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Need a tool to create a fictional langauge?

Need a tool to create a fictional langauge?

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First pass recording is done

So. I have a dialogue-only audio montage containing all the dialogue in the short in preliminary recordings, and spoken in the fictional language too. Whew.

It’s four minutes long. I feel like I cut the titting thing to the bone and it’s still four minutes long. I had it down to three and a quarter minutes long before I recorded the dialogue in this new language.. crazy.

Still, it’s a fairly packed four minutes, and there’s now a few interesting pauses for dramatic effect just to let the moments sink in. I’ve learnt a couple of useful things about voice direction – making sure a character is emotionally believable from moment to moment in the recording, making sure their words, emotions and reactions are consistent with the character you know, and making sure furthermore that it’s all interesting enough to hold the attention of an audience. Is that directing or acting? Both, I guess.

And the character I’ve honed out of the dialogue is reserved. Reserved characters are.. hard. But that’s the kind of character I want to make: a merry introvert.

Recording dialogue in a tongue-twisting constructed language sucks.. until after twenty rehearsals you nail the take from muscle memory alone. Then it is the best. I’ll post a couple of tricks later when I go through and record the final version.

As for how it sounds? Kind of great. It feels like a real language being spoken here and there and that’s what I wanted. Tick box.

This scene is going to be great to animate, that for sure. Lots of quiet thinky character animation. Nothing broad. I love that stuff.

Anyway, next comes a bit of art direction – characters and the set. The set’s coming to me in bits and pieces. As for the characters, more vizdev and definitely more drawing are in my future.

But my self-imposed exile from dicking around in Blender is now over because there’s enough soundtrack to storyboard off. That was the deal. 🙂

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Translations are done!

The translations are done! Forty-six odd lines of dialogue which took sixty-ish hours over a month to translate into a language I was more or less constructing on the fly. Let’s have some more numbers while we’re at it:

  • A hundred and nine affixes of various and assorted uses – inflections for aspect, diminutives, relative clause formation… a rich and varied morphology
  • Fifteen free adverbs and conjunctions
  • Forty nouns
  • Seventy-four intransitive verbs (including adjectives)
  • Fifty-four transitive verbs
  • Fourteen interjections and stock phrases (including one swear word)

Here’s some of today’s translation notes just to give you an idea of what’s involved. They are presented more or less unexpurgated. I’m not sure how much sense they’ll make to non-linguists, but here goes…

001-17: “I can try to reconstruct her words from the soundtrack using your language and her lip movements as probability guides. One moment.”

This is a long one. Well, except for the end – that’s just good old ts`ikla. It is, for the record, my favourite line in the whole episode. The coolness of such a thing makes me squee. Also it’s probably the hardest line left to translate.

So. “I use your language and her lip movements as probability guides.”

“I use..”
téh-ngih.. – tone sandhi, V1hV2h = first V decreaks and becomes a rising tone.

New stuff: “try” modal affix, “reconstruct” vt, “soundtrack” n, “language” n, “motion” n, “mouth and lips” n, “guide” vt, “probability” n.

Try => statement of future intent, so léé.
Reconstruct => reconstitute, remake… we have `oko.. so “shape” “form” “build”. Building will probably be one of those t- verbs because they tend to involve hand stuff. Also probably short. So.. tïl for build, giving tïl`okoléé-ngih X – “I will rebuild.. X…”

“I will rebuild what she is saying..” – although.. rebuild? Isn’t it more like discovering? Eh. Translation so far:
tïl`okoléé-ngih kadyéé+nyi-rdzah-k`éé`a…

Soundtrack.. sound.. sound from the transmission.. stuff it, yaslkadyadyé-dyurtu – from the transmission.

And now we need grammars:

“using..”
téh-kséTé

Sketching the next part we have..
language-NDiye motion-also lips_and_mouth-rdza (guide-PURP probability)

her lips and mouth: Toka-rdza
move: `ayé
motion of her lips and mouth: `ayérre – -rre is probably going to be -tion in some ways

language: kadyakadya – reduplication FTW

Also possible: `aye-rdzah-k`uunh`a-t`unh Toka-rdza = and how her lips move

So..
“…using your language and how her lips move…”
…téh-kséTé kadyakadya-NDiye `aye-rdzah-k`uunh`a-t`unh Toka-rdza…

And now.. “as probability guides” which I’ll render as “for the purpose of guiding probabilities…”

trhoole = guide vt
probability = something that is probable to one extent or another = `iduunartirtetyeh

…trhoole+léé-ngih-nyïrde `iduunartirtetyeh

So, all together now:
“I intend to rebuild what she says with using (both) your languages and how her mouth and lips moved to guide probabilities.”
tïl`okoléé-ngih kadyéé+nyi-rdzah-k`éé`a téh-kséTé-kuTh kadyakadya-NDiye, `aye-rdzah-k`uunh`a-t`unh Toka-rdza trhoole+léé-ngih-nyïrde `iduunartirtetyeh. ts`ikla.

