Writing – Page 31 – Prose Poetry Code

Nocturne on Patreon

Today, April 21, 2017, marks the release of my latest novel, Nocturne, to supporters of my Patreon. For a pledge of only $3/month, you can download a copy in EPUB or MOBI formats, readable on your desktop, mobile device, or e-reader. (You can cancel the backing at any time, of course, but I’d prefer that you didn’t.)

What is Nocturne, you may ask? Here’s the blurb I wrote for it:

He is the Nocturne, and this is his story.

In a world where children are marked for life by the hour of their birth, one man breaks the rules. In Velin, those born in the dark, moonless night are perceived as treacherous thieves, while their brethren of the day are lifted up, glorified. But Shade entered the world in a brief window of darkness within the day, a phenomenon seen once a generation.

He is neither, yet he is both. Now, he must use the combination of day and night to solve the riddle of his past, but also to save the future of a people. Hunted by church and crown alike, the road he walks is long and lonely, yet he knows there is no one else. Only Shade. Only the Nocturne.

One of those searching for him is Kellis Matene, an inspector in training. Her superiors gave her the case of a man born in the night, calling on his fellows, urging action. A rebel, a traitor. As a king dies, a pretender emerges, and Kellis must solve a mystery. All she has to go on is a single name: the Nocturne.

It’s a fantasy novel set in a world of racial tensions, magic, and religion. At the intersection stands the Nocturne, an outcast who wields a power beyond any other man. I’ll be talking a lot more about the book in the coming weeks, because it’s definitely something I’m proud of. And I do plan on releasing it onto the Kindle Store in July, but we’ll see how that pans out.

On idioms

One of the hardest things about creating a realistic, naturalistic language of your own is capturing some of the ways real-world languages create meaning. Some of those ways are less than obvious, as anyone who’s tried to translate metaphors well knows. And idioms might be the worst of all.

Definitions

Idioms, in essence, are phrases with meanings that are not obvious, that can’t be determined by looking at their constituent parts. They’re figures of speech. They often grow out of slang or colloquialisms, they may be highly dialectal, and many are simply untranslatable. An idiom’s meaning will often be figurative, not literal (though this isn’t always the case), and there can often be significant cultural associations involved.

Now, idioms aren’t the same thing as metaphors and similes. Those are comparisons. Equations, if you will. An idiom, on the other hand, is simply a fixed phrase with a specific meaning, one that substitutes for the “real thing”. And they’re also not necessarily euphemisms, because there doesn’t have to be any hiding involved. Everything can be out in the open, but it may be harder to put together, especially if you’re not a native speaker.

English, of course, is full of idioms. We talk about jokes or lies as “pulling one’s leg”, for instance, and a sad person might be described as “feeling blue”, a familiar one as “ringing a bell”. Neither of these phrases makes any literal sense, as (unless you have synaesthesia) you can’t really “feel” blue. Some others, like “knock on wood” and “cross my heart” may have grown out of actual practices, but they’ve since become idiomatic.

Translations

The problem with idioms is that, because they’re so very culture-specific, they’re exceedingly difficult to translate. In some cases, they may even be impossible to render into another language while still preserving some semblance of meaning. Literal, word-by-word translation fails utterly, because of the figurative nature of the idiom; it may be a phrase made up of words, but it’s an indivisible unit.

Many languages, especially those closely related, may have idioms with similar meanings, which helps. But a conlang, by definition, doesn’t have that luxury. Again, literal translations won’t work, so what do we do?

For auxiliary languages, the best option might be to ignore idioms altogether. The whole point of an auxlang is to foster communication, and figures of speech actively work against clarity. So, we can just distill English (or whatever) idioms to their core meaning, and translate that instead. Simple, right? (Well, wrong, but it’s close enough for now.)

More artistic conlangs are worse off when they need to translate idioms. When you’re first starting with a new language, the “distill” approach might be your best bet, but as your creation gets more involved, more complex, you’re going to have to come up with something better.

Creation

Eventually, you may need to start creating your own idioms. Either you want to use them in your conlang, or you’ve come to the conclusion that the best method of translating out of English (or your native tongue) is to swap like for like. Here’s one of the more creative areas of language construction, which naturally means that it’s one of the hardest to generalize.

Idioms are figures of speech. If you’re making a conlang that has any sort of culture behind it, then you’ll need to think about what figures into that culture. History, art, religion, science, politics, mythology, and almost anything else can come into play here. For example, a lot of our English idioms derive from medieval or early modern Christian beliefs (“the devil’s in the details”) or culture (“the proof is in the pudding”), but the past few decades have brought an increasing number of modern creations referring to technology (“information superhighway”; fortunately, that one finally died out) or media (“Netflix and chill”).

For a conlang, then, idioms require a cultural backdrop. It doesn’t have to be perfect, and you only have to go into as much detail as the work requires, but if you want to make something natural-looking, you might need to do a lot more thinking than you originally anticipated. Borrowing (which you might think is the easiest way to go) doesn’t really work, though you might be able to get away with importing a few English modernisms into a near-future conlang—you could always blame the Internet. Everybody else does.

