Language lessons: I
Even orcish is logical
Make the system fit the speakers
by Clyde Heaton
 

Languages have logic	Common Orcish	Setting up syllables	From syllables to sentences	Translation, direct and indirect
-	-	-	-	-

Players of FRPGs
are spectators and critics of a complex,
varied Art form. This medium covers a
range of experience equal to that of music
and poetry, which soars from simple
rhyme and melody to the rarefied heights
of symphony and epic opera. So, too,
does game design range from simple to
complex.

The simplest form is that of the freestanding
dungeon, where the players
enter the demesne of a mad wizard, who
has supposedly created the dungeon for
his own amusement. The characters come
from nowhere. There is never a reference
to the wider world outside the maze of
tunnels, no reason for the strange menagerie
of monsters and men found in the
rambling warren, and the players find no
hints of anything more.

Eventually, usually under the goading
of players' inquiring minds and free
imaginations, the referee either loses
interest in an increasingly complex hobby
or gets lost himself in what has become
an art form: the design of a fantasy world.
If the players don?t ask questions about
the world, the designer?s own mind will
ask them ? and there are always answers
to be had:

?You said a wizard built this place
because he was mad. What made him
insane??

?The madness was a curse from the
gods.?

?What did he do to get the gods
down on him??

?Uh . . . he helped overthrow a king
that had the support of the local
religion.?

?What kingdom is this? Can we go
there??

And so it goes, until you find yourself
as the creator of your very own world,
dropping hints of great treasures and
glory to be won.

Imagine a scenario wherein the players
find an inscription on a tomb wall in an
unknown language. They copy it down
and go looking for someone to translate it
for them. A magician can make sense out
of some of it, enough to figure out what
language it is. Since a player character
has been told in a dream that this inscription
may mean life or death to a member
of the party, off the party goes in search
of a needed sage, having many adventures
on the way.

In most cases, the life-or-death inscription
is never described except as a set of
probabilities on dice, or it is given in a
sort of doubletalk, as ?razzamatazz da
gooblegoop,? which the players instantly
recognize as a simple symbol for a real
phrase, with no meaning of its own. Too
much of this sort of thing, and the game
becomes dry.

The masters of literature have often
found solutions to the puzzle by actually
designing a language. J. R. R. Tolkien?s
Elvish is famous, spiced with a bit of
Dwarvish; Frank Herbert?s Dune series is
full of fragments of language, from the
battle language of the Atreides to bits of
Fremen and Tleilaxu tongues. Each of
these fragments strikes a note of realism
beause it reflects a real vocabulary and
syntax, however incomplete it is. These
languages are not simple substitutions of
nonsense words in English grammar, like
a ten-year-old?s ?secret language? he
shares with his friends; they represent real
thought about the characters speaking the
lines, and real rules about how languages
work. It?s not hard to learn: This article
will show you how, and we?ll design a
language for orcs along the way.

Languages have logic
Every language has its internal logic,
although folk wisdom holds otherwise.
Some people are fond of saying that English
(or whatever language they are being
forced to study) is illogical, unpredictable,
and ridiculous. Deep down, they
know this is not true, for they learned the
basic logic of their native tongue as they
learned to talk, without any formal lessons.
They can hear a sentence made up
entirely of unknown words, but if these
words conform to the patterns of English
they will instantly recognize certain facts.

The commonly quoted example of this
is the meaningless phrase, ?The gostak
distims the doshes.? Without knowing
exactly what one is, you automatically
know that a gostak is a being or an object
capable of performing some kind of
action. This gostak distims; that is, performs
an unknown action (defined as an
action by the internal logic of the language),
and it distims doshes (whatever
they are), the object of the action of ?distimming.
? The only time this internal
logic is upset is when two languages
come into conflict by being used at the
same time and place, and therefore are
often combined. Eventually the two
tongues will become the same language,
having its own slightly different logic
within a slightly different framework.

Before a language can be designed, you
have to decide a few things about the
people or creatures who will speak it.
First, what kind of vocal apparatus do
these creatures have to work with?
Obviously, a creature with no teeth, only
a horny bill, will not use the same sounds
that a beast with fangs will, and neither
will use the phonemes of human
language.

Second, what kind of culture and world
view do these people live in and with? In
his science-fiction novel The Languages
of Pao, Jack Vance suggests that languages
shape cultures. In his fictional
example, he uses language changes to
shape changes in a society. This may be
so, but if a language grows up within a
culture, the reverse will probably be more
often true. The sound and grammar of a
language will almost certainly reflect the
cultural environment in which is is used.

For example, it may be no coincidence
that ancient Rome, an aggressive, expansionist
society, spoke Latin by putting the
verb first. The position of the word denoting
and describing action shows clearly
the importance the Romans placed on
action. The English-speaking world puts
the subject of a sentence, a noun, in the
leadoff position in the simplest sentences.
This may reflect, as it seems to do, an
acquisitive, possession-oriented culture.
To design a language for part of an
AD&D world, you don?t need a complete
analysis; knowing the general alignment
and cultural habits of the society will
cover the situation.

The third fundamental decision
involves the question of use. What do
these people do with this language? Is it
spoken primarily by courtiers (such as
High German) or by peasants and merchants
(such as Low German)? To you, as
the game-world designer, this decision is
important because it will limit the kind
of vocabulary you will develop. The
Atreides? battle language in Dune didn?t
need words for flowers or birds, for philosophy
or religion, but it had a driving
need for military intelligence and combat
terms. In the same manner, you will
design only the part of a greater language
that you require, adding the rest only if
you find some part of it useful.

Common Orcish
The language we are going to develop
is Common Orcish, so named because it
is common to all the orc tribes in a given
AREA.  Common Orcish is a well-developed
military language, having evolved to
meet the needs of intertribal cooperation.
Generally, the only reason tribes will
work together is for warlike purposes,
such as civil war or a major raid intt civilized
territory.  The orcs of Stony Ledge
don't want to discuss the fin epoints of
metal work with the Black Dog orcs, but
they do need to know how, why, and
when they are all going to launch a joint
charge against the kobolds. Hence, the
language is full of concepts relating to
warfare and military construction.

Orcs are always shown with protruding
fangs, a physical feature which definitely
limits the sounds they can make. Many
subtle sounds that require a completely
closed mouth to produce will be
unknown to orcs, because their fangs
literally get in the way. Their harsh, savage
nature will further lead orcs to use
mostly harsh, guttural sounds. Therefore,
the only consonant sounds in the language
are D, G, J, K, N, R, T, and Z. The
vowel sounds are A (as in at), E (as in
egg), and O (as in off).

(Remember, the process of gaming language
design is arbitrary. You are the
designer and authority. It is only necessary
that the component parts not be
inconsistent. If, by chance, a slight inconsistency
does creep in, blame it on interlanguage
contamination, which happens
in all but completely closed societies.)

