The Making of a Conlang

I thought I would take this week's blog entry to unravel some of the thought processes that went into the creation of Paiodd, or as much as I can remember, since I've been working on this language for at least 15 years. Still, I am certainly still aware of a lot of the influences and events that went into creating my own language. I'll start by sharing the original motivation, and some of my early exposures to linguistics and other factors that made me want to create my own language. Depending on how long this ends up being, I may break it up into parts. For now, on with the show!

The First Cause

In reality, it may be more complex than this, because many things were happening at the same time. Nonetheless, one of the primary motivating factors in my conlanging was my first exposure to C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia. We read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in fifth grade, and, not content with that, I went to the local library and checked out the other six, one-by-one, until I had read them all. Having always been an avid reader, and interested in writing as well, I decided I wanted to write my own fantasy series. It was then that The Chronicles of Virestia and Holas were born. Originally a simple revenge story, of a boy from a tribal, Native-American-like people of the mountains, that has morphed into just a small part of a much larger story, in a world with a fairly complete history and mythology all its own. The first version may still survive in a notebook somewhere, written in faded pencil, and all of 20-something pages long.

After completing the Narnia series, my mom suggested I read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. I did so, and LOTR quickly became my favorite story of all time, as it is to this day. Of course, learning that J. R. R. Tolkien had invented his own language for his stories, I felt it was only right that I do the same for Virestia.

The Space Between Letters

Another important influence on my conlanging results from growing up in a christian family. Around the same time, or shortly thereafter, I was visiting my grandparents. They had a small wooden plaque which simply had the name of Jesus printed on it. However, the letters were printed in such a way that there were many interesting shapes between them, which seemed to compose the name. I thought it would be interesting to make an entire script based on the space between letters formed by combining them. This actually resulted in one of my first conscripts, which still survives, and I should probably post it here at some point. It's hard to say whether this was the first inkling of creating my own language, or if it was my desire to write a fantasy novel, or that first exposure to Latin.

Word Order is not the Only Way

Another milestone event happening somewhere around this time to influence my conlanging was my first exposure to Latin. It happened on another family visit, to a great aunt, the sister of the grandmother who had the Jesus plaque. Aunt Jeanette's house had a living room with a fairly large bookcase built into the wall, filled with all of these wonderful old books! Drawn to this bookcase, I pulled out Harkness's Easy Latin Method, and began to read the first several Lessons. I was absolutely enthralled to realize that Latin did with suffixes what English does with word order, particularly denoting subjects and direct objects. I began to wonder what other ways there might be to express these relationships and others.

It was when I got home from that visit that I first remember making genuine attempts to create my own languages. Fascinated by the idea of case, and potential other ways to express it, I came up with three different languages that had as many cases for as many functions as I could think of. Naturally enough, I also began reading up on case systems, and realizing how widespread it actually is, even in modern languages like German and Russian, I decided case wasn't exotic enough for me. I wanted something more, a way to express the relationships between words that was not case, exactly, but would be able to cover the important uses of case.

The first thing I tried was to have an article that inflected for case, rather than endings on the nouns themselves, but that wasn't satisfactory, either. I needed something still more exotic. Eventually, this resulted in the idea of the dual-inflection system that Paiodd has today, where nouns inflect to show whether they are related to verbs or to other nouns, with invariable suffixes to indicate more precisely how they are related. The actual form of this inflection, as well as that of verbs, is a result of the next influence I will discuss.

Making the Irregular, Regular

I had always been mystified and fascinated by the weird way irregular verbs like run had past tenses with internal vowel changes, eg. ran. So it was only natural that I would think to make these irregular forms the regular way to inflect verbs for different tenses. With this kind of vowel-alternation in place for the verbs, it seemed natural enough to extend it to nouns as well, and thus the vowel-change to indicate verbal or nominal inflection was born.