Finally, if you want to make idioms for aliens, well, have fun with that. Seriously, those will require even more careful thought, and you’ll likely end up with a lot of phrases that simply do not translate at all. Come to think of it, that may be a good thing…

Conclusion

I know there’s not a lot here. As I said before, idioms, being figurative and not easily “buildable” in the same sense as the rest of a language, don’t lend themselves well to generalizations. We use them all the time, but it turns out to be really hard to define them precisely enough for cross-language purposes. They’re one of the hardest parts of a language to learn, because they don’t fit in, and that also makes them nearly (if not entirely) impossible to translate. Not really a winning combination for artificial languages. Hence, idiom creation is an art, not a science. The best advice I can think of? Follow your heart. (Oh, and there’s an idiom for you. What a way to end a post, right?)

Playing with Memoir

Last time, I talked a little about how I used Pandoc to create a paperback book. Well, since I wrote that, I’ve not only posted the thing, but I have a copy of my own. Seriously. That’s a strange feeling, as I wrote about on Patreon.

Anyway, I promised I’d talk about how I did it, so that’s what I’ll do. First off, we’ll look at Memoir, one of the greatest inventions in the history of computer-aided authorship.

Optional text

Memoir is a LaTeX class; essentially, it’s a software package that gives you a framework for creating beautiful books with less painstaking effort than you would expect. (Not none, mind you. If you don’t know what you’re doing—I can’t say I do—then it can be…unwieldy.)

It’s not perfect, and the documentation is lacking in some respects (the package’s author actively refuses to tell you how to do some things that upset his aesthetic sensibilities), but it’s far superior to anything you’d get out of a word processor. Oh, and it’s like code, too, which is great for logical, left-brain types like me.

So, let’s assume you know how to use LaTeX and include classes and all that, because this isn’t a tutorial. Instead, I’ll talk about what I did to beat this beast into shape.

First off, we’ve got the class options. Like most LaTeX packages, Memoir is customizable in the extreme. It’s not meant only for books; you can do a journal article with it, or a thesis, or just about anything that could appear in print. So it has to be ready for all those different printing formats. Want to make everything print only on one side of the page? You can do that. Multicolumn output, like in a newspaper? Sure, why not?

The list goes on, but I only need a few options. “Real” books are single-column and double-sided, so I’ll be using the appropriate class options, onecolumn and twosided. Books in English start on the right-hand page, so add in openright. But wait! Since most books use these options anyway, Memoir simply makes them the default, so I don’t have to do anything! (Now, if you’re making manga or something, you might need to use openleft instead, but that’s the exception, not the rule.)

Besides those, I only need to specify two other options. One is ebook, which sets the page to a nice 6″ x 9″—exactly the same as Amazon’s default paperback size. If you want something else, it can get…nontrivial, but let’s stick to the basics. Oh, and I want american, because I am one; this changes some of the typography rules, though I’ll confess I don’t know which ones.

Set it up

The remainder of the LaTeX “coding” is mostly a series of markup commands, which work a bit like HTML tags. The primary “content” ones are \frontmatter, \mainmatter, and \backmatter, which are common to Memoir and other packages; they tell the system where in the book you are. A preface, for instance, is in the front matter, and you can configure things so it gets its pages numbered in Roman numerals. Pretty much the usual, really, and not Memoir-specific.

For typography, some of the things I did include:

Changing margins. Amazon is finicky when it comes to these. It actually rejected my original design, because Memoir’s 0.5″ is apparently less than their 0.5″. So I’m using 0.75″ on the left and right for Before I Wake, and I suspect Nocturne will need something even bigger on the inside edge. Top and bottom get 1″ each, which seems comfortable.
Adding subtitle support. I don’t need this for either of the two novels I mentioned, but I might later on. Pandoc passes the subtitle part of its metadata through to LaTeX, but Memoir doesn’t support it. So I fixed that.
Creating a new title page. This was fun, for varying values of “fun”. Mostly, I just needed something functional. Then I had to do it again, to make the “half-title” page that professional books have.
Fixed headers and footers. This was mostly just configuration: page numbers in the outer corner of the header, author and title alternately in the middle, and footers left blank. Not too bad.
Changing the chapter style. Here’s where I almost gave up. By default, Pandoc tells LaTeX to create numbered chapters. Well, I did that myself. Rather than go back and change that (it would screw up the EPUB creation), I told Memoir to ignore the pre-made numbering completely. This is especially important when I get to Nocturne, because it has a prologue and epilogue. Having it put “Chapter 1: Prologue” would just be stupid.
Add blank pages. Now, you might be wondering about this one. Trust me, it’s for a good cause. Memoir is smart enough to add blank pages to make a chapter start on the right side (that openright thing I mentioned earlier), but it won’t do that at the end of the book, or if you go and manually make a title page, like I did. Oh, and if you’re doing a print book, remember that it ends on the left page.

The whole thing was almost a hundred lines of code, including the text for, e.g., the copyright and dedication pages. All in all, it took about three or four hours of work, but I really only have to do it once. Next time around, I just tweak a few values here and there, and that’s it. Automation. It’ll eventually take everybody’s job.

