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Hellcat
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 Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 2:24 am Post subject: Languages |
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This isn't about the Knowledge skill. I'm curious to know if folks are willing to develop a working laguage for new alien species they create. And if so how do you do it.
In the PbP I've been running I've included a species I'd originally created for a different purpose. Originally I'd had a direction as to what their culture was like but since using them I've greatly expanded on their culture and their history. Among the most interesting things for me has been the development of two working languages, one being the modern version of the species language and the other being the ancient version. Which seems to have surprised at least some of the folks in the game as I'm sure it looked like I was just putting up any combination of letters I felt like until I said that I'd made a mistake in what I'd posted as I'd forgotten about using a past tense prefix to turn the word in the ancient language which means leave into left. Got a bit of a surprise that it actually was a real language and asked about how I was doing it.
As I explained:
| Hellcat wrote: | Off the dictionary. I'm no linguist, I use the dictionaries I've got which give word origins. Yegoglaran itself uses words from Old English, Sanskrit, Middle English, Greek, Middle High German Old Greek, etc. The Yegoglaran word werreier means warrior but it actually means to make war in Old North French. The ONF word werreieur (warrior) comes from werreier. I just look at the word origins and pick what I like best. At least a couple of the words, however, are just the pronunciation of the actual word. Then so I can use the same words later I ascribe them to a list. Pain in the ************** sometimes to do a lot of Yegoglaran dialouge as I'm running through the list and selecting the right word.
Then there's Ancient Yegoglarian. I've got a chart for converting the Modern Yegoglaran word into Ancient Yegoglarian. Some Ancient Yegoglarian words end up being shorter then their Modern Yegoglar counterparts. That's my choice when I convert the words. |
Right now the list is eleven pages in length, and it get's longer as I need new words in either the modern or th ancient language (the list for the latter is shorter). With it being used for a PbP I'm currently less worried about pronounciation than I am about having the words I can turn to and post. And as the language I'm most comfortable with is English, the structure of the language is based on English.
One of the things I find more interesting is when the words in the made up language are longer or shorter than the actual word in English is. So a sentence like "There is more to come" becomes "Thoet est mara zuo kum" in the modern version of the language.
What about you folks? Do you create your own languages for species you create?
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Fallon Kell
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| Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 3:19 am Post subject: Re: Languages |
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| Hellcat wrote: | This isn't about the Knowledge skill. I'm curious to know if folks are willing to develop a working laguage for new alien species they create. And if so how do you do it.
In the PbP I've been running I've included a species I'd originally created for a different purpose. Originally I'd had a direction as to what their culture was like but since using them I've greatly expanded on their culture and their history. Among the most interesting things for me has been the development of two working languages, one being the modern version of the species language and the other being the ancient version. Which seems to have surprised at least some of the folks in the game as I'm sure it looked like I was just putting up any combination of letters I felt like until I said that I'd made a mistake in what I'd posted as I'd forgotten about using a past tense prefix to turn the word in the ancient language which means leave into left. Got a bit of a surprise that it actually was a real language and asked about how I was doing it.
As I explained:
| Hellcat wrote: | Off the dictionary. I'm no linguist, I use the dictionaries I've got which give word origins. Yegoglaran itself uses words from Old English, Sanskrit, Middle English, Greek, Middle High German Old Greek, etc. The Yegoglaran word werreier means warrior but it actually means to make war in Old North French. The ONF word werreieur (warrior) comes from werreier. I just look at the word origins and pick what I like best. At least a couple of the words, however, are just the pronunciation of the actual word. Then so I can use the same words later I ascribe them to a list. Pain in the ************** sometimes to do a lot of Yegoglaran dialouge as I'm running through the list and selecting the right word.
Then there's Ancient Yegoglarian. I've got a chart for converting the Modern Yegoglaran word into Ancient Yegoglarian. Some Ancient Yegoglarian words end up being shorter then their Modern Yegoglar counterparts. That's my choice when I convert the words. |
Right now the list is eleven pages in length, and it get's longer as I need new words in either the modern or th ancient language (the list for the latter is shorter). With it being used for a PbP I'm currently less worried about pronounciation than I am about having the words I can turn to and post. And as the language I'm most comfortable with is English, the structure of the language is based on English.
One of the things I find more interesting is when the words in the made up language are longer or shorter than the actual word in English is. So a sentence like "There is more to come" becomes "Thoet est mara zuo kum" in the modern version of the language.
What about you folks? Do you create your own languages for species you create? |
My brother and I created an alien race, culture, and two partial languages for one of his PCs. The Kran were very tall winged humanoids with a semi tribal culture. They were almost all bilingual, using the masculine Northern Kran and the feminine Southern Kran. Northern Kran was low and deep and guttural and had an almost brutal feel to it. Southern Kran was high and crisp and airy. Somewhat patterned after Tolkien's Sindarin elvish. Kran had two sets of vocal cords at different registers, and the lower register was used to speak Northern, while the higher was used for Southern.
