You know what I find really jarring about when there's a conlang or a different species in fantasy or scifi TV or film?
They clearly don't give the actors and instruction on pronunciation. They just cut them loose and you get actors who all have their individual takes on how to pronounce a word so they all say the word differently. Drives me absolutely nuts. Hire a linguist or a speech pathologist for a day as a consultant and get your pronunciations on the same page, please.
David J. Peterson has talked about it a couple of times. Sometimes he’s allowed to coach people on pronunciation and other times he’s not. Sometimes in the edit they will change their mind about what they want the translation of a line to be after filming or splice together different lines, so even though they had him go through the effort of making a conlang and the dialogue, they fuck it all up after the fact by not making sure it matches what the final product says.
Side note, I always thought it was funny that they had the Dothraki repeating “armor” with two tapped /r/ sounds after hearing someone with an accent that doesn’t pronounce /r/ there say it. They apparently had understanding of English writing despite not speaking it.
Why am I not surprised at all to hear that a producer or a director would go and screw it all up like that?
Side note, I always thought it was funny that they had the Dothraki repeating “armor” with two tapped /r/ sounds after hearing someone with an accent that doesn’t pronounce /r/ there say it. They apparently had understanding of English writing despite not speaking it.
You get it! I feel so seen!! It's this shit that wrenches me out of my suspension of disbelief and it just hurts when shit like this happens.
Making new languages is easy. Just keysmash with no defined meaning and let the Internet make up definitions.
: "Covfefe"we also got "new language but the phonetic inventory and grammatical features are just a remix of celtic languages like daddy tolkein intended"*
*i am aware that quenya is mostly finnish, don't at me nerds
Run English through 6 different google translates into other languages, then cypher the result.
foyü hë Xöxolü, yåtx' yiet hol äl xyü
Key
f = /h/
o = /e~ɛ/
y = /l/
ü = /ow/
h = /ð/
ë = /ə/
x = /s/
ö = /ɪ/
l = /ɹ/
å = /ʊ/
t = /k/
ie = /aj/
ä = /a~ɑ/
Translation
Morning Mr. Freeman, looks like you're running late.
I don't make conlangs, I focus on important things in my world building. Like climate cells, warm/cold water currents, and predicted rainfall patterns.
And yet there's always a Mediterranean, Europe, and Middle East
More people need to learn how to make a naming language so they don’t have to worry about making a full-blown conlang.
you learn just enough linguistics to make a language skeleton with consistent names that don't sound like 1) english but not or 2) what an english person thinks language X sounds like where X is Arabic for people in an arid climate, etc. this is much less complex than making an entire language with a full enough dictionary to express complex thoughts and grammatical rules just to have names for places
So what you throw together a subset of the IPA and some basic phonotactics and then just create names that fit that as needed?
Pretty much. Phonotactics, important geographic terms that are likely to be reused in multiple place names, a little bit of word order rules - like whether it would be the “Black River” or the “River Black”, and so on. As long as you keep some consistency, you don’t need to get into deeper stuff like conjugation, pronoun systems, how clauses are structured, and so on. George R.R. Martin is actually pretty decent at it, despite not being that interested in languages. Looking at random words from his books, you can usually tell whether something is supposed to be Valyrian or Dothraki just based on the aesthetics and the fact that there are some clearly related words.
Props to Tunic for making both a phonetic symbol based language and a musical note based language
I don't really enjoy conlangs at all. If you do all power to you, but nah not for me. I am not interested in an artificial language, I am much more interested in all the cultural aspects. "By the gods!" "By Odins' beard" "As the stars shine above" all those sayings, all the weird little intricacies and slang and so on. That I do enjoy. What do your people call monday? What's a holiday they enjoy, what's their dances like? What's their clothes like? How are the cities designed? What matters to them?
If you don't like conlangs, then that's more a matter of not liking linguistics than a matter of preferring "cultural aspects" — because, at least if you're a good conlanger, you can't really separate the language from the culture.
When I was in my early teens I did both English with a cipher and Americanized Norwegian with a cipher, then I moved on to making an actual conlang that was shitty, then an actual conlang that was a little less shitty, then an actual conlang that was decent, then an actual conlang that was good-ish, and I've been slowly refining that one for many years now.
There isn't anything inherently wrong with making a relex (i.e. the writer's first language but with a cipher or word replacement), but there is a time and a place for it. Some people don't care about linguistics and they shouldn't force themselves to care, because it's going to show.