Coming up

So that’s enough to get something that looks like a book, but I’m still not done. Next up, you’ll get to see the bane of my existence: Pandoc filters. And then I’ll throw in a little bit about some interesting LaTeX packages I use, because I need Code posts. See you then!

On neologisms

If you’re a writer of fiction that isn’t set wholly in Earth’s past or present, you’ve more than likely come across a situation requiring a word that simply does not exist. Science fiction has alien or future human technology; fantasy has magic and elves and the like. Sure, English has about a million words (depending on who’s counting) available for you to use, but sometimes that’s just not enough.

We’ve got a few ways we can fill this void. Which one is best depends on a lot of factors. For fantasy and aliens, you might need to come up with a fictional word from a fictional language. (If you do, well, maybe you should look at the Friday posts around here.) Established authors do this all the time, and not only to write epic conlang poetry. Tolkien casually dropped Elvish words like lembas into dialogue. Larry Niven’s Ringworld is constructed around a skeleton of scrith, an alien material stronger than anything humans could dream of making. And those are but two examples among many.

Technically, however, those are loanwords, linguistic borrowings that aren’t necessarily from any real language. For stories revolving around the interactions of disparate cultures, that might be exactly what you need. More human-focused writings, however, might want something else. This is especially true for, e.g., near-future sci-fi, where everything is mostly as it is today, apart from a few oddities. For these, we need to delve into the world of neologisms.

The making of a word

If you look at a dictionary of the English language, it’s obvious that no one sat down and came up with all of those hundreds of thousands of words in isolation. No, there are rules for most of them. Building blocks. Our language has a wide array of prefixes and suffixes, mostly borrowed from Latin and Greek in ages past, that allow us to create new terms with predictable meanings. (Linguists call this agglutination.) For example, we’ve got prefixes like un-, ex-, or over-, and then suffixes such as -ation, -ism, and -ness; Wikipedia, among others, has a whole list you can use.

Many of the new entries in the language—the more “technical” ones, at least—are fashioned by this process of agglutination: Internet, transgender, exoplanet, etc. All you have to do is snap the right pieces together to get the desired meaning, and there you go. In futuristic science fiction revolving around technological advancement, this may be all you really need.

Another option is even simpler: just use an existing word, but in a new context. We’re seeing that one a lot today, with terms like cast or stream or even tweet being reinterpreted to fit our modern world. Here, though, you have to be careful, because even if your characters understand the new meaning you’ve given these words, your readers might not. If you’re going this route, then, be sure to work in an explanation somewhere.

Compounding is another good option. Unlike agglutination, this sticks whole words together into a single, cohesive unit: swordmage, dragonborn. This process, in my opinion, is more suited to fantasy and such; it sounds less “scientific” to my ears. Your mileage may vary, however.

A kind of “opposite” of compounding and agglutination can be made by abbreviation. Different fields use this for jargon nowadays; in sci-fi, especially of the military or paramilitary varieties, this can make the narrator seem to “fit in” better. Shortened words like tac for tactical, vac for vacuum, and mag for magazine are mainly what I’m talking about here. They work best in dialogue, but putting them in narration is fine, as long as you make sure the reader is on board.

Last is the option of pure coinage—making a word from scratch. Unless you really know what you’re doing (or you’re not opposed to some serious linguistic construction), you might want to steer clear of this one. Here, you’re making a word that doesn’t actually exist, in whole or in part, and that’s a lot harder than you might think. When it’s not intended to be an “alien” word, whatever that may mean for your story, it’s actually quite difficult to come up with something that doesn’t sound corny and forced. For this one, I can’t really give much advice beyond “Play it by ear.”

In conclusion

However you choose to do it, adding new words (or new meanings for old words) really can help set the “otherness” of a world. An unfamiliar or nonexistent term is a sure sign that we’re not dealing with the ordinary anymore, whether it’s in there because you’re talking about aliens, elves, assault weapons, or the mysteries of the universe. (On a personal note, my forthcoming novel Nocturne uses neologisms to describe its magic; they’re all compounds.) Now, if you want to make a whole language, then check the “conlang” section of the site. And if you’re simply looking for technobabble that would make a Trekkie proud, well, that’s a different post. Maybe I’ll write it soon.

Let’s make a language, part 24c: The mind (Ardari)

As with Isian last week, I’m not going to bother with the rundown of Ardari vocabulary. Let’s focus on the cases where it doesn’t match up with the glosses in the list instead.

First up is tor- “to agree with”. You’ll notice the parenthetical down there; “to agree” is tory-, a derived intransitive. Thus “I agree with you” is torotya, while simple “I agree” is toryma, with the usual split-S concord trickery.

The Ardari word for “sad”, jysall, is a bit harsher than its English counterpart. To be jysall, you have to be really sad, like “in tears” level! Anything else is merely umil “unhappy”.

With tèch “nice”, it’s something of the opposite. “Nice”, for a speaker of Ardari, is good, wholesome, kind, thoughtful, and even pretty. It’s possibly more general than the English word is in formal contexts, but about the same as in colloquial speech. The man who picks up that bag you dropped is tèch, but so is the bag itself, if it was, say, a Christmas present.