If we were designing a tongue for a less
hostile race, such as elves, we might discard
this series of consonants completely
in favor of softer sounds such as F, H,
TH, L and S.

Setting up syllables
are chosen, set up a table to help pick syl-
Once the basic sounds of the language
lables, using a matrix something like the
one given here, or a similar design of
your own creation:

1st Consonant (null)	Vowel	2nd Consonant (null)
d	a	d
g	e	g
j	o	j
k	-	k
n	-	n
r	-	r
t	-	t
Z	-	Z

Now, by picking "one from column A,
one from column B, and one from
column C," Chinese restaurant style, you
can build dozens of suitably harsh syllables
(243, to be precise), each one similar
in form and sound to the others, such as
dug, jeg, zor, ot, and tet.

These syllables may be used as complete
words, by themselves, or may be put
together into longer words. In doing this,
take into account the intelligence of the
speakers. In most cases, only races of relatively
high intelligence would use a lot of
polysyllabic words. I doubt seriously if
orcs would use more than two syllables to
a word, especially in their common, intertribal
language. Even so, the consonants
and vowels from the above list can be
combined into more than 40,000 twosyllable
words. Common Orcish need not
be a limited tongue.

When building a vocabulary, if you
choose you may have similarities between
some words, to show a common root; for
example, in Old Dwarvish (described in
DRAGON issue #66) the verb ak (to cut)
was reflected in the nouns bak (cutter)
and zak (axe). Such relationships and
roots are very easy to develop when
designing a language, since one word
will suggest another, such as with sleep,
bed and blanket.

However, root-word organization
would not be very prevalent in Common
Orcish. Orcs are not very creative, are
lawful, and may have evolved from a
pack-running, hunting carnivore. I stipulate
that their words may have developed
originally from hunting calls and are
therefore arbitrary in nature, at least in
the common language. New words are
either borrowed from other languages or
imposed by a leader strong enough to
have his way. Once used by enough orcs,
a word gains the weight of custom and is
accepted by the lawful-minded populace.

Another thing to consider is whether
certain parts of speech have a different
word form, making them immediately
recognizable for what they are. This may
be done by reserving certain syllables for
special uses, or by the use of suffixes and
prefixes. In Common Orcish, we will
record a tendency for verbs to be of one
three-letter syllable, and for connectors
such as and, or, but, from, etc., to be of
one two-letter syllable. Plurals will be
denoted by adding the suffix -a to a word,
and a female version of a noun will be
given an -o suffix. All other words,
whether nouns or adverbs and adjectives,
will be of similar structure, probably of
2 syllables.

In any language, there must be a way
to denote possession and tense. In High
Elvish (see the article on that topic elsewhere
in this section), a relatively more
sophisticated language, possession and
tense are both shown by using an entirely
different word to denote the difference
between my possession and yours, as well
as a difference between an object of today
and the same object tomorrow. In Old
Dwarvish, the same requirement is met by
a short modifying syllable preceding the
word. In Orcish, we will use a simple
modifier in the same manner as an
adverb.

From syllables to sentences
Next, we must determine simple sentence
structure, taking into account the
culture and attributes of the race and culture
using the language. When Old
Dwarvish was designed, I considered the
reputation dwarves have of being materialists,
always seeking to amass treasures
of gold and finely worked materials.
Apparently, physical objects are of most
importance to them, and this must be
reflected in their language, with the subject
and object of a sentence taking the
prominent position.

In the case of High Elvish, I tried to
imagine what would be of paramount
importance to a nearly immortal people.
I decided that my personal view of elves
was that of a race of artists, more concerned
with appearance and attitude than
with actual objects and actions. Hence,
the mood of a statement takes grammatical
precedence over the subject, verb, and
object. Orcs are not as highly developed
as either dwarves or elves, however, so we
will use the simple egocentric grammar
of subject, verb and object, in that order.
Words modifying another word will follow
it.

For example, the English sentence The
chief of the orcs attacked the big fort by
the wide river would be organized in
Common Orcish as Chief orcs/attack
past/fort big by river wide.

The simple concept is Chief attack fort.
The subject, chief, is modified by orcs;
the verb, attack, is put into past tense by
an adverb; and the object, fort, is modified
by the adjective big and the prepositional
phrase by river wide.

We now have the bare skeletal structure
of a language. If all you need for gaming
purposes are a few fragments of speech or
tomb inscriptions, you really don?t need
to develop a full vocabulary; just follow
these rules of construction and the language
(or what there is of it) will sound
and look consistent.

However, if you want to develop a
vocabulary for orcs, let?s continue. First,
decide what concepts are required by the
speakers of the tongue. As we decided earlier,
Common Orcish is basically a military
language to allow cooperation
between tribes in time of war. The orcs
will need to talk about combat (both
individual and group), bivouac situations,
sieges, construction, and possibly
hunting. Incorporating these concepts
will dictate the vocabulary of the
language.

Start by making a list of the names of
every object, person, direction, etc., that
an orc may have to talk about when in
any of these situations, and assign an
Orcish word to each, according to word
structure as decided earlier; go back to the
three-column syllable table. Remember,
nouns are usually of two syllables.

As you begin this list, keep it in alphabetical
order. I find that 3"×5" index
cards are the easiest method; by keeping
files for both English and the language
I?m working on, I avoid any repetition.

When the noun list is as complete as
you want it to be, look it over and add .
any adjectives that an orc might need to
apply to any of these. For instance, river
might require wide and fast; sword might
need the modifier sharp. In the case of
Common Orcish, the adjectives have the
same syllabic form as nouns.

Now, decide what verbs an orc would
need, such as cut to go with sword and
swim with river. These verbs are usually
of one three-letter syllable, in the case of
Orcish. File these verbs in order with the
nouns and adjectives, then select adverbs
to modify the verbs, such as hard to modify
cut. Adverbs have the same form as
nouns and adjectives.

Now, we need one more type of word to
give the language the flexibility it needs:
connectors, such as conjunctions (and, or,
if, etc.) and prepositions (from, for, and
to). These we have already decided will be
of one syllable of two letters only, so
assign Orcish translations to these words
and file them.

