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Home / 🤠 personal / project ideas / Creating a New Language

Creating a New Language

How do you create a language? | Answer by Hans Dylan Guerin Lao, Bachelor's in CS | Quora

1. Pick what sounds your languages uses.

You can pick from here and here. You can also choose whether or not to include these:

Tips:

  • Make sure you choose in such a way your language is still pronounceable, as such. DO NOT include all of these (unless you are Îţkûil).
  • When choosing, make sure to choose entire columns or rows in the vowel and consonant tables. Again, DO NOT get every single one, doing so will make differentiation harder.

Fun Experiment:

  • Having volume in conjunction with tone and length, you can have a truly ‘sung’ language. The musicality of which I can not guarantee…

2. Choose which sound goes with which, and what happens when they ‘interact’.

For example: an ‘n’ comes before a ‘g’, is the ‘n’ still pronounced as ‘n’ or as ‘ng’? Stick to the rules you have set up. If you want it to be more ‘natural’ make some exceptions, but not too many, or your language would be come inconsistent.

3. Choose the morphological typology of your language.

You can choose from these:

Summary of differences:

  • Analytical - little to no inflections; auxiliary words and particles galore; strict word order.
  • Agglutinative - heavy inflections: parts that change or add to the meaning of the word are ‘glued’ on to the word, modifiers, verbs and nouns are often merged into one word; less auxiliary words and particles; freer word order.
  • Fusional - heavy inflections: look up a inflection table of a Latin word, that but the rows, and columns are dependent on the step 4; less auxiliary words and particles; freer word order.

4. Choose the word order.

There are three main components of a sentence that are usually taken into consideration: subject, verb, and direct object. If you are paying attention to math (or statistics) class, you should know that there are 3! or 6 ways to arrange a set of three without repetitions.

Namely:

  • SVO
  • SOV
  • VSO
  • VOS
  • OSV
  • OVS

You also have to choose the morphosyntactic alignment of your language. TL;DR choose whether or not to mark the doer of a transitive verb the same as the doer of an intransitive verb, the object, both, or neither.

5. Now for morphology.

For verbs you have to choose:

The first three comprise the tense-aspect-mood system. Tenses is when it happened, aspect is how it happened, mood is how it was done, voice is the relationship between the verb and its argument nouns.

Tenses include:

Nonpast is basically present and future combined into one tense, while nonfuture is past and present combined.

Aspects list.

Mood list is in the article linked in Grammatical Moods.

For nouns, you need to choose to whether or not you would include these:

  • Gender
  • Case
  • Number

Gender is can be not you usual male-female-neutral or animate-inanimate distinctions. You can go Zulu and have more 3 genders. Cases indicate the relation of a noun to another noun. Number can be the singular-plural distinction, the singular-dual-plural distinction or any other disticntion. You can go wild.

Case list.

Tips:

  • It may be helpful to look at this.

Fun Experiment:

  • Having a ‘multi-indirect’ voice where you can chain ‘had’s like this: ‘Angela had Bianca had Carla had Diana make Emma some breakfast’ is going to be fun… The number of nouns (or arguments) a verb can handle is called its valency. In the example if the verb is morphologically in the hypothesized ‘multi-indirect’ voice, it will have a valency of : ‘Angela’, ‘Bianca’, ‘Carla’, ‘Diana’, ‘Emma’, and ‘breakfast’.

6. Now, time for some ambiguity or to be less blunt indirect referrals.

These are:

Demonstratives have deixis. This refer to the distance of a third object (or something else) or the speaker and the listener. Pronouns have a similiar concept: clusivity.

This refer to whether or not the listener is included in the group of the speaker.

Tips:

  • Make a table of correlatives to make it easier for you to organize. make sure all of the categories that you will use is relevant. I mean you could just have a ‘demonstrative + deixis affix’, ‘quantifier + modifier affix’, ‘and ‘interrogative affix’ so that you can just stick to generic nouns to make your life easier.

Fun Experiment:

  • Having a distinction between ‘exclusive second person plural’ and ‘third person plural’ is going to be confusing… For example:
    • exclusive second person plural - your group
    • third person plural - they
  • Having an ‘nth’ person pronoun marker is going to be useful, and lessens ambiguity. This is used to differentiate between more than one or even more than two ‘third persons’. I wonder how hard is the pronoun game going to be…

As you can see this is akin to reading a linguistics text book… That or extensively reading the linguistics section of Wikipedia. Well, this is all I have, I wonder how well will my ‘experiments’ hold up.

If I missed anything else, please tell me.

Comment:

You missed sign languages, which have been invented many times recently, usually in orphanages for kids with no ability to speak or hear, Communications include teaching how to manipulate bedding so it looks like a bed is occupied, distracting the staff so they don’t notice the kids sneaking out, inventing silent games that the staff doesn’t notice and playing them in the dark.

Some orphanages have refused to believe high level sign languages exist, but they often evolve within a couple of decades. The orphanages themselves invent signs for hungry, thirsty, bathroom, etc. but do not easily become aware of the depth of the language around them.

Thus; humans have innate skills to communicate. Speech and writing are just the most obvious.

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