In much the same vein, trodyn “wise” has a bit of an expanded meaning in Ardari. A good idea is trodyn, as are your elders. Anything that makes you laugh can be considered säv “funny”, but you have to be beyond hopping mad before you’re considered nyol “angry” instead of merely urkwis “un-calm”.

Regular derivations exist for pretty much all the words below. Adjectives can easily be turned into nouns: nyolymat “anger”, trodynymat “wisdom”, milyëmat “happiness”. (Note the slight change in that last one to prevent the awkward letter sequence -yy-.) Verbs work, too: salmönda “love”, bejëkön “thinker”, toròs “agreeable”, chòmnyn “action” (an irregular example).

Word list

angry: nyol
brave: noll
calm: kwis
funny: säv
happy: mil(y)
intelligent: sund
mind: broma
nice: tèch
sad: jysall
thankful: därynt
to act: chòma-
to agree: tory- (trans. “to agree with”: tor-)
to decide: bèlse-
to fear: nurh-
to feel: luch-
to hate: jad-
to know: trod-
to learn: prèll-
to love: salm-
to remember: ingri-
to teach: sydon-
to thank: där-
to think: bejë-
to want: majtas-
wise: trodyn

Next time

Remember, no posts for this series next month. We’ll be back in May to look at how Isian and Ardari talk business. Until then, have fun exploring the minds of your own conlangs.

Let’s make a language, part 24b: The mind (Isian)

There’s not too much to say about the collection of words this time around, and I’m not going to bother with the whole “here’s what they can do” deal again. You should have a pretty good idea of that by now. Instead, we’ll look at some of the connotations that are different in Isian.

First off, mac “mind” refers more to the abstract notion of a thinking organ, as opposed to sayban “brain”. The latter only talks about that physical bit inside your skull, while the former can’t refer to it at all. It’s a more defined distinction than in English, where the two terms can be almost interchangeable.

Second, itey “funny” indicates humor, but not most of the other senses of its English counterpart. An Isian joke would be itey, but not something oddly shaped. (That’s not to say you can’t use it in a metaphorical sense, but it’s not the dictionary definition.)

Similarly, erda “act” isn’t used for a movie star. It’s more of a general term, probably better translated as “to take action”. It can also function in the sense of “to make oneself become”, as in erda yali “cheer up” or erdacan halu “I’ve calmed down”.

The word cobet, translated below as “intelligent”, also means “sentient” or “sapient”, in a technical context. But almerat “wise” can mean both of those, too. In this sense, almerat is more “philosophical”, while cobet is more “scientific”.

Finally, essentially all of the terms in the list below have regular derivations. Isian speakers can talk about happiness by saying yaliros, and they can be unhappy (but not necessarily sad) with ayalin. Agreement is awconas, hatred uldinas, and so on. True wisdom, or almeratos, is something few speakers believe exists, but that doesn’t mean they don’t strive for it.

Word list

angry: hayka
brave: abor
calm: halu
funny: itey
happy: yali
intelligent: cobet
mind: mac
nice: nim
sad: nulsa
thankful: nichodo
to act: erda
to agree: awco
to decide: sade
to fear: poyo
to feel: ilsi
to hate: uldi
to know: altema
to learn: nate
to love: hame
to remember: noga
to teach: reshone
to thank: nicho
to think: tico
to want: doche
wise: almerat

Pandoc, LaTeX, and Memoir

A while back, I wrote about the “inner workings” of my writing. My stories are created using Markdown, which I run through a program called Pandoc to turn into EPUB format. (Then, to make Amazon happy, I send that through KindleGen, which spits out a MOBI file that can then go on the Kindle Store.) It works, and there’s a minimum of fuss. No fiddling with margins and page layout, no worrying about arcane or proprietary file formats, just a lot of text that already looks pretty much like a book.

Well, Amazon has a new thing for their KDP self-publishers: paperbacks. If you remember Createspace, it’s kinda like that, but integrated with the “main” Kindle Store. All you really have to do is upload a new format manuscript, and they’ll even give you an ISBN. (Note for non-US readers: my country seriously overcharges for ISBNs, so getting one for free is a big deal.) And the paper book shows up on Amazon as an option alongside the Kindle digital version. My brother already tried it with his book Angel’s Sin, and it seems to have worked.

So, of course, now I’m going to do the same with Before I Wake and the forthcoming Nocturne, as well as some of my future projects. To do this, however, I’ve had to delve deeper into the mechanics of my workflow.

The format issue

Amazon doesn’t like EPUBs. That’s well known. For digital books, they really, really want you to send them either a MOBI file, or something like HTML or a Word document. That’s most assuredly because of DRM. (It can’t be because they don’t know how to convert, since they give you a command-line tool to do so!) Be that as it may, I don’t really mind the last little step of running KindleGen to make an Amazon-friendly version; it’s easily automated, and I’ll still have the EPUB ready to go on Patreon or wherever.

With this new paperback option, however, there’s a problem: they don’t take MOBI, either! Nope, if you want to upload a manuscript for actual printing, your options are Word DOC/DOCX, plain HTML (possibly zipped with images and stylesheets), or “print-ready” PDF. That last is code for, “Do all the layout yourself, ’cause we ain’t touching it.”