Using this process, I worked out the
following English-to-Orcish vocabulary
list:

And (conj.) ................................ ak
Animal (n.) .................................. ragdar
Army/warband (n.) .............................. joktar
At (prep.) .......................................... ag
Attack (v.) .......................................... dak
Attack (n.) ............................................ dakzok
Axe (n.) ................................................ ekdod
Bed (n.) ............................................... derdar
Big/great (adj.) ......................................... jajgak
Blanket (n.) ............................................... derdak
Break (v.) .................................................. dod
Brick (n.) ....................................................... kettak
Bright (adj.) ................................................. gatad
Burn (v.) ................................................... det
But (conj.) ................................................. ek
Carry (v.) ...................................................dog
Charge (v.) ................................ kot
Chest (n.) .................................. zekar
City/town (n.) ..................................ejtag
Climb (v.) ............................................... teg
Cloak (n.) ................................................ durad
Close/shut (v.) ............................................. gen
Cold (adj.) ............................................. etar
Come (v.) ............................................. zen
Coming (n.) ......................................... zenak
Company (n.) ....................................... roktor
Cut (v.) ................................................. gek
Dagger/knife (n.) ....................................... jortak
Danger (b.) ............................................ nartag
Dark (adj.) ............................................ gerdak
Day (n.) .................................................. zandag
Deer (n.) ................................................... rorad
Defend (v.) ........................................ gag
Die (n.) ................................................ ot
Dig (v.) ................................................. gar
Dog (n.) ................................................ gojak
Down (adj./adv.) ................................. zegor
Drink (v.) ............................................. az
Drink (n.) .................................................. aztar
Dwarf (n.) .................................................. kez
East (n.) ..................................................... gokzek
Eat (v.) ........................................................ gad
Elf (n.)  ......................................................... rekar
Enemy (n.) .................................................... rargad
Far (adj./adv.) ................................................... gotrak
FAST (adj./adv.) ............................................... tortan
FIGHT (v.) ........................................................ dek
Fire (n.) ............................................................. detad
Flank (n.) ............................................................ togtad
Food (n.) ............................................................... gadduj
For (prep.) ................................................................ oj
Formation (n.) ............................................................ kejar
Front (n.) ................................................................. regton
Future (adv.) .............................................................. gakdar
Gate (n.) ..................................................................... netdag
Get/fetch (v.) ............................................................ doj
Go (v.) .............................................................. zor
Going (n.) ............................................................ zorak
GAURD (v.) ..................................................... dej
GUARD (n.) ..................................................... dejad
Hammer (n.) .................................................. gettok
Hard (adj./adv.) .......................................... gegor
He (n.) ........................................................ darag
Helmet (n.) ..................................................... ozrad
Horse (n.) ......................................................  gozak
Hot (adj.) ........................................................ dendad
How (adv./conj.) ............................................ or
Hunt (v.) ........................................................... jar
Hunt (n.) ......................................................... jarag
Human (n.) ................................................. rannor
Hunter (n.) .................................................... jardak
I, me (n.) ........................................................ dagad
If (conj.) ........................................................... eg
In (prep.) .......................................................... aj
Is/am/to be (v.) .................................................. tot
Kill (v.) ............................................................ dez
Lead (v.) .......................................................... jed
Leader/officer (n.) ........................................... jeddar
Left (n.) ........................................................... rakan
Like/as (prep.) .................................................. ad
Listen/hear (v.) ................................................ dun
Loose (adj.) ............................................... (kon ad)
Make/build/erect (v.) ....................................... tek
Many (adj.) ...................................................... zejdad
March (v.) ......................................................... dok
MOVE (v.) ........................................................... tor
Near (adj.) ..............................................gotrag
Night (n.) .................................................. zakdag
No/negative (adv.) ........................................ zozgat
North (n.) ............................................... todreg
Obey (v.) ................................................. jeg
Of/from (prep.) .......................................... og
Open (v.) ................................................... nez
Or (conj.) ............................................ ok
Orc (n.) ................................................. darak
Order (v.) .............................................. jen
Order (n.) .................................................. jendad
Parry (v.) ................................................... gaj
Past (adv.) ..................................................... dotad
Rear (n.) ....................................................... rontak
Retreat (v.) ................................................... noj
Ride (v.) ....................................................... rej
Right (n.) ...................................................... tokan
Run (v.) ........................................................ raz
Saddle (n.) .................................................... orgad
Safe/safety (adj/n.) ......................................... noztan
Scout (v.) ......................................................... gon
Scout (n.) ........................................................ gontad
Sergeant (n.) ....................................................... jegdan
Shield (n.) ........................................................ gandal
Shoot (v.) .......................................................... jez
Shut/close (v.) .................................................... rot
Sleep (v.) ............................................................. der
Slow (adv.) ........................................................ tontag
Soft (adj.) ........................................................... gezan
South (n.) ........................................................... takren
Squad (n.) ............................................................ jok
Stand (v.) .............................................................. nak
Steal (v.) .............................................................. dez
Stone (n.) ............................................................. kordad
Stop/halt (v.) ......................................................... gej
Sword (n.) ........................................................... dotak
TAKE (v.) ............................................................. don
Thief (n.) ............................................................. deztej
Threaten (v.) ........................................... nar
Thrust (v.) ............................................... zok
Tight (adj.) ................................................ kozad
To (prep.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . od
Treasure/wealth (n.). . . . . . . . . . . . . doztat
Tree (n.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . tadnen
Up (adv./prep.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . tegat
Wall (n.) ......................................... kokad
Water (n.) ............................................. dozar
West (n.) .......................................... gogker
What (n./adj.) ................................... ar
When (adv/conj.) ......................... an
Where (adv./conj.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . er
Who/whom (n.) ........................................ on
Why (adv./conj.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . en
Wine (n.). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . tagrat
With (prep.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .ed
Wood (n.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .dortod
Yes/affirmative (adv.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . tojat
You (n.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .dakar

The parts of speech abbreviated after
each English entry are expressed generally
in terms of how the Orcish language
uses these words and concepts. For simplicity
(because that?s the way orcs would
instinctively do it), there is no distinction
drawn between nouns and pronouns.
Although a given word may be characterized
either as an adjective or an adverb
because of its principal usage in English,
it can be both parts of speech in the
Orcish sentence structure, where the same
words are used to modify both nouns and
verbs.

Words can be easily added to this list as
they are required by the game situation.
Words on the list can influence the creation
of other related words (as with the
Orcish words for ?hunt? and ?hunter?).
But don?t overdo this; as mentioned earlier,
Common Orcish wouldn?t be terribly
sophisticated in this respect. Reserve the
?related word? privilege for concepts and
objects that are near and dear to orcish
mentality, such as az/aztar, dej/dejad,
jar/jardak, and gon/gontad, to name a
few from the list above. As long as you
follow the language's construction and
grammatical rules -- and avoid outright
duplication of words by keeping organized
lists -- the language can be dealt
with and used by players. It can become a
major factor in the events of your campaign;
for instance, being able to recognize
Common Orcish from previous contacts
with the language may provide an
important clue to PCs in a
perilous situation.

Translation, direct and indirect
To translate an English sentence into
Common Orcish vocabulary and grammar,
reorganize the sentence in English
first. The sentence The officer ordered us
to climb the wall has officer as its subject,
ordered as the verb, and us as the object of
the verb. The basic Orcish sentence
would be officer order me. The subject is
not modified, but the verb is modified by
the phrase (to) climb the wall and by
being placed in past tense by the modifier
dotad. The object is modified by adding
the plural suffix, -a.

