By Madeleine Higgins
ConLangs, shorthand for “constructed languages”, are made-up languages commonly created in the context of fantasy and fiction media. The most famous ConLangs come from J. R. R. Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Constructed languages must not only have vocabulary, but grammatical and syntactical structures. Famous ConLangs include Tolkien’s Elvish, the Na’vi language of Avatar, the Klingon language of Star Trek, etc. More advanced ConLangs even have historical and etymological lore to make them realistic to real-world languages. For instance, words with similar meanings might reflect a shared historical “root”.
The first step I took in creating my language (which has the official name “Higginsian”) was establishing a “library of sounds”. All languages are made up of a set of particular sounds called phonemes. Phonemes aren’t the same as letters; English, for instance, has 26 letters but 44 individual phonemes because we pronounce letters in multiple ways. We also combine letters to create single sounds like “sh” and “th”. Some languages have far fewer phonemes than English; Hawaiian, for instance, has only thirteen.
To keep things simple, I decided on only twelve sounds: five vowels and seven consonants, listed below. I mostly took from the English sounds that I could pronounce, with a couple sprinkled in from other languages.
Vowels of Higginsian:
/i/ = “ee” as in “seem”
/u:/ = “oo” as in “soup”
/ʊ/ = “ou” as in “would”
/ɔ/ = “o” as in “lot”
/ɛ/ = “e” as in “dress”
Consonants of Higginsian:
/x/ = “ch” as in “Bach”
/ʒ/ = “zh” as in “Zhao” or “Rajah”
/s/ = “s” as in “sit”
/m/ = “m” as in “mom”
/k/ = “k” as in “kick”
/θ/ = “th” as in “thaw”
/r/ = “r” as in “rose”
The writing system I chose for this language is an alphabet, where individual letters (or combinations of letters) stand for sounds. This differs from, for instance, a pictographic script like Chinese where single characters stand for either words or units of meaning. I started with only four letters: “△”, “o”, “♢”, and “🍥”. Each of the twelve phonemes is either represented by one letter (/i/ = △) or multiple letters (/s/ = ♢🍥).
Eventually, I ran into a problem where my words started to look like “🍥♢o△🍥🍥”, and it was impossible to tell where the separations between phonemes were. To solve this problem, I ended up adding a fifth letter, the silent “.”, to go between phonemes. So the word instead looks like “🍥♢.o△.🍥🍥”, clearly showing the phonemes to be “r”, “ou”, and “zh”.
After I finished with the writing system/alphabet, I moved on to the syntax, or word order, of my language. A key linguistic feature of any language is the order of its subjects, objects, and verbs. In English, that order is S-V-O, subject-object-verb (e.g., “I walked the dog”). For my language, I picked the rarest inversion, object-verb-subject – sentences look like “Dog walked I”. I added some other basic syntactic features: adjectives go before the nouns they modify, and all adverbs are placed at the beginning of a sentence.
Then, I added grammatical rules. Like in the romance languages, all my nouns are in one of two gender categories; except, instead of male and female, the two genders of my language are bigger-than-a-breadbox and smaller-than-a-breadbox. Breadboxes themselves are classified as smaller than a breadbox. Concepts and other intangible nouns are all classified as bigger than a breadbox. Plurals end in “♢♢”, which sounds like “m”, and adjectives have different endings based on the gender of the nouns they modify. Past tense verbs end in “o”, and futures end in “oo”.
Finally, I created vocabulary. A full list (as of now) can be found at this link. My next project will be trying to create enough of a database of words and sentences to train a model which could independently generate Higginsian text.
This is so creative! Now I want to try.
LOL at the breadboxes