Well, there’s the dilemma. Pandoc will happily output just about whatever format you like, but each of the options available has its downsides. Microsoft Word documents require (naturally) Microsoft Word, which isn’t really an option for a Linux user like myself. (The web app version of Office is also a nonstarter, for much the same reasons.) Zipped HTML is essentially an EPUB already, but then you have all the layout issues that come from shoving a “streaming” markup format like HTML into the “blocks” of a printed page. Fiddly bits like margins and headers and page numbers, and all with no usable previewer.

So what does that leave? Only one thing: PDF. And Pandoc can make a PDF, but not by itself. Fortunately, it knows someone who can help.

The type type

TeX (that’s really how it’s meant to be written in plain text) is the famous typesetting program originally developed by the equally famous Donald Knuth. I’ve used it many times before, on Linux and on Windows, and it works great for what it is: a “programmer’s” interface to text layout. Not a word processor, but a text processor.

TeX has been extended a few times over the past 40 or so years, and it has accrued an entire ecosystem of add-ons, bells and whistles, and documentation. If you’re willing to put in the work, you can get a seriously beautiful document. By default, it comes out in PostScript format, which is relatively arcane and not really useful to anyone. But far more common these days is its PDF option. Its print-ready PDF option.

I don’t mind writing a bit of code. I’d rather do that than play around in a word processor GUI, clicking at buttons and tweaking margins. Give me the linear word any day of the week. So I decided I’d try to use TeX (actually, the much simpler wrapper LaTeX, and be absolutely sure you capitalize that one right!) with Pandoc to make a printable PDF of one of my books.

Writing my memoir

The full story is going to play out over the next few weeks. I’ve been searching for new material for the “Code” posts here, and now I’ve found it: a deep look into what it takes for me, a very non-artistic writer experienced with programming in multiple languages and environments, to create something that looks like a book.

In the first of multiple upcoming posts, I’ll look at memoir, a wonderful LaTeX extension (“class”, as they’re called) used for creating books that truly look like they were designed by professionals. It’s not exactly plug-and-play, and I’ll gladly admit that I had to do a lot of work to beat it into shape, but I only had to do it once. Now, every book I write can use the same foundation, the same basic template.

After that, I’ll go back to Pandoc and show you the work I did to convince it to do what I wanted. I’ve never written a horror story before, but this might be the closest to it, from a programmer’s perspective. It was a coding nightmare, one I’m not sure I’m out of yet, but the end result is everything I need in a book, as you’ll see.

Let’s make a language, part 24a: The mind (Intro)

Humans are not alone in having emotions, desires, and mental capacities. We are, however, alone on this planet in having the higher cognition functions commonly described as sapience. (Now, there’s nothing saying alien species can’t have the same, but that’s a different post.) And we’re also alone in possessing the full capabilities of language. In this part of the series, we’ll look at how those two uniquely human attributes combine to produce the linguistic expression of our minds, and how a language can encode those attributes.

The center of thought

Cogito ergo sum, goes the saying, and it may be one of the most profound in existence. I think, therefore I am. It’s pure humanity distilled into three words of Latin, five of English. We are thinking beings. We can think about thinking. And we can speak about thinking.

Thought, then, is going to play a part in any language’s vocabulary. We have the English verb think to start, obviously, but that’s far from the end of the story. Not only can we think, but we can know. We can understand or comprehend. We can deduce, perceive, and reason. All these are related to thought and cognition, but in different ways. Knowing something is true, for example, is different from knowing (i.e., recognizing) a person’s face; some languages split this distinction into two verbs. Understanding and comprehending are likewise slightly different, but then there are languages out there that combine the two into a single term.

Without veering too far into philosophy, it’s still easy to see the potential for a lot of vocabulary variation. How a culture’s speech divides the linguistic space of thought tells a lot about how they think. It’s not quite the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (language determines thought patterns), but you might think of it as a weaker form.

Of course, talking about the mind’s function is a lot easier for us than for, say, the ancient Greeks. But most of our technical terminology comes from classical sources, formed following the usual agglutinative patterns of English scientific vocabulary. A conlang might look to its own “classical” cousin for inspiration, or it might borrow from a more advanced neighbor, or its speakers could instead choose to coin their own terms. That’s up to you.

The seat of emotion

Although the ancients may have considered the heart the source of human emotion, we now know it comes from the brain. So emotions therefore fall under the category of mental terms, too.

Emotion is easy for us to recognize, for reasons that should be fairly obvious—society probably couldn’t function if we didn’t know how to read the unspoken signals of our fellow man. So it’s not surprising that many languages have a native stock of emotion words. We can say we’re happy or sad, for instance. We can talk about feeling love or envy towards another. But every language runs out eventually; there aren’t any native English words for ennui, acedia, or Schadenfreude, among many others.

Humans all feel roughly the same variety of emotions, too (ignoring psychopaths and the like), so there’s going to be a good cross-linguistic alignment of emotion terms. One language may have three different kinds of “happy”, but you can bet none of them are going to indicate anger. (For non-human conlangs, this is another chance to get creative. Short-circuiting basic assumptions regarding emotion will very easily give a culture an alien feel.)