The complete rearranged sentence
reads: Officer order (past) to climb wall
us. A direct translation of this sentence
into Common Orcish yields: Jeddar jen
dotad teg kokad dagada.

If players ever get too familiar with the
language, it may be time to sprinkle your
Common Orcish vocabulary with some
"indirect translations," otherwise known
as dialects. As the use of a language
spreads (and any language worthy of the
name "common" would certainly be
widespread), differences arise in the way
various tribes pronounce various words.
For example, one tribe may pronounce
the harsh T more softly, so that it would
be written TH; the K could become a
breathy KH at the end of a word only.

Much of the Portuguese language is
similar to Spanish, with the words shortened,
some of the vowels left out. Perhaps
one tribe of orcs speaks this way, so that
gogker (west) becomes go'k'r, and tagrat
(wine) is t'grat; in an adventure, this
could be a source of friction between
tribes that adventurers could exploit.

How will you make the most and the
best use of the languages you design?
That's impossible to predict; there are at
least as many ways to use a language as
there are words in the language itself.
And no matter how much and how well
you use authentic languages, one thing is
for sure: Player characters in your world
will use the languages you designed in
ways that you didn't even dream of.

JULY 1983
 
 

Language lessons: II
All games need names
But don’t make a game out of naming!
by Katharine Kerr
©1983 Katharine Kerr

What is a language?	Pick the right phonemes	Vowels and consonants	TABLE OF CONSONANTS	Reading, writing, and morphemes
Isolating-type languages	Inflectional-type languages	Gender and number	Possession and location	Prefix, suffix, or infix
Now, for the names	How many words is too many?	Watch out for weird words	-	-

"You?re in the Temple of Florwaks in
Shinebright City," says the GM.
"You see the Priestess Oolala and her
barbarian bodyguard, Upchuk, who <easy: allow barbarians to dual-class>
serves the mighty god, uh, the god . . .
how do you say Smkznrf, anyway?"

Does any of that sound familiar? All
too often, role-playing games, to say
nothing of the lower reaches of fantasy
and science-fiction writing, are marred by
the use of personal and place names ranging
from the merely silly to the utterly
incomprehensible. Even some popular
published gaming campaigns are filled
with banal random names.

The problem seems to be that many
gamers forget that names are part of a
language, and that each language has a
consistent character that sets it apart from
other languages. By and large, most roleplaying
games are created and played by
speakers of English, and American English
at that. For centuries, English has
been a linguistic melting pot, drawing
roots and words from many other tongues
and in the process losing any recognizable
purity of tone and sound, such as one
finds in, for example, Chinese or
German.

In America, our cross-cultural society
produces names drawn from all over the
world. I?ve known a Kevin Woo and a
Heidi Sanchez, for instance ? ethnic
combinations of names that would be
unthinkable elsewhere, especially in a
primitive, isolated society such as those in
most FRP games. As a result, when
gamers create names, they start with the
assumption that anything goes, just as it
does in American English. Sometimes, in
a desperate attempt to sound exotic, they
fall back on handfuls of consonants; more
often, they mix and match from widely
different languages, with a healthy dose
of just plain English thrown in.

It is possible, however, to have a system
that will produce personal and place
names in fantastic languages with a minimum
of effort and brain-wracking. What
the gamemaster needs to do is create the
language from which these names will be
drawn. Making an entire language would
be too time-consuming and not necessary,
but you can use a few basic linguistic
principles to create a small part of a language
in a surprisingly short time. This
article explains those basic principles and
gives specific pointers on language creation
so that it can serve as a starter-kit for
those who want to create partial languages
for their campaigns. You should
bear in mind that the article oversimplifies
many a tangled concept, but on the
whole, it sticks close to modern linguistic
theory. It also uses two standard linguistic
conventions by setting off example
sounds in slashes (/g/) and example
words in italic type.

What is a language?
Before we can get down to the step-by-step
process of making up a language, it?s
necessary to define exactly what a language
is: a system of sounds, all given
arbitrary meanings and organized into
patterns that carry meaning and show the
relationships between the basic sounds.

The one primary reason that languages
exist is to communicate information
between individuals. Every existing language
fulfills this need in a very precise
way, no matter what speakers of other
languages may think of it. You must
understand that a truly ?primitive? language
? that is, a system of grunts, short
words, and grammarless sentences, like
those often attributed to primitive peoples
in fantasy fiction ? simply never has
been discovered and probably never
existed among anyone recognizably
human. It?s likely that as soon as protohumans
were using tools, they were
inventing real languages; the same will
hold true for any sentient human or
humanoid beings in a fantasy or sciencefiction
campaign.

Pick the right phonemes
The 2 basic parts of any language
are its sound (what linguists call its phonetics
or its phonological inventory) and
its structure (grammar and syntax). To
invent a language, you must first determine
what kind of sounds your new language
will have, then decide what kind of
grammar it uses. Once these decisions are
made, you can generate lists of personal
names and words that can be used to
build place names. Let us begin then
with what most people call sounds but
linguists call phonemes (for a reason that
will become clear later).

The human mouth and throat, to say
nothing of the speech-making parts of an
alien anatomy, can produce an enormous
variety of sounds, ranging from a Bronx
cheer to a soft hiss. Any language that
used all or even most of the sounds a creature
is capable of making would be too
complex to use for general communication.
So, every language selects a relatively
small number of sounds to use in
building words. This selection is what
gives a real-world language its basic
?music? or character, because out of a
simple human liking for what?s familiar
and orderly, languages tend toward consistency
in their choice of phonemes.

Thus, the German Ianguage sounds
throaty and harsh to many people
because of its selection of phonemes pronounced
farther back in the mouth than
those of English, while Spanish uses the
open, soft phonemes that give it its nickname
of ?the loving tongue.? These
judgements, of course, are culturally conditioned
and emotionally subjective ?
but as a gamemaster, subjective emotional
color is exactly what you want in
your invented languages.

Your first job, then, is to select basic
sounds in an orderly, patterned way to
give your new language character. Since
the word ?sound? is vague, let?s define
our special term, phoneme: A phoneme is
a speech-sound that must be precisely
pronounced to communicate meaning,
but this precision is a relative thing.

If a person with a high-pitched voice
and one with a baritone voice both say
the word can, for instance, the pitch of
the two words is different, but they would
both be understood. Similarly, a British
and an American speaker would each
pronounce the vowel /a/ in can slightly
differently ? but again, they would be
understood. On the other hand, if someone
pronounced the word as con, the
word would not be understood for what it
is. Thus, the British and the American
/a/ sounds are variants of a single phoneme,
while /o/ is a different phoneme.