As a starting point, we basically just made up words that sounded like they had some relation to the ideas we wanted to convey and wrote them down. I can try and dig up some quotes for examples tomorrow...
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Bren
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| Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 10:18 am Post subject: |
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That's an interesting approach Hellcat. "Thoet est mara zuo kum." Has has some clear English/German origins. I understood about half of the meaning without a translation. I guess the fact that one may understand part of what is being said without actually specifically knowing the Yegoglarian language sort of simulates the D6 Languages skill's base abilty in the RAW to understand all languages.
I've never created a language - being monolinqual that seems quite challenging to me, however I created a glossary for Coynite based on the words provided in the original description in the Planets Collection as well as a number of the Adventure Journal articles that featured a Coynite character. I don't actually have a defined grammar or clear syntax, just a word list, so it is a bit difficult to string together very many sentences, but it serves to handle greetings and to add a few words and phrases to what is basically a conversation in English/Basic. |
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Hellcat
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| Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 7:03 pm Post subject: |
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Thoet is from Old English, est is from Latain, mara is from Old English, zuo is from Old High German, and kum is from a pronounciation of come. You're right that if you understand a little of what's being said you may get a gist for the modern language.
But the same isn't going to be true for the ancient language as I first "translate" the English word into the Modern Yegoglaran language then I consult a chart I created and translate Yegoglaran into Ancient Yegoglarian. And depending on how the conversion goes I may leave certain letters our shortening the Yegoglaran word in it's Yegoglarian form.
Like you Bren, creating a language would be a challenge to me if I were doing it all from scratch. That's why I cheat and use a couple of dictionaries that give me word origins. I look up the word I want to use and then select the word origin I like the best. The origin itself could mean something different, but as it was given for the word when I look up the word I may still choose to use it. Or if there's no origin or none of the origin words look right to me I may go with the pronounciation instead.
Fallon, if you can find the quotes I wouldn't mind seeing them. After all this was about sharing what folks do language wise.
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Fallon Kell
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| Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 8:04 pm Post subject: |
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| Hellcat wrote: | Thoet is from Old English, est is from Latain, mara is from Old English, zuo is from Old High German, and kum is from a pronounciation of come. You're right that if you understand a little of what's being said you may get a gist for the modern language.
But the same isn't going to be true for the ancient language as I first "translate" the English word into the Modern Yegoglaran language then I consult a chart I created and translate Yegoglaran into Ancient Yegoglarian. And depending on how the conversion goes I may leave certain letters our shortening the Yegoglaran word in it's Yegoglarian form.
Like you Bren, creating a language would be a challenge to me if I were doing it all from scratch. That's why I cheat and use a couple of dictionaries that give me word origins. I look up the word I want to use and then select the word origin I like the best. The origin itself could mean something different, but as it was given for the word when I look up the word I may still choose to use it. Or if there's no origin or none of the origin words look right to me I may go with the pronounciation instead.
Fallon, if you can find the quotes I wouldn't mind seeing them. After all this was about sharing what folks do language wise. |
Heck, creating languages from scratch is a challenge to anyone, even philologists like Tolkien and Lewis.
I remember some Northern Kran off the top of my head. "Churaka" (Chew-ROCK-uh) meant attack, and "crott hra'chock melicrotar" was "A cold wind over your grave" but I don't remember the spelling or even where one word ends or the other begins towards the end of the sentence.
The moon of the Kran homeworld was Sulva (Southern Kran, and blatantly borrowed after I read C.S. Lewis's space trilogy.)
My brother has most of the phrases and words stashed away somewhere. I'll get them if I can.
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Hellcat
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| Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2011 10:36 pm Post subject: |
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But it's gotta help when you have a background in languages to fall back on.
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Fallon Kell
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| Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2011 4:22 am Post subject: |
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| Hellcat wrote: | | But it's gotta help when you have a background in languages to fall back on. |
Oh, yeah! Certainly.
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Hellcat
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| Posted: Tue Aug 09, 2011 10:44 pm Post subject: |
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| Fallon Kell wrote: |
My brother has most of the phrases and words stashed away somewhere. |
The scariest words in RPGing in my opinion. Stashed away somewhere. I recently came across stats for NPCs, speices, and such I'd created in the mid '90s and completely forgot all about because I stashed them away. Hopefully it'll be another fifteen years or so before I see some of them again.