Conclusion

There’s a lot to the mind. Philosophers wouldn’t have spent the last few thousand years talking about it otherwise. It’s the center of our humanity, the source of thought, reason, logic, and emotion. What we do with it is up to us, but how we talk about it is a matter of language. There’s not too much room for variation here, except in the margins. As long as we’re thinking, we’ll have a verb to say that’s what we’re doing. As long as we can feel happiness, there will be a word for it.

Strictly speaking, the next part of this series, Part 25, is supposed to be about business. However, I’ve got other plans for the month of April, including some Patreon and Amazon releases, so I’m putting off the next installment of “Let’s Make a Language” until May. I’ve been going at it for about two years now, and I think I deserve a break.

On child characters

One of the more interesting challenges of writing in a “limited” style (i.e., not omniscient third-person) is getting into the minds of your characters. I don’t mind. In fact, I like it. I feel like it lets me try out new ways of thinking, of seeing the world. And nowhere is this more true than when I’m writing children.

This isn’t a purely theoretical exercise, either. My short story “Either Side of Night” is entirely written from the point of view of an 11-year-old boy caught up in events largely beyond his comprehension. A novel I’m writing features multiple POVs, and all of them are children when the story starts.

Of course, I’m not the only one. Plenty of authors write narrative through a child’s eyes, and some of the greatest fictional characters are young. Look, for instance, at Harry Potter, or half the cast of A Song of Ice and Fire. (Going strictly by the American standard of “under 18”, the kids narrating A Game of Thrones outnumber the adults!) I’m sure you can find plenty of others, and not just restricted to the young adult and teen fiction sections.

Eyes of a Child

Why, you may ask, should you bother writing from a child’s perspective? Well, disregarding the obvious answer of “it’s what the story needs”, I can think of a few reasons.

First, children can be more ignorant of the inner workings of the setting. To them, especially to the younger ones, everything in the world is mysterious or unknown. That’s exactly how a reader starts out, too. Your readers don’t know who the political factions are, or what the different schools of magic teach, or which of the gods is really an ascended human from a bygone era. By writing from a child POV, you can introduce a reader to the more complex parts naturally; they follow the same path as the character.

This works even better if you’re doing something training-based, like a magic school (Harry Potter), an apprenticeship travelogue (the first parts of Peter V. Brett’s The Warded Man), or something of that nature. As the child advances in knowledge, so does the reader, and there’s no sense in them complaining about disbelief. Sure, it can be a slow reveal, but if that’s what you want, then it might be just what you need.

Second, children are innocent. This can be used by a writer in a couple of ways. It’s great for setting up good-versus-evil plot points, for example, because most kids won’t be able to discern the subtle shades of gray. And destroying innocence can be a powerful dramatic tool, as any fan of Arya Stark knows all too well. But children as characters can also keep things “light”. In escapist fantasy (as opposed to the gritty and grimdark types that are all too common these days), the child can be a kind of touchstone.

Finally, the third reason ties into both of the last two. Since children are less concerned with “adult” matters, as well as simply knowing less about them in general, that’s that much you don’t have to write about when they’re the center of attention. Kids aren’t going to be cynical and jaded. They won’t care about romantic and sexual relationships. They don’t have major responsibilities. Even the language you use for their narration can be simplified, especially if the child POV is only one of many.

Raising a child

The limitations, of course, are evident. Children don’t normally have the same opportunity for adventure. Their lack of responsibility is countered by a lack of ability, whether natural (kids aren’t as strong as adults) or social (kids can’t vote, drive, etc.), and this can hinder a story.

One easy way to circumvent some of those restrictions is to make the child “attached” to an adult in some way. Obviously, one possibility is traveling with their parents. Babysitters, master craftsmen, robot nannies, and royal servants all work just as well. No matter how you do it, since the adult and child are together, they’ll experience most of the same things. And then you have a quick and dirty way to increase dramatic tension by separating them.

At the other end of the spectrum are the children who are alone. Typically, these tend to be older, usually teenagers. That’s because they’re close enough to adulthood to interact with “grownups” on a more even footing, but they still haven’t lost all of their childlike nature. Runaways, orphans, and incoming students all fit this mold, and their stories will likely involve lots of social conflict, issues of acceptance, and such.

Speaking of conflict, the kinds children can be involved in are often entirely different from those of their elders…at least to start. There’s nothing stopping an adolescent from being the Chosen One; that’s basically Harry Potter. But you can’t jump right into the deep end there. Let kids be kids for a while, so that when they can’t, it’ll pack that much more of a punch. And always be aware of both the limits of youth, and its capacity for exceeding them.

Conclusion

Writing children can be tiring, and it may seem unrewarding. But it can also be loads of fun. Even if you’re creating something entirely serious, a well-placed child’s point of view can add a bit of levity, a dash of lighthearted escapism, or just a change of pace. Or it can be a heartbreaking look into a shattered world full of broken dreams. Your choice.

We connect with children on a biological level. It’s innate to empathize. That’s why their stories can be so powerful, so emotionally moving. Whether you’re writing light or dark, it’s something to think about.