When inventing your new language,
then, remember to define the phonemes
closely rather than broadly. For example,
just how will the vowel /a/ be pronounced
in your language? Don?t assume
that it represents all the phonemes that
the English letter a represents, such as the
phonemes in can, cane, and aha, but
decide which of these phonemes you
want. (The spelling in your new language
will be a breeze, unlike English, if
you play your cards right.)

The number of phonemes used in
human speech is vast, and far from
bounded by our English alphabet. Some
African languages, for instance, use the
phoneme /!/ (no, that exclamation mark
is not a mistake), which is pronounced
roughly like a bottle-top being popped by
an old-fashioned opener. Welsh has the
phoneme /ll/, produced by putting the
tip of the tongue on the hard palate and
hissing. Many languages use the throaty
/ch/, as in the Scottish word loch. Closer
to home, consider all the ways that /r/
may be pronounced: open as in American
English, rolled or trilled as in Celtic
tongues, swallowed like in British, nasalized
as in New England dialect, or even
aspirated like the /rh/ in Welsh, Each
language selects one method as the
?right? way to pronounce /r/, and so can
your new language.

Vowels and consonants
Varied as they are, however, all phonemes
fall into 1 of 2 groups: vowels
and consonants. A vowel is a phoneme
produced by vibrating the vocal cords and
allowing the air to pass out of the mouth
or nose or both without obstruction. It?s
the vowels, in other words, that actually
allow a word to be pronounced by a
human or humanoid mouth.

A consonant may be simply defined as
anything that isn?t a vowel. Certain consonants,
such as /s/ at the beginning of a
word, do carry air with them, but this air
is insufficient to allow the word to be
heard from any distance away without the
following vowel. Say the word stop aloud
and pay attention to the way that your
voice becomes automatically louder when
you hit the /o/. Thus we see that a word
without vowels, such as the god Smkznrf
of our example, is unpronounceable and
thus unusable, no matter how dandy it
looks on the printed page.

Both vowels and consonants are classified
into categories on the basis of certain
technicalities. Although you don?t need
to learn all these categories to create a
partial fantasy language, included below
is a table for those who like this sort of
thing. The table shows most of the basic
ways of producing consonants, defines
those terms, and shows how the English
consonants are classified. Notice how few
different consonant sounds English uses,
in comparison to the number of different
sounds the human vocal apparatus can
make. For a new language, it would certainly
be possible to introduce new consonant
sounds ? but make sure you and
your players can actually pronounce a
nasalized dental, for example, if you
choose to include one. (Perhaps written
as /nt?/, it would be sounded with the
tongue pressed against the upper teeth as
the air went out your nose.)

TABLE OF CONSONANTS

-	Nasals	stop: voiced	stop: voiceless	Spirants: voiced	Spirants:  voiceless
Labial	m	b	p	w	wh
Dental	-	-	-	th	th
Labio-dental	-	-	-	v	f
Alveolar	n	d	t	zh, z, l	sh, s, l
Cacuminal	-	-	-	r	r
Palatal	n (as in onion)	-	-	y	y
Velar	ng	g	k	-	-
Uvular*	-	-	-	-	-

* (not used in English; ch in German, as in achtung, is one example)

Definitions of terms in table:
Nasals are sounds produced with the
nasal passage open.

Stops are produced by first closing the
lips, then opening them with a puff of
breath.

Spirants narrow the lips, but allow air
to escape with a feeling of friction.

Voiced consonants are those where the
vocal cords continue to vibrate as they are
pronounced. (Put your fingers on your
throat and say first /s/, then /z/ to feel
the difference.) Many consonants have
both voiced and voiceless pronunciations.

The technical terms reading down the
left column show how the consonant is
produced by the vocal apparatus. Labials
are produced with the lips. The other
types are produced by contact between the
tongue and another part of the mouth:
dentals with the tongue touching the
teeth; labio-dentals with the tongue and
the lower lip; alveolars with the tongue
touching the gum above the upper teeth;
cacuminals with the tongue toward the
hard palate; palatals with the tongue
close to the hard palate; velars with the
tongue on the soft palate; and uvulars
with the tongue back in the throat. (Say
some English consonants, noting how
your tongue is positioned, to get a better
understanding of these terms.)

Taking the table further
To go beyond the table of consonants
given here, write out the English
alphabet and make notes of the variety of
phonemes each letter represents in actual
speech. If you know other languages,
think of how those languages would pronounce
the various phonemes. Pay attention
to any foreign languages spoken in
your community and try to distinguish
different phonemes. (If you're unfortunate
enough to live in an English-only
community, you can ask at the public
library for language-learning records.)
You may want to incorporate distinctive
foreign phonemes into your new language.
A little bit of thought will give
you a long list of possible phonemes ?
more than can be incorporated into a single
language. Remember, however, that
any unusual sounds must be easily
learned and easily spoken during the heat
of play.

To make your new language sound
properly exotic, it?s not even necessary to
have a large number of non-English
phonemes. Languages also take on character
by the way in which they combine
their phonemes and the frequency with
which they use certain combinations.
English, for example, readily uses consonants
in pairs or clusters, such as in the
words strong track star. Other languages,
such as the Polynesian group, rarely use
more than a single consonant per vowel,
and many syllables consist of a single
vowel, as in Hawai'i or Nu'kalofa. The
Welsh language strings together a variety
of diphthongs, as in haearn, while English
avoids such combinations.

What about frequency? Well, if you
look over this paragraph you will see
many uses of /t/, /r/, /e/, /a/, and /n/,
but hardly any appearances by /x/, /q/,
and /v/, to name three relatively rare letters
in English. In other languages, /x/
(for instance) might be a common consonant,
even at the beginning of words,
while /t/ may be exceptionally rare.
When you select phonemes for your new
language, give them a different frequency
rate than in English; that is, use some of
them more and some less than the corresponding
English phoneme. The choice
of a phoneme pattern is just as important
as the choice of the phonemes themselves.

Let?s look at an example drawn from
my own fantasy campaign, which has
two prominent languages: Kazrak and
Tribal. Kazrak predominantly selects the
consonants represented by /j/, /k/, /z/,
/w/, and /r/, with other phonemes added
for variety, of course. It also clusters its
consonants and isolates vowels from each
other with consonants. Tribal, on the
other hand, prefers smooth sounds such
as /l/, /m/, /d/, and /p/, and rarely
pairs, much less clusters, its consonants.
If we have two chararters, for instance,
named Jezro of Haz Strokej and Marador
of Rinbabadelan, it?s obvious that the
first is a Kazrak and the second a man of
the Tribes. Any place with a name like
Melimbalaban will be in Tribal lands,
while Dazjarko must be somewhere in
Kazrak territory. More importantly,
neither could be in California or Indiana.