Just Add 'H'

Of course, there is another aspect of the verbal and nominal inflection in nouns besides the vowel-change in the stem. Final consonants change as well. I don't remember exactly the order of events in this case, but I had some awareness already that /b/, /p/, /v/, and /f/ were related, as were the alveolar stops and fricatives, and the velars (though I didn't know those terms at all; that wouldn't come until graduate school). And of course, English had the orthographic 'th', 'sh', 'ch', and more rarely 'ph'. In the original conscript that I intended for use with Paiodd - which didn't have a name for a long time, until I decided to name it for my middle name, calling it Kirkian - there were only independent letters for the voiceless stops. I decided the plural morpheme would be the letter for 'h' and the resulting sound would be what I later learned were called fricatives.

Double the Fun!

Similarly, the double consonants at the end of most nouns were originally because writing a consonant doubled turned voiceless consonants into voiced ones. This terminology I did know at the time, somehow, because the logic for double consonants being voiced was that, to my linguistically ignorant mind, 'voiced' meant that voicing had been added to the sound, therefore the voiced sounds were stronger. Of course I now know that, linguistically speaking, it is actually the opposite, and voiceless sounds are considered 'strong' because they impede the flow of air much more strongly than voiced sounds!

Adjectives? Adverbs? Who Needs 'Em!

Once I had established the verbal nominal inflection system, it soon became clear that an unintended consequence of this was the utter lack of need for separate word classes of adjectives and adverbs. After all, why do you need a separate part of speech for a word meaning 'big' when you can simply take the word for 'size' in nominal inflection (showing that it is related to a noun, not a verb) and add the suffix meaning 'with', or 'of', or even '-y', giving a word meaning '(a noun) with size' or 'of size' or 'size-y'. Perhaps a better way to think of it is 'sizeable', such that just like in English, saying 'a sizeable income' means a big one, a lot. habb 'size' becomes hapía 'with size, of size, sizeable, big'

Likewise, if there is a noun meaning 'quiet', if we put it in the verbal inflection and add the same suffix meaning 'with' or 'of', we would get '(an action) with quiet' or 'of quiet', or in other words, 'quietly'. Thus, Paiodd adjectives and adverbs are really just nouns in nominal or verbal inflection, respectively. The same process results in a natural form of compounding words. If we want a noun, for example, we can take the main noun (the 'head') and attach to it a nominally-inflected noun. If we want a verb, we can take the verb and attach a noun in verbal inflection. The word for 'to sleep', among many others, is formed this way, literally meaning 'to take sleep', with the verbal-inflection form of the noun 'sleep' followed by the verb 'to take'. ashedd 'sleep' attached to mré 'to take' becomes ashidmré 'to sleep'.

Word Order

One final interesting aspect of Paiodd is the word order. It is most usually OSV (that is, the direct object comes first, the subject next, and the verb next), another result of some linguistic ignorance on my part. To 15-year-old me, the relationship between subject and verb seemed extremely important, much more so than the relationship between the verb and objects that may or may not even be there. Thus, I decided that the subject would always be directly adjacent to its verb in Paiodd. Now, of course, I understand the concept of a predicate much better, and if I were creating Paiodd for the first time today, I probably would not make it OSV. Unless, of course, I liked it because of its exotic quality, which would be more likely. I now know, fifteen years and an MA later, that OSV languages do exist, although they are rare - which is why Yoda-speak sounds so alien to us, even though we can usually figure out what it means. 'Long have I watched this one.'

That's All, Folks!

I hope you've enjoyed this peak into the mind of a conlanger, albeit a rather immature, ignorant one when I started the process fifteen years ago or more. A huge motivation in my continued work with this conlang, and others is the desire to find more exotic or even completely innovative ways of expressing the relationships between words. A more recent idea, for instance, has been to have some sort of particle, either at the beginning or end of a sentence, that tells you what word is what, subject, object, verb, or other. I've tried to work this into the language of the Native-American-like people among whom my fantasy-novel's hero, Holas, was raised, and I've also considered using it in a language I've started in honor of my wife. These may never be as fully developed as Paiodd, but just experimenting with ideas like this one is its own reward, and most exciting of all to me is when a language I've created begins to take on a life of its own, such as doing away completely with adjectives and adverbs, something I never intended, but was a natural consequence of the structure of the language in other areas.