So. Imagine doing that kind of thing for sixty hours over four weeks, except for the first thirty or so hours you end up throwing away to varying degrees. Bit painful. Yet at the end of it all, I have a writing system, useful dictionaries, lots of usage examples cross-referenced to words in those dictionaries, a rich and productive morphology, and a working functional language complete with a rude word or two.

A useful production asset, then. 🙂

But anyway, that’s a project milestone hit right there. Hopefully I can record and time the rest of the dialogue by this weekend. Then I think I’ll leave sound and dialogue for a bit to tackle some art direction. (And by tackle I mean a sort of oafish rugby tackle that leaves the art direction with broken ribs and a permanent limp. Maybe.)

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The slog of making up languages

Some days I wish it were the kind of slog where you hit something with a bat and it’s gone and you’re done with it, but this is the kind of long seemingly unending slog where you try to bargain with it, reason with it, plead with it.. then you just get back into it and keep doing it because that’s what’s going to happen and there’s no escaping it.

So any time I have the thought of “Let’s just make this in English, seriously, it’s not worth spending eight hours every weekend trying to chip away at this apparent mountain of creating fictional speech”, I eventually come around and just get on with it. Of course it’s worth it. It’s worth it because the end effect is going to be listening to two folks having a conversation in a language that has never existed before. It’s going to be properly alien. Richly alien, even. The best sort of alien.

Still, it’s hard work. It’s possible that Ktish’s language is going to be the longest slog in the whole of pre-production. So many ideas, so many decisions, so many takes required to get the tongue muscle memory primed and working right. Ktish’s language is going to be the only one in the series with retroflex consonants in it, that’s guaranteed. The next speaking character (in the second episode, a long way off at this rate) gets a language with clicks – they’re easier for me to do and most importantly they sound totally awesome.

I’ve started cataloguing the actual translated sentences with numbers. This means I can check how nouns and verbs and affixes behave “in the wild” to keep usage consistent. It also means that if I’m really burning to change a word, I can see where it’s been used, whether the line of dialogue that uses it has already been recorded, etc. That’ll be useful, even though accounting work like that is always boring. It pays off.

The grander overview is a little disappointing though: there’s not even forty lines of dialogue in Ktish’s special language, and I’m already three weeks into the language build but only about halfway done. Some of those lines are several sentences each, I suppose. Some of them I can probably cut or rewrite – more bargaining for less work. As long as the story’s still there once I’ve finished rearranging words.

Making such slow progress is a little bit disspiriting. I’m rusty at this stuff and languages take a long time to build right – and by right I mean build in such a way that they’re still optimally useful as a production property going ahead. There are dictionaries broken down by part of speech, there are notes on the grammar.. so many spreadsheets.

So yeah. It’s a slog. The bad kind. That said, it’s perfectly possible that when the production design stuff really kicks in that I’ll be absolutely nostalgic for the language stuff.

At least with language stuff I basically know what I’m doing. I’ve never built environments before, and I haven’t really designed them. Writing and backstory have come to the rescue however, mainly in the form of of inspiration about the kind of stuff Ktish would have sitting around his house. I’ve decided an electric mushroom farm is definitely going to be one of them. There’s also the question of what Ktish’s house even looks like, how it’s laid out, what sort of techniques and approaches Ktish would use to make himself a place to live. Originally I had him living in a low-cost apartment block but at the moment he’s living.. well.. I’m not going to say yet. It may still change. 🙂

Meanwhile, on the drive to and from work, I’ve been learning about cognitive linguistics and prototype theory thanks to the text-to-speech feature on my daggy old-school Kindle. Instant audiobook. Love it.

Anyway, I’m far enough into pre-production now that I’m looking back at all the ground I’ve covered and there’s no thought in my mind of stopping, and not much lasting thought given to down-scoping. Yeah, I may have rewritten the first episode a bit again but only because I was explaining stuff like crazy instead of leaving expositional gaps. Yeah I’ll probably be re-editing the dialogue next time I have Reaper open so I can have more pregnant pauses as well – the talking whizzes by so fast, like I’m terrified of silence or something. Hopefully the pacing and dialogue problems can rinse out during the animatic stage. I’m trying not to think about how far I’ve got to go before I hit that. Shouldn’t be too much longer, but if it is, eh, put it down to experience.