Reading, writing, and morphemes
At this POINT, let's consider the question
of how to write down your new language.
While it?s tempting to make up an
exotic alphabet, remember that you have
to read these words out in the middle of a
game. Since learning how to read a new
alphabet takes a lot of time and practice,
it?s best to start by writing your new language
in the alphabet you already know.
For non-English phonemes, modify existing
letters by such devices as putting a
slash through or a dot over them. Make a
key, and stick to it, to avoid confusion.

If you assign one and only one phoneme
to each letter, spelling will be easy.
The horror of English spelling arises
from the fact that one letter can represent
several phonemes, and some phonemes
are represented by several letters. This
situation arose because of the ?linguistic
melting pot? characteristic of English
mentioned earlier -- a characteristic you
can avoid in your new language.

Before you begin making up word lists
for your language, you have to decide
some basic questions about its structure,
because the grammatical structure of a
language determines not only the length
of its words but the details of the words?
form. In spite of their amazing variety on
an individual basis, all known human
languages can be classified as one of two
broad types: isolating and inflectional.
(Modern European languages, including
English, are a mixture of the 2 types,
but most other languages are quite recognizably
one or the other.) In the primitive
and culturally pure worlds of fantasy
gaming, languages will also follow 1
or the other of these patterns. To define
these two language types, we need a new
term -- morpheme -- to replace the
common term, word.

Just as a sound can be made up of several
phonemes, what are commonly
called words can be made up of several
morphemes. Consider, for example, the
word unfortunate. It is made up of un,
fortun, and ate, each a set of letters that
contributes meaning to the total word: a
negation, then the root meaning, and
then a suffix showing that the word is an
adjective. Although none of these pieces
can stand alone as a word in a sentence,
each has a definite meaning and thus is a
morpheme -- the smallest unit of a language
that can carry meaning. Some
words are single morphemes: can, a, and
is, for instance, cannot be subdivided in
the manner that unfortunate can be.

Isolating-type languages
In an isolating language, each morpheme
is indivisible in the same way as
can or is. In the purest type of such a
tongue, one morpheme equals one word
equals one syllable, always remaining
distinct, never changing its form or
sound, and revealing its grammatical
function by its position the sentence
alone.

Chinese is a good example of an isolating
language. In a very rough transcription,
in Chinese jung means middle and
gwo means country; thus the word for
China (the Middle Country) is Junggwo.
The morpheme hwa means either
?speak? or ?speech?; there is absolutely
no difference in the form of the morpheme
to show whether it?s a noun or a
verb. The morpheme bu is used for negation.
Thus, the sentence Do you speak
Chinese? translates (very roughly) as
Junggwo hwa, hwa bu hwa? or, more
literally, China speak, you speak not
speak? The listener understands that this
sentence is a question from the pattern of
the morphemes; that is, the repetition in
hwa bu hwa is a vital part of the language
and carries the information that
the sentence is a question.
<I thought Cantonese and Mandarin were 2 different languages!>

If you choose an isolating type of structure
for your new language, its words will
be short ? ideally all monosyllables, but
even Vietnamese, the purest known isolating
language, does not attain that
ideal. Such a language will have to have
plenty of different phonemes in order to
avoid words which sound alike but mean
different things. Chinese neatly solves the
problem by adding tones to its phonemic
system; that is, a word like hwa means
one thing when pronounced in a high,
even tone of voice, but quite another
when pronounced emphatically with a
falling tone of voice. Unless you already
speak Chinese or another tonal language,
this system will be very confusing for
your game-world language. Since you?ll
only need a small number of words, you
can get by with simply including a lot of
phonemes in the language and paying
strict attention to make sure that you
don?t duplicate entire words.

Making up names in an isolating language
is a relatively simple matter. Personal
names will consist of two or three
words placed side by side, such as ?Ling
Mei? or ?Trong Nhu Tang,? to give one
Chinese and one Vietnamese example.
One of these words will be the person?s
actual name, the other the name of the
person?s family, or perhaps the village
where he or she was born or resides. An
attribute can also be added to a personal
name ? as in ?Thor Stormbringer,? to
give a common-sounding example with
the attribute plainly stated in English. It
would be much more interesting to have
the name be ?Tor Mek Al,? for instance,
and leave it up to the character bearing
the name to reveal (if he chooses) how he
earned the name Mek Al, or ?Bring
Storm.? Place names can be formed in a
similar way. ?Big Tree Place? or ?Orc
Death Rock,? suitably translated, could
be names of places in a country speaking
an isolating tongue.

Inflectional-type languages
Although the inflectional type of language
is more complex, you can invent
one with a minimum of effort once you
understand the basic principles. Basically,
an inflectional language changes the
sound or form of its words to show
changes in meaning. There are two ways
of making these changes: (1) altering the
sound, as in the English run and ran,
give and gave, and so on, or (2) by adding
morphemes, as in fortunate and unfortunate.
When morphemes are added, some
of them remain distinct; others have their
pronunciation ?blurred? and become
part of the word. (Always remember that
speech is the primary form and writing
the secondary form when thinking about
these matters.) In the purest type of an
inflectional language, every single word
in a sentence will change its form to show
its precise function and various shades of
meaning ? but even in Latin, a good
example of an inflectional language,
some words are invariable. Inflectional
languages are further subdivided into two
types: agglutinative and fusional. Since
the differences between these two types is
confusing at first, let us examine them in
more detail.

Latin is a good example of a fusional
language. Remember our example of
unfortunate, a Latin word taken over
almost whole into English. To form that
word, un and fortun and ate are ?fused?
into one longer word which has a meaning
that goes beyond any one of its parts.
In Latin itself, unfortunate undergoes
another change when it?s being used in a
sentence. Consider the examples Marcus
est infortunatus (?Mark is unfortunate?)
and Anna est infortunata (?Ann is unfortunate
?). The end of the word undergoes
a further sound-change because Ann is
female and Mark is male.

Suppose we want to say that Ann and
Mark are both unfortunate; this becomes
Anna et Marcus sunt infortunati. Notice
that the verb changes its form to the plural,
just as the end of infortunatus/a is
altered yet once again. Are these changes
at the end of infortunat- sound-changes,
or are they morphemes added to the root?
Scholars argue the point, because in a
fusional language it?s very hard to say.
Fortunately, the answer is irrelevant for
our purposes, except as it bears on the
distinction between a fusional and an
agglutinative tongue.

In agglutinative languages, there is no
question of sound changes. Each morpheme
has a distinct meaning and a distinct
character, no matter how many of
them are ?glued together,? or agglutinated.
In Turkish, for example, the morpheme
for house is ev. To form a plural,
one adds ler, for evler. This morpheme is
always a sign of the plural. In Latin, that
-i which pluralizes can also be added to
different kinds of words to fulfill other
functions: librum Marci does not mean a
book and several Marcuses, but a book
belonging to Marcus. In Turkish, such
confusion would never arise.

