Saturday, July 17, 2010
Article about creating alien languages
Here's a cool article I ran across thanks to TTA Press on Facebook. It compares Elvish and Klingon and talks about how to go about approaching "the next great alien language." No mention of Na'vi, which surprised me, but it does have quite a long video in which Marc Okrand talks about his creation of Klingon. Very interesting stuff.
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This was an awesome article and pointed out some stuff I hadn't thought too closely about. Though I admit to finding human language universals not that very necessary. When I created my first language, I never asked what word order it should be in. In fact, by the time I finished creating its structure and learned about OSV, SOV, etc., the need for object as a part of word order simply didn't exist in the language.
ReplyDeleteI think one of the most fundamental things about creating an ALIEN language isn't so much to use things that are rare in human languages, but to not BASE them on human languages. Just use logic to create a system that communicates. But maybe that's just me...
I love the commentary on history and such. Goodness, makes me want to go conlang instead of write!