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Whill
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| Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2011 7:35 pm Post subject: |
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I'm an armchair linguist and I would never try to create a language. Real languages are formed by entire cultures, and it would be a incredibly massive undertaking to make a completely functional alien language. I don't have the time or energy for that. I have created words for alien languages but those are mostly limited to proper names and other nouns that only have a few optional concerns such as plurality and gender. That adds enough flavor for me, and I don't have to worry about verb conjugation, etc.
When appropriate I do also make use of the wonderful book by Ben Burtt (Star Wars Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide) for some basics on Bocce, Huttese, Ewok, Shyriiwook, Droidspeak, Jawaese, Tuskan, Neimodian, Sullustan and the Gunganese dialect.
I think it would be a lot more reasonable to create a functioning dialect of Galactic Basic Standard or maybe even a derivative language, but I still haven't made more than basic nouns and adjectives for those and doubt I would ever go to the trouble of getting more in-depth than that.
In my game, when a character is speaking with another character that is not fluent in the same languages, I allow for ad-libbed gibberish to be spoken in play (and roll Languages to interpret). I like it to at least sound like it might possibly be that language if there is any frame of reference available. At least a few times a new word has been created for an alien language out of the more memorable (usually humorous) ad-libs.
Multilingualism is quite common in the Star Wars. This is evident in the many examples of characters speaking different languages to each other but still being mutually understood. I have a rule that all PCs are automatically fluent in Galactic Standard, plus PCs may start out fluent in a number of additional languages equal to the die value of the PC's starting Languages skill (i.e. A PC that starts out with 3D+2 Languages starts out with 3 additional language fluencies). NPCs have as few or many language fluencies as I determine. If two characters are fluent in the same alien language and speaking in that language (or both speaking in a language understood by the other), the players speak in English but we imagine that they are speaking in the language and there are subtitles beneath them. So if a character is not speaking Galactic Standard then the player must designate which language they are speaking in when they say something. (In my game characters gain new fluencies according to two methods in RAW.)
Since PCs in my game are fluent in multiple languages, that really decreases the occurances of alien languages actually being spoken or ad-libbed during play. Characters being so multilingual in my game adds a flavor I enjoy, although it is admittedly a flavor that mostly depends on the imagination of the players.
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Ankhanu
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| Posted: Thu Aug 11, 2011 9:34 pm Post subject: Re: Languages |
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| Hellcat wrote: | | What about you folks? Do you create your own languages for species you create? |
It depends.
Table top, I don't maintain structure, but I do work with basic phonetics. I've done some improv theatre, which can involve use of convincing sounding gibberish, and use those skills when applying languages. I try to decide the feel of the language, i.e. the romantic languages are somewhat flowing with certain vowel and consonant combinations being prevalent, whereas Germanic languages are far more clipped and staccato. I apply these sorts of rules to how I portray languages. I don't tend to actually create a proper syntax or lexicon, however, just a sound.
Play by post, on the other hand, gives a lot more freedom, as you have time to build ideas and the ability to create easy reference material with which to build a language over time. I tend to create lexicon files, or borrow bits from other languages (real and made up) with which to build a dictionary. I decide on the syntax and off I can go. With the time to reference the language files, I can create some linguistic consistency... not that players/GMs necessarily notice 
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Hellcat
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| Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2011 2:22 am Post subject: |
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| Whill wrote: | | Real languages are formed by entire cultures, |
I think that's part of my deal with this dictionary, lexicon, or whatever you want to call it. I've got a lot more to the Yegoglar than just stats, I've been working on other elements of who they are and who they were. Having a working language just seems to fit better than saying they say something in their own language. I'm not against doing that, but when I've been investing a lot of time into this particular species I just feel I need to devote some time to their language as well.
Yeah, I'm not very original with it. But then again you did mention Ben Burtt's book. And doesn't he discuss how certain languages he created for the movies were based on real world languages. Like Sullustan comes from Hyah, the native tounge of then exchange student from Kenya Kipsang Rotich. Or how Huttese is based off of Quechua (not exactly Quechua but based off it). And Jawaese is based off the Zulu language and how he heard it.
| Ankhanu wrote: | | Play by post, on the other hand, gives a lot more freedom, as you have time to build ideas and the ability to create easy reference material with which to build a language over time. |
And you don't have to worry about pronounciation  As long as you have the lexicon and dictionary/lexicon handy you can type the same word the same each time. The thing I have to worry about is tenses. I screwed up in game as I'd created a past tense prefix that is supposed to obviously be added for certain words when they are in the past tense instead of the present or future tense. Then I went to say left as in past tense of leave and completely forgot the past tense prefix. So I created a word for left and then remembered the prefix existed so I had to go back and edit in the prefix and the word for leave.
What I've got to do, and have been telling myself I need to do for some time, is set up a seperate listing of the prefixes and suffixes so I don't have to scroll through the list to find them when their needed.
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