Agglutinative languages can string
together quite a number of morphemes.
In Turkish, the morpheme den indicates
movement away from the root it?s attached
to, so that evlerden means out of
the houses. In practice, most fusional
languages have some agglutinative features
and vice versa, but all you need to
worry about is the predominant character
of your new language. Since an agglutinative
language can pack a lot more morphemes
into a single word, names in this
language will be longer but at the same
time more distinctly pronounced.

Any inflectional language has a
number of different kinds of morphemes.
Some are what we think of as words, pure
and simple, referring to events, things,
qualities, and so on: horse, ride, fast,
under. All morphemes of this class are
complete, as it were, even in their most
stripped-down form. If a Latin speaker,
for instance, heard the incomplete word
caball-, he would think vaguely of a
horse, even though he would feel that
something was missing without another
morpheme on the end. Morphemes of this
first type can be called, simply, "complete" morphemes.

A second kind of morpheme can be said
to carry meaning by itself, but its meaning
is so abstract that it can hardly stand
alone. This second kind of morpheme is,
for instance, a -us for caball- to make the
word ?horse? in the nominative case, or

the -i which would make it caballi, the
plural. The Turkish morpheme ler is
similar, in that a Turkish speaker would
recognize it as meaning ?more than one,?
but would hardly consider it a word in
the way that ev is a word. Morphemes in
this second category are those that add
something to the meaning or qualify the
meaning of the root-morpheme to which
they are attached; therefore, we may call
them ?qualifying? morphemes.

A third class of morpheme, which I?ll
term ?relational? morphemes for our
purposes here, is exemplified by the
phrase a horse's back. The 's morpheme
shows the relationship of horse to back,
namely, that the horse possesses the back.
All inflectional languages either add
morphemes or use sound changes to show
certain basic relationships such as
possession.

Inflectional languages have an
immense variety of morphemes in both
the second and third categories for every
part of speech, but you will be pleased to
know that you need only a few morphemes
for a few kinds of qualifications
and relationships to make up names in a
created inflectional langauge. (Anyone
who?s obsessive enough to want to create
an entire inflectional language should
read Theoretical Linguistics by John
Lyons, Oxford University Press, to find
out about the months of work that lie
ahead.)

If you?re inventing an isolating language,
you?ll need none of these secondary
morphemes at all. Isolating languages
leave such questions as number,
gender, and time totally to the context of
the sentence. Thus, Two horses ran by
yesterday would become Two horse run
by yesterday if English were an isolating
language.

Gender and numbers
To make up Names in your new inflectional
language, you will need qualifying
morphemes or sound changes for gender
and number. Gender is important for personal
names for characters. It refers to
actual sex only when the noun refers to a
living being, but inflectional languages
assign genders to all nouns just for linguistic
consistency. Often, as in Latin, a
language will use three genders (masculine,
feminine, and neuter), but at times,
as in Welsh, there are only two (masculine
and feminine).

A game-world language might well
have an unusual way of designating
gender. An hermaphroditic race, for
instance, might use the two ?genders? of
living (sexed) and dead (non-sexed); or, a
precise language might split up the
neuter gender into categories such as
active, passive, and abstract. When it
comes to number, most languages distinguish
only between singular and plural,
but others include a dual number for a
pair of things or make distinctions
between ?one only,? ?a few,? and ?a
great many.?

Let?s look at some examples of number
and gender changes. In Latin, a common
class of personal names ended in -a for
the feminine gender and -us for the masculine.
Thus, Claudius and Claudia are
the same name, merely differentiated for a
man and a woman. English has some
names which follow a similar pattern, as
in Robert and Roberta. An agglutinative
language will have morphemes to show
gender added onto the core of the name.

It?s also possible to use internal sound
changes to mark for gender, as in John
and Jane. The plural of words will be
shown in similar ways. Arbor is one tree
in Latin; arbores means more than one
tree. In English, we have one man, several
men. For variety?s sake, your new language
can have several different morphemes
or sound changes that mark for
plural and gender. For example, you
might decide that men?s names always
end in -onno, -el, or -on, while women?s
names end in -alla, -or, or -ne. If you are
making up an agglutinative language,
remember to make the morphemes consistent
with the general sound of the
tongue; in a fusional language, the morphemes
should be short and colorless.

Possession and location
For place Names, you will also need
morphemes |or| sound changes to show
possession && location. The possessive
has an example in English: the ?s added
to nouns, as in the house's roof.
Although English can also say the roof of
the house, an inflectional language has
no equivalent to of. The possessing noun
will have to have a sound change or morpheme
added to it to show possession.
For example, in my Kazrak language, haz
means ?fort,? and stroko means ?sun.?
The name ?The Fort of the Sun? translates
as Haz Strokej, because -ej is the
fused morpheme of possession.

The locative, or located-ness, quality is
more foreign to English, which represents
that idea solely with prepositions and
makes no changes in the actual noun.
Although most inflectional languages
have prepositions, they also feel the need
to add a morpheme or change the sound
of a noun to show its subordinate status
to the sentence. In Latin, for example,
arbor means ?tree,? but ?under the tree?
is sub arbore. A word in this locative case
can also stand alone; domus is ?home? in
Latin, and domi means ?at home.?

Prefix, suffix, or infix
By now you may have noticed that
most of these examples so far have added
their morphemes at the end of the basic
word, but many languages make CHANGES
at the beginning and middle as well. A
morpheme added at the end of a word is a
suffix; at the beginning, a prefix; and in
the middle, an infix.

All three of these forms can be used in
the same language for a properly foreign
feeling. In your fantasy language, ?tree?
might be hendir, and ?trees? bahendir. In
agglutinative languages, infixes become
especially important. For example, in my
campaign?s Tribal language, the possessive
morpheme is bala, which comes
before the possessing noun and after the
object possessed to form names. Since rin
means ?mountain? and delan is ?moon,?
the name Rinbaladelan means ?Mountain
of the Moon.? Simple sound changes
can occur at the beginning or end of
words as well as in the middle. In Welsh,
for instance, ?home? is cartref, and ?at
home? is gartref ? a locative parallel to
the Latin domus/domi. You thus have
many ways of particularizing the different
languages in your campaign.

Now, for the Names
Now that you have determined the
basic structure of your new language,
made up a list of the phonemes for it, and
invented the basic grammatical morphemes
if it needs any, you are finally
ready to make up names and words. Personal
Names are the easiest, simply
because they don't have to mean any particular
thing. After all, do you know what
Susan or Robert actually means? Do you
care? All you need, then, are words that
are the proper length and consistent with
the sound of your new language, and a
way of marking them for gender. You can
prepare a list of such names and have it
on hand for both NPCs and new player
characters as the need arises. If a simple
one-word personal name is unsatisfactory
for some reason, you can add a place
name, put into the locative case, to show
the character?s origins, or make up an
attribute, such as ?Stormbringer? or
?Quicksword,? using the principles
detailed below for place names.

