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.