The Campaign Builder's Guild

Since we got kicked out of the tavern for talking about linguistics and conlanging, here's a fun place to discuss it!

My initial task here will be to come up with a naming language for th locale I'm focusing on first.  I figure it's at least the third generation of a mother tongue for the region.  After a bit of thought and much cringing at the prospect of actually inventing three different languages, I'm going to start with the local language and as the need arises, reverse morph it into its parent language and branch off from there.

So I'll start with Y and later morph it into X and use that as the mutal parent language for Y and Z, for example.  I really want to do it this way because it'll give a lot of flavor if as the PCs leave their home town, the climate changes, the people change, and even the names of things change.  I think it's one of those little details that'll play on the subconcious.

Another thing I'll do is transliterate foreign or really old names into the modern, local tongue.  That'll give them the feel of being different and adopted, I think.  An example of this would be spelling "Happy Chinese New Year" as "Hapi Chainis Niu Yir" for a Spanish speaker.  Engrish forms another (and probably better) example of this.

Anyone have any thoughts or comments on the best way to tackle this sort of thing?  Or evne just how ya'll do it?  Or if you think I'm nuts for even attemptig it?

It's a cool idea, I like it when people put this kind of linguistic effort into a setting as it can make for some wicked names and stuff - I'm very into having cool names. I can't really give any advice though, as I don't do it myself, I just choose cool names and try and make them sound like they're backed up by a concrete system - often by just using archaic/obscure/foreign names from the real world.

Thanks.  It's also a time-consuming idea, unfortunately.  I hope it pays off.  Heck, I hope someone will play a game in this setting when it's "finished."

I think I'm going to start by making a list of types of places in the locale I'm detailing first.  I know there are fjords, caves, forests, mountains, hills, etc.  I figure I'll translate that mess first, try to pull some root morphemes from that and expand them into other words.  Frex, [River] may contain a such a root, and [Stream], [Brook], and [Delta] might be based on it, but [Rill] might be a foreign word from a previous migration (where that damnable mother tongue comes in).  I'll start with a real simple naming vocabulary until I work out some other languages.

Truth be told, you're probably better off devising the parent language first, and then evolving the daughter languages. Doing it the other way around requires you to essentially reconstruct the parent language using the comparative method, which is...problematic, if the history of Proto-Indo-European scholarship is any indication.

An easy way I've found to construct a (family of) naming language(s) is to settle on the phonology (set of available sounds) and phonotactics (patterns by which sounds are assembled to form words) of the parent language, then generate a set of roots. A compact list of roots can be extracted from Sona's table of radicals. Once you've compiled a set of roots in the parent language, you can derive new words and then mutate them according to various "sound laws" to produce cognates in the daughter languages.

I didn't say I intended to develop the various languages independantly and then use the comparative method across them all.  I'm looking at making the one local language and then using the opposite of those sound laws you mentioned to generate its parent language.  Then use the parent language to make other languages in the region.  I could later do this again to the parent language to get a protoparent language for the continent.

Quote from: Humabout
I didn't say I intended to develop the various languages independantly and then use the comparative method across them all.  I'm looking at making the one local language and then using the opposite of those sound laws you mentioned to generate its parent language.  Then use the parent language to make other languages in the region.  I could later do this again to the parent language to get a protoparent language for the continent.

Ah, my bad. I misread what you had posted above. Are you familiar with the zompist boards? The owner wrote The Language Construction Kit and The Sound Change Applier. Very useful for conlanging.

Oooh!  Sweet!  Thanks, man.  I hadn't heard of those.  And you did raise good points, for sure.  I just figure since I'm making it all up anyway, I should be able to save some time (always a plus for a GM) by focusing on what's immediately useful for a game.

I'm on my way to those links right now!

[EDIT]
Holy cow!  Awesome forum!  Thank you so much!

Roots!

Here are some pre-wordified roots:

[spoiler]Large - ja
Small - łï
Land - ji
Body of Water - mïr
Flowing Water - kaž
Mountain - ŧaina
Cliff - duđ
Cave - mïjë
Coast - füvre
Tree - sežo
Marsh - šaivjo
Field - čig
Crossing - ruta
Boarder - źeśu
Storm - vetra
Thunder - zvüt
Snow - žda
Fog - vai
Ice - kelek
Water - źë
Falling - bähu
Strong - śü
Weak - ba
Not - ǩä
Home - đłïd
Deep - vüŋ
Shallow - ślütäl
Dangerous - druď
Safety/Protection - riǩ
Spring - gušë
People - šiđ
Structure - täz
Rulership - ralis
All/Entirety - ka
Purity - jau
Multitude - te
Hill - łïŧaina
Forest - jasežote
Wood - sežote
River - kaž
Stream - łïkaž
Fjord - vüŋkaž
Rapids - druđkaž
Waterfall - bähuźe
Island - źeŧaina
Bluff - źeduđ[/spoiler]

As I'm sure you can tell, I'm focusing on geographical stuff at first.  I need to name stuff on a map!  Anyway, I'll modify and tweak these a little, once I get some basic noun structure sorted out.  Maybe even gender?  Not sure yet.  I'm definitely leaning toward aglutination eventually.  Meh, anyway...enjoy my wordiness!

River and flowing water are the same... although you may have intended that.

I like how rapids are "Dangerous Rivers" :D

Your orthography gives a strong "Slavic" feel to your region. If that was intentional, then it has accomplished its goal-- but if your audience is English speakers, they may not have any idea how to pronounce your placenames. Really, it's often hard enough to do that with just the unadorned 26 letters of the alphabet.

Sparkletwist makes a good point there; to add another thing- one consequence of your selection of letters is that it's difficult to search for those words in a document unless you either have those keys on your keyboard or you know how to make them. Of course, players could copy/paste... But it's something to consider. One way around the search problem could be to add the marks after the letters.

I'd definitely recommend editing out the accents and spelling them with "h"s and diphthongs where appropriate. Makes it easier. I'm calling the high fey in my world sidhe, and still trying to convince myself if I should just come out and spell it Shee to avoid confusion or just chocking it up to "fey can't spell".

Quote from: sparkletwist
Your orthography gives a strong "Slavic" feel to your region. If that was intentional, then it has accomplished its goal-- but if your audience is English speakers, they may not have any idea how to pronounce your placenames. Really, it's often hard enough to do that with just the unadorned 26 letters of the alphabet.

I was going to say it looked vaguely Hungarian, but it definitely has a broadly Eastern European flavor to it.

Wow, I never posted a pronunciation key for my orthography!  I'll do that in a minute.  To respond to everyone, it is intended to have an Eastern European flare to it, even if I eventually bash out transliteration that's more friendly to English speakers.  For now, I'm just using that one for my own purposes, since it's far more consice and less scary than a bunch of Hs everywhere, or god forbid, a more pinyin-style transliteraiton where familiar letters aren't pronounced in any sort of familiar way (x = sh?  q = ch?  what are they on?!)

With regard to "flowing water" being the same root as "river," that was intentional.  Any words that have to do with "flowing water" will have that root, as opposed to the one for a body of water.

I like the compound word structure, btw.