If you look at maps of various countries,
you?ll find that many place names
fall into one of a few broad groups. One
group is a description of the place, such
as Salt Lake City or Stratham, which
means ?the hamlet on the strata (Roman
road).? Another group incorporates the
name of a god or a saint, as in San Francisco
or Lyon, which once was called
Lugdenensis, ?the land of the god
Lugh.? Other places have been given the
names of secular heroes, like Washington.

Natural features sometimes take their
names either from their appearance, like
the Black Hills, or from legends about
them, like all the places named Arthur's
Chair, Arthur's Castle, Arthur's Seat, and
so on in Britain. <Lyonesse>

To make up names, you can use these
same groups, make up basic word lists,
and draw combinations from them. If
your new language is an isolating type,
all you have to do is decide whether
adjectives come before or after nouns,
then place the chosen words in a row in
the proper order. In an inflectional language,
you?ll have to relate the chosen
words with the possessive and locative
morphemes if necessary.

How many words is too many?
Doubtless you're wondering how many
words you'll need to develop meaningful
names. In actual practice, you'll find the
number to be surprisingly small; most
real-world languages use a relatively
small vocabulary for basic, everyday
communication -- and even fewer words
than that for naming.

A good many names can be built with
only 100 words of the right kinds.
One group ov words necessary for place
names are prepositions: on, by, on top of,
below, and so on. For personal names,
you'll need a morpheme for son of and
daughter of. Otherwise, most of the words
you need are nouns && adjectives suitable
for describing countryside. You can
also USE the names of the gods in your
campaign, and secular heroes if there are
any. In a science-fiction game, many
places will be named after the person who
first discovered or colonized them. In fantasy
worlds, the inhabitants are more
likely to give their gods credit for a deed
as stupendous as founding a town.

At the top of the next page are some
examples, to get you started, of words
with a high degree of name potential.

Natural features: hill, mountain, river,
forest, meadow, ford, peak, canyon, plain,
lake, desert.

Man-made features: town, city, village,
fort, palace, battleground, crossroads,
bridge.

Adjectives: big, great, small, high, low,
marshy, dry, color words, north, south,
east, west, dangerous, placid, famous,
holy, cursed.

You can also add some animals and the
names of certain trees: bear, horse, oak,
dragon, pine, and so forth.

From even this short list, you can generate
a tremendous number of names.
Just for starters: Black Bear Mountain,
Little Fort, Great Blue Mountain, Dragon
City, North Peak, High Fort, Holy River,
and so on.  Translated into your new language,
these names will sound not only
exotic, but consistent, as if they were
thought up by real brains and spoken by
real mouths, instead of having their
names, and the history those names
imply, come from an essentially random
choice.

Watch out for wyrd words
When you're making up vocabulary, be
careful to AVOID inventing words with
unwanted connotations, and stay away
from downright puns. Once you're
immersed in a brand-new language, it?s
easy to forget your English ?roots? and
produce some real howlers if you?re not
careful.  To USE one of the examples from
the beginning of this article: Oolala
might be a respectable name if pronounced
oo-LA-lah, but who's goint to
say anything other than oo-la-LAH?
Upchuk, of course, is reminiscent of
regurgitation no matter how you say it.
To be reasonably sure ov avoiding such
mistakes, say each of your invented words
and names aloud several times in several
different ways, until you're sure it can't
be twisted into something you didn't
mean to say.

Another trap to avoid is words that
sound like commercial products.  If you
watch TV, all that advertising has
soaked right into your subconscious
mind, and it will reappear at the wrong
moment.  Take a name like Kolak, for
instance, which sounds properly masculine
and exotic at 1st hearing.  But think
aboot it for a minute, and it also suggests
cola, Kodak, koalas, and t othe historically
minded, kulaks -- none ov those
being worded that have really suitable
connotations for a heroic figure.

Of course, it?s far from necessary to
invent a language for every area in your
campaign, particularly if the players are
going to pass through it quickly, but I
heartily urge every gamemaster to work
up the two or three primary languages in
his or her world. Such a process adds
more than atmosphere. If you refrain
from translating place names in foreign
countries, the rules about languages will
have some point in the ongoing adventure.
Players will have to get translations
from NPC?s to learn that a place called
Melimbalatanol, say, means ?River of the
Monster,? rather than getting an easy
clue the moment they enter an area.

As player characters gain added proficiency
in a language, you can offer more
translations more easily, thus giving
them the feeling that they are indeed
learning something new. The cleverest of
characters may even learn to pick apart
names and decipher them for themselves.
When faced with a string of border forts,
all called Haz something-or-other, even a
dolt can figure out what haz means.

The last ingredient: you
Following all of these rules && guidelines
need NOT restrict your creation of a
language in any way, because the one
element that distinguishes each language
from all others ? its individuality ? is
something that only you can provide.
The atmosphere and the conditions of
your game-world remain the overriding
considerations when inventing consistent
and workable names for that world.
When we consider what?s in a name, we
may conclude that a rose by any other
name would smell as sweet ? but if roses
were called plontzes, it?s unlikely that
they'd figure as prominently as they do in
poetry and song.

JULY 1983
 

OUT ON A LIMB

Language lapses

Dear Editor:
I was pleased to find the two articles on languages
in issue #75. When I began to read the
first one, however, my enthusiasm lagged. One
reason for this was the passage: ". . . It may be
no coincidence that ancient Rome, an aggressive,
expansionist society, spoke Latin by putting
the verb first. The position of the word
denoting and describing action shows clearly
the importance the Romans placed on action."


This is not only illogical, but also incorrect.
In Latin there is no standard word order. Poets
who wrote in Latin did so not by using rhyming
patterns, but often by devising new ways in
which to arrange the words in the sentence.
Furthermore, as a Latin scholar, I can say that
although there is no standard word order,
verbs often come at the end of sentences.

I find the notion that culture shapes language
to be absurd. ("Their harsh, savage
nature will further lead orcs to use mostly
harsh, guttural sounds.") I find that to be an
ill-drawn conclusion. Would a society of artistic,
peaceful people necessarily, then, use
words with pleasing sounds and soft consonants?
I think not.


Also, even though the author describes orcs
as slow-witted beasts (which they are, as far as
I have heard), their language would not necessarily
be as unimaginative as it is presented.
From what I can tell about Common Orcish,
there are no adjective clauses, imperatives, and
many ingredients of most languages.


Ben Grossblatt
Chevy Chase, Md.
(Dragon #76)