Bisky's Twitterling's Scribbles! discussion

I'm terrible at learning languages. I don't use English in my everyday life and I tend to walk around sounding like I'm speaking Mondoshawan. (Fifth Element)

But I love fictional languages. From Dothraki to Ewokese and Klingon to Elvish. A lot of the languages in Books and Films have their bases in real languages and can be learnt.

What is your favourite fictional language?

And more importantly, is there one in your story?

I don't really have a favorite, but the funniest I think is the language of the Jadoon on Doctor Who, basically big Rhinoceri in space suits. Their language just consists of a string of words all ending in long O sounds. "No do ro ko bo lo jo" etc. The Doctor spoke in it several times and it never failed to make me laugh.

The only one I've used, funnily enough, is Klingon, and I used it as a stand in for whatever language was actually spoken, because a nerdy character was relating the story. Of course, other nerds pick up on it and go "It sounds like Klingon." and the entire conversation gets derailed because he was using Klingon. :-D

I tend to avoid strange names and fictional languages, they just drive me bats. In my series, the aliens are simply other humans that were seeded in another part of the galaxy, and share many of the common languages here on Earth, but with an odd lilt or accent. A cop-out, I know, but it actually ties in to the series plot further on.

I tend to shy away from made up languages also, but I have no problems with making up new words. Robert Jordan did that a lot in his Wheel of Time series. He used them often enough to make them a part of that world.

I don't have a favorite fictional language but I do like them. They add some authenticity to a story.

I created a few alien words for my novel. Of course, my protagonist is an alien so... I used them sparingly, a few words here and there only. They come out mostly when he is nostalgic about his people, or when he is angry. I also have special words for titles or names of places that he can't really translate.

At some point, before my last edits, he was explaining the plural form to some humans. They add 'zie' in the middle of the words when it's more than one. For example, his rank is Lutnalind. If there were more than one, it would become Lutzienalind. I changed my mind, and removed the explanations.

When I submitted my manuscript, Smashwords didn't mind the singular form because it was all over the book but when they caught one plural, they sent me a warning with the word telling me that it might be a typo. Needless to say, I was impressed that they did notice, but ignored the warning and decided to leave it there nonetheless.

Anyway, in my novel, I don't use it much, when someone speaks in another language, if he understands it, I put the English words in Italic instead.

Oh my gosh, I'm in love with fictional languages. One of these days I'm going to create one... not yet, but one of these days. ;)

I had this conversation with my father, and he said in his day, many ' alien ' languages in the old black and white movies was simply speech played backwards. That harkened memory of The Exorcist, * shiver *

@G.G that sounds really interesting :] My novel is kinda an Urban Fantasy set after an Epic fantasy :p so there were other strange languages but now its all just melted into english and the only strange words are the Cities :]

You know I've never seen the exorcist :p

@Bisky Any date set yet for the release of your book? You're making us wait! ;)

Ohhh, I'm stressing myself out too much, hah! It won't be long now I hope :3 It's taking me far too long to type up edits. Hoping to get it to beta readers by mid december.

Cool!

I love languages! I just suck at speaking them :( through my 4 years of Spanish, 2 of Japanese and 1 of French, I'm sad to report that I have not learned a thing (I am just as depressed as you are). But i could listen to any language all day without knowing what's going on haha it's just fascinating to me. I love it.

I really love the languages in Game of Thrones and the Elven language in LOTR is really pretty. Oh and the language from Avatar. There is a language in my book that I made up using inspiration from Latin, Lakota, French, and English.

Where is Lakota from? :] The language in Avatar is called Na'vi :3 I've read the first Game of Thrones book but I can't recall the different languages (was ages ago though) is it just in the series or did he write them in the books?

Lakota is a Native American language from one of the Sioux tribes ^.^ I'm not sure if GRRM wrote his languages in the books or not since I'm only on the second book, but there were phrases here and there, but I think that he does more so later on, I've heard .

Oh I didn't know that :3 I have a character in A Dance With Fury that I think people will think is Native American but I actually based his culture on the Sami from Finland ^-^

I really don't remember any, terrible isn't it :p My bf read the books years ago and has been waiting for the new ones for ages. I knew about the series before it was being advertised he was so excited I'm holding off reading the books because I love the series so much :p

Ohh very interesting. I'll have to research that a little bit before I ever get my hands on your book. Then I'll feel smart and go "Yes, yes, I see what you did there. And everyone actually thinks this character is Native American? Ha Ha." Yup...that's exactly how it'll happen. ^.^

Also, my main character in ReiHana knows like seven languages. I'm sooo jealous *pouts*

I dated a guy who spoke five languages. He included the 3 scandiavian languages. They are all pretty much the same -.-

Ahahaha wow

Obviously, there are all sorts of finctional dialects, though, not aware of any grammatical syntax. They typically have the least amount of grammar and vocabulary.
It seems that an author would develop a fictional language for his own books or series. Not aware of a universal one.

One of my friends, Lawrence Schoen, is the director of the Klingon Language Institute. They are the ones that translate Shakespeare into the original Klingon. I met him at a Star Trek convention, we were seated together at a table signing books, and we had a lot of time to talk about his work.

The thing about fictional languages, for me, is that when I find a few recognizable words (Qapla' in Klingon for example), I enjoy it. When I read a fantasy novel, however, and the mage spouts of some long spell in a made up language (something that we hear once and never again) it makes me crazy. Eragon did this, and even Dragonlance, one of my favorite series, did it as well. It pulls me right out of the story if I'm listening to an audio book, and I just ignore it if I'm reading it in a paper or e-book.

Kevin wrote: "One of my friends, Lawrence Schoen, is the director of the Klingon Language Institute. They are the ones that translate Shakespeare into the original Klingon. I met him at a Star Trek convention, w..."

That's really cool haha. My older brother used to know Klingon. He used to have this book that taught him. It was pretty cool.

I've always kinda wanted to learn Klingon and I'm not really that big a star trek fan :p

I did originally have a system in Queen of Alendeortor where the rich spoke one language and the poor spoke another and this was translated into different dialect, but I wrote it out because it seemed to stop rather than serve the flow of the story. One character's dialogue, Pontoleo, did remain in the "poor language" throughout though, because it sort of sat well with his character and made him a bit interesting.

My last Nano project, Praetor, is set in an alternate Wales so I have thrown a couple of welsh words in, or anglicised welsh words, so the city is called Kai Dyth, and the university is called Prifysgol etc.

In the very first novel I wrote (an epic fantasy, which since died a horrible death, though I hope to try resurrecting it one day), I created a very small bit of language which I used to name various locations within the kingdom.

All the towns were named for their geographic features (e.g. water, mountains, trees). Towns located on major water courses, for example, thus had the translated word for water somewhere in their name, along with a translated adjective to describe the water (e.g. east, west, large, dry). These same adjectives got used in combination with words for other geographic features. The result (I hope) was consistency within the naming convention for places, which would give the kingdom the feel of being very old and stable, and having a national identity.

I don't usually use fictional languages in my novels, but I tend to use forgotten ones, such as Latin or Greek and mainly Old English. OE sounds like a legendary language (if that means anything ^^) and I like it because of that. By the way, if I'm not mistaken, there's a lot of OE in Tolkien and some Elven sounds are inspired by it.