Virisai pronunciation guide

On my Patreon page, I’ve been posting drafts of a series of long novellas (or short novels, whichever you prefer) called Chronicles of the Otherworld. I won’t reiterate the entire plot of the story here, as that’s what the Patreon is for. Suffice to say, it’s a kind of alternate-universe thing, except without the alternate universes.

On the “otherworld” are a number of invented cultures loosely based on the indigenous peoples of the Americas, but with about 10,000 years of parallel development—including 500 years free from European colonization—and some genetic engineering by a mysterious precursor race. All this has caused their languages to be different from any on Earth. In other words, I built a story around a conlang. It’s okay; Tolkien did pretty much the same thing.

This post describes the pronunciation and orthography of the main conlang of the Chronicles of the Otherworld series, called Virisai. Story-internally, it is spoken by approximately one million people in and around the pre-industrial nation of Vistaan, where most of the Otherworld series takes place. Externally, I started making it in 2013, which doesn’t really feel like four years ago. My goal with Virisai was to make a natural-looking language that wasn’t too hard to grasp (the protagonists only have about two and a half months) while having no real connection to Earthly tongues. Ten thousand years, after all, is enough to give us the linguistic variety of Europe, the Middle East, and most of India…or of the indigenous languages of the Americas. In future posts, if there is interest, I’ll delve more deeply into the language. It’s one of my most developed conlangs, second only to Suvile, which I worked on from 2003–2010, and it remains in development, as I’m currently working on future entries in the series.

Finally, a word before we begin: the meat of this post is written from the point of view of someone treating Virisai as an actual language. If you prefer to think of it as the writing of a character in the story, that’s fine. From this point forward, though, I won’t be referring to any “external” qualities of the language, only what a speaker would understand.

The sounds of the language

Virisai has a fairly simple phonology. In total, there are 31 sounds: 21 distinct consonants, 5 vowels that show distinction between short and long. All of these sounds are simple, in that there are no phonemic distinctions of consonant length, palatalization, tone, or other complex phonetic properties. Speaking Virisai is not difficult for most people, unlike some of its neighboring tongues. The orthography, however, can be a bit difficult to understand.

While there are some dialectal differences, mostly between east and west, these do not rise to the level of unintelligibility. For the most part, this guide will describe the “standard” dialect of the east, with western differences noted as they arise.

Vowels

As there are fewer vowels, it seems prudent to begin with them. As stated above, Virisai has five main vowels, with each coming in a short and long variety. Long vowels sound approximately like double-length versions of their short counterparts, but many also give the short vowels a more lax pronunciation.

A: The vowel a (as in aloc “mill”) is most often pronounced like the Spanish or Italian a. At the end of a word, it may instead sound like German er as in oder. Western dialects use a pronunciation like a in English cat at the beginning of a word.
E: The vowel e (as in esau “lake”) is commonly pronounced like the e in English bet. In stressed positions, it can also sound like the more tense French é of été. Colloquially, an unstressed e can also be pronounced as a schwa, as in English taken.
I: The short vowel i (as in imec “gift”) should be pronounced as in Spanish, but it very often becomes lax, as in English bit. This relaxation is common among lower-class Virisai speakers in the west.
O: Short o (as in oca “but”) usually sounds like the o in French sot, but that of English not is sometimes heard instead, especially in unstressed syllables.
U: The short u (as in uro “round”) is pronounced as in Spanish, but the oo sound of English foot is also acceptable.
AA: The long vowel aa (as in baad “dog”) is a longer version of a. It can be approximated by the British English pronunciation of bath, or simply by stretching out the pronunciation of a.
EI: The vowel ei (as in eib “fish”) sounds like a longer variant of stressed e. The English diphthong ay of say is a close, if strictly incorrect, approximation.
IE: Long ie (as in mies “top”) sounds like English ee as in feet.
OO: Long oo (as in sool “glass”) is pronounced like a longer o. As with ei above, the English diphthong ow of glow is close, although not exactly the same.
OU: The vowel ou (as in crous “to write”) sounds like English oo in boot.
AI or AY: Both of these two spellings (ai as in ain “corn”; ay as in ayc “duck”) represent the sound of i in English like.
OI or OY: These two spellings (oi as in boi “nut”; oy as in proy “mad”) are pronounced as in English boy.
AU: The diphthong au (as in aus “cat”) sounds like ou in English out or au in English caught. The two sounds are in free variation; the preference is largely personal. The sound can also be spelled aw, if needed to prevent ambiguity.
EU: The diphthong eu (as in keud “deer”) has no exact English equivalent, but it can be approximated by the sound of you. When detailing western Virisai, this sound is often spelled ew.

In addition, some western dialects have a set of four front rounded vowels, two long and two short. These arise regularly from combinations of the consonant y (see below) and the vowels u, ou, o, and oo. They are presented here for completeness.

Y: This sound (as in lys “flower”) is a short vowel pronounced like French u or German ü.
UE: The vowel ue (as in bueder, a type of grain) is the long form of y, pronounced like German ü.
OE: The short vowel oe (as in goer “now”) is pronounced like French eu in peu.
EU: The long vowel eu (as in Beus, a month name) is pronounced like German ö, a longer form of oe above.

