Steve Posted March 11, 2011 Report Share Posted March 11, 2011 I am wondering how to make an alien language that sounds realistic. One way I was considering was to take an existing language (like Japanese or Korean) and swapping out consonants for different consonant sounds, like turning all "k" sounds into a more liquid "l" sounds. Does anyone know a better way to put together a language without requiring a degree in linguistics? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Osye3 Posted March 11, 2011 Report Share Posted March 11, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? I have found this website to be useful in working on languages for games: http://www.zompist.com/kit.html Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobGreenwade Posted March 11, 2011 Report Share Posted March 11, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? There are many, many resources online for this kind of thing. Just do a Google search under the phrase "constructed languages" (or the word "conlang") and you should find a lot. At another location I have a binder of things I printed out a few years ago, having found them on the Web. If nobody posts a bunch of links before I can retrieve it, I'll do so (retrieve plus post, that is). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dmjalund Posted March 11, 2011 Report Share Posted March 11, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? It also depends on how alien, the aliens are. (Just saw your near human genetics thread, so - never mind) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Posted March 12, 2011 Author Report Share Posted March 12, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? I'm planning on the aliens being near-human, close enough to be considered an alternate branch of the hominoid family. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The Main Man Posted March 12, 2011 Report Share Posted March 12, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? There are many, many resources online for this kind of thing. Just do a Google search under the phrase "constructed languages" (or the word "conlang") and you should find a lot. At another location I have a binder of things I printed out a few years ago, having found them on the Web. If nobody posts a bunch of links before I can retrieve it, I'll do so (retrieve plus post, that is). Yes, please. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadowcat1313 Posted March 13, 2011 Report Share Posted March 13, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? I always thought you by combining Welsh and Hawaiian you could enough letters to make a proper language Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daeglan Posted March 13, 2011 Report Share Posted March 13, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? Research what Ben Burt did for Star Wars. Look into what Star Trek did for Klingon. JRR Tolkien is another good source as he was a huge fan of creating languages. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
shadowcat1313 Posted March 13, 2011 Report Share Posted March 13, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? Klingon was based at least partially on Swahili IIRC, some of Tolkiens languages were at least partially based on Finnish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
L. Marcus Posted March 13, 2011 Report Share Posted March 13, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? Quenya Finnish, Sindarin Welsh. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kraven Kor Posted March 14, 2011 Report Share Posted March 14, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? Another thing to think of is the biology of the alien in question - you said human like, but there are still some questions that can help. Look at how we make sound; air is pushed over our vocal chords, creating tone, then specific sounds are shaped by how we manipulate our tongue, lips, and teeth. A species without flat incisors, for instance, might have trouble making 'th' sounds. One with thinner lips might have fewer 'p' sounds in their vocabulary. One with a split tongue might be capable of sounds we are not. Etc. etc. etc. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlHazred Posted March 15, 2011 Report Share Posted March 15, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? I'm considering using Simlish snippets as background conversational noises when my Traveller Hero game starts up again. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian Mackinder Posted March 15, 2011 Report Share Posted March 15, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? Plus stance, gestures, tone and expressions may be of more or less significance. English might be less expressive than some other languages in this respect, but think of all the subtext one can provide in a normal conversation with certain gestures - to indicate things like sarcasm, "Help me, this dude is nuts", etc.. The old, politically incorrect joke - "How do you get [insert ethnic groupmember here] to shut up? Break both his arms." Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Manic Typist Posted March 15, 2011 Report Share Posted March 15, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? Plus stance' date=' gestures, tone and expressions may be of more or less significance. English might be less expressive than some other languages in this respect....[/quote'] Actually, English is MUCH more expressive in this regard than most languages in this regard. That's part of why it can be difficult for nonnatives to learn, since we can say the WRONG thing but with the RIGHT tone and our message is clearly conveyed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ian Mackinder Posted March 15, 2011 Report Share Posted March 15, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? I disagree, since I think certain languages may leave English for dead in this particular respect. But the main point stands. There could be an awful lot of "stuff" involved in a language that cannot be adequately expressed via a dictionary or thesaurus. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Manic Typist Posted March 16, 2011 Report Share Posted March 16, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? I make no arguments regarding stance or body expressions, but I'd be interested to hear of some examples of language that use tone (I'd like to note I'm referring to it in the laymen sense, not as in whether it is a tonal language) more expressively than English. Edit: I believe I am talking about inflection. English, apparently, is "simpler" in that we use fewer words to have more meanings. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Daeglan Posted March 16, 2011 Report Share Posted March 16, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? They are refering to Japanese and Chinese. For example Sake=an alcoholic beverage. Sake=salmon Same word 2 different meanings and it is the context and tone that differentiates them. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Escafarc Posted March 16, 2011 Report Share Posted March 16, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? I have a russian friend who said that thoughest thing about English for her was the number of words that mean the same thing(i.e. like the number of words for the color blue). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Manic Typist Posted March 17, 2011 Report Share Posted March 17, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? I have a russian friend who said that thoughest thing about English for her was the number of words that mean the same thing(i.e. like the number of words for the color blue). I find this a very ironic example, since apparently the Russian language has many more words for blue than English, and it is theorized that as a consequence Russians tend to much more sensitive to variations in blue because of it. Your point stands regardless, though. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Steve Posted March 17, 2011 Author Report Share Posted March 17, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? Following the notion of many words to express variations on a single thing, a warrior race could have many words to express different sorts of battle. One word could express a tactical game played out between two opponents, another word could express a friendly sparring match, and another word could be the equivalent of "blood-spilling frenzy that will only end when one's foe has had their heart ripped out." I heard somewhere that the eskimos have a dozen words for snow. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kraven Kor Posted March 17, 2011 Report Share Posted March 17, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? They are refering to Japanese and Chinese. For example Sake=an alcoholic beverage. Sake=salmon Same word 2 different meanings and it is the context and tone that differentiates them. Japanese and Chinese both have a lot more "honorifics" and contextual adjectives or whatnot; for instance, those two words, spelled the same in english, are pronounced slightly differently, not so much tone as inflection or which syllable is stressed. Japanese also has a rich amount of tonal differences for sarcasm or whatnot, not so sure about Chinese. English has probably the highest incidence (that I am aware) of two words pronounced and/or spelled the same that mean different things. I think tone is likely used in most all human language to alter the meaning of words, which may not be the case for a non-human language. Gestures are very universal for humans as well, and facial expressions - most everyone smiles and frowns the same way. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigbywolfe Posted March 19, 2011 Report Share Posted March 19, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? They are refering to Japanese and Chinese. For example Sake=an alcoholic beverage. Sake=salmon Same word 2 different meanings and it is the context and tone that differentiates them. Japanese and Chinese both have a lot more "honorifics" and contextual adjectives or whatnot; for instance' date=' those two words, spelled the same in english, are [i']pronounced[/i] slightly differently, not so much tone as inflection or which syllable is stressed. Japanese also has a rich amount of tonal differences for sarcasm or whatnot, not so sure about Chinese. English has probably the highest incidence (that I am aware) of two words pronounced and/or spelled the same that mean different things. I think tone is likely used in most all human language to alter the meaning of words, which may not be the case for a non-human language. Gestures are very universal for humans as well, and facial expressions - most everyone smiles and frowns the same way. While most human languages use tone to convey meaning, some do so much more than others. It should be noted that Japanese is not a "tonal language" in the linguistic sense. In other words tone does not change the meaning of a word (at least anymore than it does in English with sarcasm, questioning tones, et cetera). It might be more accurate to refer to "tone" in that case as "intonation" and realize that the tone/intonation used often applies to the entire sentence/utterance. Chinese on the other hand is linguistically a tonal language. Cantonese and Mandarin have a different number of tones, but both have words that would sound exactly the same to a speaker from a non-tonal language that can mean completely different and unrelated words depending on the tone. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AlHazred Posted March 20, 2011 Report Share Posted March 20, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? It occurs to me, rereading this for the first time, that I was unnecessarily cryptic and uninformative with my seemingly unrelated post. I find many homebrew "alien languages" don't really work that well. I've started to use sound effects more in my games. I was thinking, when I restart Traveller Hero, I will take snippets of Simlish conversation (Simlish is the "language" spoken by the Sims in The Sims game franchise). Simlish is designed to sound like an actual language, while actually containing many gibberish words. This allows the player to think at a meta level without being distracted by a conversation taking place in the game; it also allows the computer to simulate actual conversation without sounding as weird and stilted as most conversation-simulating programs usually do. Because it has the right cadence and structure for language, I think it will make an excellent "background blabber" for starport scenes, planetary locations, and so forth. Plus, it should be easy to extract conversational snippets from Sims videos people have posted online, or generate my own with a (cheaply-purchased) older copy of one of the Sims games. Added bonus: EA games has paid many recording artists to rerecord their tunes with Simlish lyrics instead of English (or whatever the original language was). Since they pick a few popular tunes and many more that are less well-known, I should be able to find some Simlish songs to lend added verisimilitude to the background chatter. There are also attempts to construct a Simlish dictionary in various places online. Since the game's authors make an attempt to keep some gibberish consistent, this actually works fairly well without allowing huge (game-dragging) levels of detail. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SSgt Baloo Posted March 20, 2011 Report Share Posted March 20, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? I am wondering how to make an alien language that sounds realistic. One way I was considering was to take an existing language (like Japanese or Korean) and swapping out consonants for different consonant sounds' date=' like turning all "k" sounds into a more liquid "l" sounds. Does anyone know a better way to put together a language without requiring a degree in linguistics?[/quote'] For a Star Trek (FASA) RPG I ran, I came up with a language for the Keltanii, short (4' 8", a bit less than 1.4m tall) humanoid canines from a high-gravity, thin-atmosphere planet. Basically, I'd write the phrase I wanted to say in English, reverse the words, and replace the vowels AEIOU with IOUAE respectively. "Look out! He has a gun!" becomes "Neg i sih oh! Tea kaal!"* For a first-contact scenario I recorded some subspace radio traffic for the communications officer to intercept and translate. I recorded several short speeches in Keltanii, and used a rather involved process of recording into a hand-held phase-shifting microcassette recorder, and dubbing the result back and forth between the hand-held and a cassette recorder at different speeds until I had the voice at the pitch I wanted at a cadence slow enough to not give away the fact that the playback speed had been tampered with. It was a very successful campaign. * ETA: Correction. The actual phrases are reversedm and should have been "Tea kaal! Neg i sih oh!". Uospaa! Gnussurubmo wah! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BobGreenwade Posted March 22, 2011 Report Share Posted March 22, 2011 Re: How to create alien language? I finally got around to finding these: Language Construction Kit Grammar Sketch Outline (PDF) How to Create a Language Those should be enough to get you started. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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