 responses total.

Note--speaking of codes, check out KINUME on IQ

I've invented a language for a book I'm writing.  It's an intersting
experiment.  Once you come up with a grammar the hardest thing to do
is create words for the multitude of things there are in the world.

started once.  Made a cool alphabet, arranged as best I knew to fit the order
in which infants begin to test sounds.  I
have long since forgotten it, unfortunately.

Cool.  You even do languages kami?  Amazing.

not in years- I have kids instead, these days.  You may notice, all the poetry
is old...

People with 'REAL' lives don't write poems.  much.

Ahem.

that is, except remmers. ;)

John, dude, there is always an exception to the rule.

I am working on a language.

I remember when I was younger, I made up a country adn then a language, but
then, budding word/language person that I was, I started to get into the
trying to figure out the intricacies (sp!?) of how my language would have to
be to mimic languages that developed over thousands of years, and finally I
got so frustrated that I just threw the whole idea out...

Well now, my interest is in cultural linguistics: what assumptions are shown
or pre-programmed by the language, how is language used in writing to show
how a group of people understand their world (LeGuin is, of course, a master
of this).  I created an alphabet, thinking of the order in which infants 
might get various sounds, but never got far in the language.  Played more
with English word-choice to show culture.

I can't quite explain ShyMoat... (my language for myy stories) to you.
It's sorta an experiement/learning experience.
It's my way of expressing how i've come to understand language and things.
I'm very new to much of the linguistic knowledge base however, and would
love any pointers one could give towards books, etc. on the subject.

I suppose most people are aware that the makers of Star Trek employed
linguists to invent the Klingon language. It is possible to learn it
(there is a klingon language society) and some trekkies consider it
trendy to do so.
 
Late last century, a polish dude (I forget his name) invented a language
called esparanto. It is very simple and was intended to become a
global lingua franca. There are still speakers today
Mi lernas esparanton (I am learning esparanto).
 
I'm inventing one for a computer game. All of the adversaries will speak
this language and players will be more successful if they figure it out.

When I was in high school I had planned to learn Esperanto.  No time for
improving my English anymore, much less languages I can't read anything in.

Esperanto *as a global language* has some problems, including the fact that
it's quite definitely a European language.  I'm afraid that if I had time
& energy to devote to languages I'd really rather learn something spoken
for real by a real culture, rather than Klingon or Elvish or Esperanto or
anything like them.

Um.  As participants in the Mystery Quote item over in agora (or was it
summer's agora?) may remember, I was recently reading Peter Farb's
_Word Play_ - which I highly recommend to everyone here.  Farb discusses
Esperanto and also Basic English, which is in many ways a very similar
attempt at a universal language, but approached from the opposite direction
so to speak.  His discussion is quite interesting.

Esperanto is distinctly a Romance language (Latin, French, Spanish, Italian),
with some Slavic flavor to it (the creator, Zamenhov, was Polish).  E.g.
Filo amas filino (The son loves the daughter)
Cu patro amas patrino? (Does the father love the mother?)
The Cu yes/no word is distinctly Polish, but the rest of the words are
fairly distinctly Romance items.

Another problem with Esperanto in today's world is it is perniciciously
sexist.  Almost all female nouns are male forms + -in.  E.g., above:
patro = patr+o = father + noun marker
patrino = patr+in+o = father + female + noun marker
In this example, "matro" is also acceptable (although less so), but I 
know of no alternative to "filino".  "patro", of course, can also mean
"parent".
"Parents" = patroj = patr+o+j = father + noun marker + plural marker

One obvious solution would be to incorporate a masculine marker as well, e.g.,
patro parent
patramo father
patrino mother
patroj parents
But that would take community approval (and there *is* an Esperanto speaking
world subculture).

 Gee, I bought th Klingon Dictionary. Imposible to remember th grammar.
I was also Kind o jelous. Because I too have invented languagess (three I
thiknk) Wish I could have been published.

I also studied Esperanto. Remarkably  easy to learn.

Invented language number three came about because of a short story I read By
Robert Heinlein in it his heroes used a language called speedtalk. Mine was
an attempt at this

Re: 17: Don't forget about the weird consonants, like x
and j and s with diacritics on them, which are on the one
hand difficult to remember the spelling of for those that
can pronounce them, and difficult for a large number of
the world's population to learn (it is considered that an
international language should be as easy as possible for a
large number of people across the world to learn to
pronounce). some languages, for example, have no "sh",
"ch", "j" or even "l",

OTOH, a german interlinguist in the 19th century tried to
get around this problem by taking European words and
"mutating" them. "world speech", for example, became
"Volapuk" (with an obligatory extra linking "a" and a "u"
with an umlaut, as in German (the author was German)). -
This being the name of the language.

In this particular case, as well as the mutsation of "red"
to "lol", the mutation was perpetrated in the interests of
the Chinese, who, the author opined, had no "r" - which is
false - and as many people know, the Japanese have no "l".
Moreover, "puk" makes no concession to those languages in
which a word cannot end in a consonant (native Italian
nouns cannot end in a consonant, whilst the fact that some
italian prepositions can end in a consonant might be
explained by the fact that prepositions are often
pronounced as a "unit" of a greater "phonological word"
which includes prep + noun (in Russian, this process is
undisputed).

I've sort of crated an international language. It's ideografic and consist
in simple drawings that depict ideas. This simbols are easier to write than
ejipcian geroglyphs but not as criptic as chinese, so, everybody can guess
the meaning by just watching at it. The grammar is also quite simple but the
main problem is than it's only a written language.
Lately I've tried to make up sounds for the simbols, but it's difficult with
things that doesn't make any sound, like the symbol for "yes".

In high school I spent quite a while working on an invented language. At first
it wasn't supposed to have any cognates to any language, but they sort of
appeared as I wanted words for things. The grammar is backwards from English --
the order of parts is (for the most part) direct object, verb, subject,
preposition-inderect object. In a reverse of every language I know, the default
gender is *feminine* not masculine (though groups use the gender of the
majority). Verbs aren't conjugated, but adverbs attach to the verbs. It rarely
uses indefinite articles. It counts in base 7. One of the wierdest things is
that for subjects like racism, slavery, punishment, or evil of any sort the
words are directly imported from another language and the grammar is reversed,
with accents intentionally placed oddly (so that if this were your only common
language with someone they would notice the shift). The language is called (in
itself) _lo ergo dy or_, which translated means "the language of gold" (with
the word for "language" also meaning "therefore").

Turkish word order is like that.

(I asked my mom if she knew of any language with a word order like that when I
was in the earliest planning stages; she didn't.) Does Turkish have a *strict*
word order in that order? I'm pretty sure that a lot of languages (perhaps
Latin, even) could fit that word order but wouldn't have to because of their
casing of nouns.

Turkish is fairly liberal in its word order, but the "basic" order, the order
which is the "default", is Subject Object Verb (I the cat see). IIRC, the verb
must always appear last.

In spite the fact that their real world existence is disputed, i tend to
design languages that are OSV. Like the language that Yoda speaks these
languages basically sound, except that, when liberated from the constraints
of having to be intelligible to untrained English speakers, they tend to come
out as:

the by Yoda spoken language like these languages basically sound.

Turkish is postpositional - man see-past-I (I saw the man).  Pronouns are
tacked on the ends of verbs after tenses.  to the houses - house-s-to
saw-not-I  cat-their  etc.  Check out Japanese word order.

That too. Postpositions tend to correlate with OV order, (the house to),
Prepositions with VO order (to the house), irrespective of the position of
S.

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