Consonants

Despite there being more of them, the consonants are much more regular in the correspondence between their written and spoken forms. Only in a few instances are there great differences. Here, we will leave those for last.

First, these are the Virisai consonants most similar to their English equivalents:

B: The sound b (as in boun “big”) is pronounced as in English bee.
D: The consonant d (as in den “from”) is pronounced the same as in English dog.
G: The consonant g (as in gos “cold”) has the same pronunciation as in English good.
H: The letter h (as in heid “this”) has the same pronunciation as in English hat under most circumstances. When followed by b, d, or g, however, it instead has no sound, and causes the following consonant to be pronounced as p, t, or k, respectively.
J: The letter j (as in jon “give”) sounds like that of English jest.
K: The letter k (as in kit “dice”) has the same sound as in English sky. There should be no puff of air following it, unlike in English key. This letter is only used before e, i, ei, and ie.
L: The consonant l (as in los “last”) sounds like the “clear” l of English let. It doesn’t normally have the “dark” sound of American English feel, though few native speakers can tell the difference.
M: The sound m (as in maame “mother”) sounds the same as in English mom.
N: The sound n (as in nin “sky”) has the same sound as English night.
NY: The sound written ny (as in nyaal “south”) is pronounced as the ni in English onion, or like the Spanish ñ.
P: The consonant p (as in pic “horn”) has the same pronunciation as in English spit. Unlike in English, there should be no audible “puff” after the sound. (In technical terms, it is unaspirated.)
R: The letter written r (as in rad “say”) has a pronunciation similar to English r in red, not that of the Spanish, French, or German r.
T: The consonant t (as in tec “temple”) sounds like that of English stay. Like Virisai p, it is also unaspirated.
V: The letter v (as in veis “go”) has a sound like that of Spanish b or v, not the English v. It can be approximated by pronouncing English v without the teeth.
W: The letter w (as in wan “river”) sounds like English w. It is distinct from v, but the difference can be hard for some to hear. V, however, is more forceful.
Y: The consonant y (as in yet “do”; not the same as the dialectal vowel sound y above) sounds exactly like English y in yet.

The rest of the consonant sounds are written in ways that may change depending on the position of the word, the following sounds, or other factors.

C: The letter c can represent a hard k (as in caar “name”) when written before anything other than e, i, ie, or ei. Before those letters (as in cil “small”), it is instead pronounced like the ch in English chat.
CI: The digraph ci (as in ciar “bottom”) is the standard writing for the ch sound of English char, used whenever a plain c would be pronounced as k.
F: The letter f (as in faus “rain”) has the same pronunciation as v above. It is written with a different letter in Virisai, reflecting a distinction of sound that is now lost.
NN: A doubled nn is not actually used in Virisai, but the author has used it to transcribe the word Ninne (feminine form of Nina, a racial term) so as to avoid confusion with the English word nine.
S: The letter s changes its pronunciation depending on its environment. At the start of a word (as in si “day”), it is pronounced like the s in English see. The same is true at the end of a word (as in pries “only”), when followed by a vowel other than i, e, ie, or ei (as in masa “yes”), or followed by a consonant (as in ostir “shoulder”). When preceding one of the four vowels mentioned (as in tiesie “short”), it is instead pronounced like the sh in English show.
SH: At the beginning of a word, or when preceding a consonant, the digraph sh (as in shei “daytime”) is pronounced as in English show.
SI: The digraph si (as in sias “blue”) is an alternate spelling of sh, used much more commonly when ambiguity would not arise.
SS: The doubled ss (as in susse “smooth”) is pronounced like the s in English set. It is used before e, i, ie, and ei, except at the beginning of a word.
Z: Like s above, the letter z changes pronunciation depending on where it occurs. Except directly before one of the four front vowels above (as in zaad “west”), it is pronounced like English z in zoo. Before front vowels (as in feizen “trade”), it sounds like the z in English azure.
ZH: As with sh, the digraph zh (as in zhaan “safe”) is written at the beginning of a word to indicate the z sound of English azure.
ZI: As with si, the digraph zi (as in ziule “fort”) is an alternate spelling of zh.
ZZ: Like ss, the doubled zz (as in dezzic “late”) is only used before front vowels. It is pronounced like the z in English zoo.

Consonant sequences

The grammar of Virisai causes a few cases where consonants can form sequences that look like clusters, but are pronounced as if single consonants. In each of the following, the first member of the sequence is actually silent: dt, bp, gc, zs, td, pb, cg, sz, szi, zsi, dci, tj.

Stress

Under normal circumstances, Virisai stresses the syllable before the last—the penultimate. However, a long vowel or a diphthong in the final syllable will receive stress instead. Inflection affixes are almost never stressed, but they can cause a stress shift in a word’s stem: singular soulos (stress on the first syllable), plural soulossin (stress on the second).

Closing words

The preceding should be enough to pronounce any of the utterances encountered in Chronicles of the Otherworld. Understanding them, of course, is a matter for future posts. As the series progresses, I’ll write further entries describing the Virisai language, so those willing to learn can follow the story at a deeper level.