Right now, where I am now, it’s like looking back at the foothills of a mountain – I can’t see the end of the climb yet, but a) I know it’s up there, b) I’m far enough from having begun to have got over my fear of climbing mountains and c) I have only an academic idea of what’s in store. But I’m optimistic, definitely. 🙂

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Constructing languages

So. A fake language to sell a fake universe. How does one go about doing that?

Well, it helps to have a script and a few sentences to translate. I’ve got a script and a few sentences to translate.

What doesn’t help is to make up a bunch of arcane unfollowable self-contradictory rules of syntax, a spelling system that is fully regular but horribly ugly, and a bank of phonemes (the distinct sounds of the language) which lead to unpronounceable car crashes.

Unless of course you’re doing what I did and doing that sort of thing as a doomed first draft. Then it’s fine. It helps to get the nutbag craziness out of the system, and throwing it out to start again feels utterly cleansing. I hit that blissful point yesterday evening.

So. Any given language is the solution to the universal problem: how do I convey something to this other person with an idea-level degree of precision by flapping my mouth, tongue and larynx at him? Every language on Earth solves this problem uniquely, in fact, every person on Earth solves this problem uniquely with versions of languages that solve the problem uniquely. The solutions are unique based on words (lexicon), word structure (morphology), sentence structure (syntax), the meanings of those words and sentences (semantics), the sounds that make those words up (phonetics) and how those sounds interact (phonology), who is speaking and being spoken to (sociolinguistics).. and that’s just predominantly synchronic aspects of language – aspects that don’t take history into account so much.

All a constructed language has to do in the context of a film is fake the audience out and sell the idea of a broader universe. In making a genuine language as opposed to faking it, this means many problems in the above paragraph have to be solved manually – either you make up novel solutions, or you borrow solutions freely from other languages (the saner option by far). So far I can say that I’ve consciously researched Kaytetye, Noongar, Inuktitut and Putonghua for their solutions. Probably Finnish and Japanese as well. I’m always stealing stuff from those languages.

I’m putting lots of attention towards constructing the language of the main character because there’s a ton of dialogue in it in the first screenplay (fifty-two whole sentences to translate), and lots more to come. There’s lots of that language to build, which means it’ll get somewhat unmanageable pretty fast, so I’m better off getting to know it really well as soon as I can.

I’ve started from two points – phonology and Roman alphabet orthography (so I can write the words down) and syntactic structure.

Picking the right sounds is important – the sounds are the surface level of the language, the most obvious interface. The main character doesn’t have fleshy lips to pucker in order to make sounds like w and m and f and v, but he can pull in the corners of his mouth to create an open o and a sort of ö sound like in German. This means there’s a lot more mid-mouth and guttural sounds.

The best way I know to figure out what direction to go with the phonetic side of things is just to babble randomly, in character. Sometimes I come upon a non-word I like: ktullu, nkul, trrh, derche. These fit my instinctive expectation of how this main character sounds – short, staccato, gruff.

I tend to do this part of it alone, if you’re wondering. 🙂

The syntactic structure work usually involves taking sentences and breaking them down into placeholder units in constructed language order. Knowing how that order goes first helps immensely.

One of the sentences from the screenplay that needs translating is: “They never miss a chance to make us look stupid." It’s a deceptively complicated sentence – there’s "us” looking stupid, then “we” are causally being made to look stupid, then there’s a specific kind of chance in which “we’re” made to look stupid, and then on top of that there’s “them” missing that chance. It’s highly embedded and frankly not the best sentence to kick off with. Eventually I glossed it as:

stupid-ATTRIB [they]_ABS, always stupid+appear-1p_EXCL-CC_STATE result+cause-CLAUSE_CLITIC happy-HABITUAL-3p_SENTIENT

Or, glossed back into English:

stupid them, always stupid-looking-us occurring-making happy they are

Eh, it’s a work in progress,. Ts`ikla yododoklé-rza. (It looks a bit stupid.) Glosses are never flattering either.

But I know I’m on the right track when speaking in it flows off the tongue naturally, when it invites expressive intonation, when it rolls along with the style of its non-artificial cousins like a speech system that could have been around for thousands of years – instead of sounding like a crazy unpronounceable experiment dreamt up by a mad linguist with too much time on his hands. Occasionally, in bursts, it’s sounding that way.

Incidentally, “the quiet one” in this language is ktii’rsah – literally “he is taciturn” – which makes the main character’s name something like Kteesha in English spelling. For now I’m just calling him Ktish.