Writing – Page 39 – Prose Poetry Code

Let’s make a language – Part 14b: Derivation (Isian)

Both of our conlangs have a wide variety of ways to construct new words without having to resort to full-on coinages. We’ll start with Isian, as always, since it tends to be the simpler of the two.

Isian compounds

Isian is a bit more like German or Swedish than English, in that it prefers compounds of whole words rather than tacking on bound affixes. That’s not to say the language doesn’t have a sizable collection of those, but they’re more situational. Compounding is the preferred way of making new terms.

Isian compounds are mostly head-final, and the most common by far are combinations of two or more nouns:

hu “dog” + talar “house” → hutalar “doghouse”
acros “war” + sam “man” → acrosam “soldier” (“war-man”)
tor “land” + domo “lord” → tordomo “landlord”

Note that acrosam shows a loss of one s. This is a common occurrence in Isian compounds. Anytime two of the same letter would meet, they merge into one. (In writing, they might remain separate.) Two sounds that “can’t” go together are instead linked by -r- or -e-, whichever fits better.

Adjectives can combine with nouns, too. The noun always goes last. Only the stress patterns and the occasional added or deleted sound tell you that you’re dealing with a compound rather than a noun phrase:

sush “blue” + firin “bird” → sufirin “bluebird”
bid “white” + ficha “river” → bificha “rapids” (“white river”)

In the latter example, which shows elision, the noun phrase “a white river” would be ta bid ficha, with bid receiving its own stress. The compound “some rapids” is instead ta bificha, with only one stress.

Most verbs can’t combine directly with anything else; they have to be changed to adjectives first. A few “dynamic” verbs, however, can be derived from wasa “to go” plus another verb. An example might be wasotasi “to grab”, from otasi “to hold”.

Changing class

Isian does have ways of deriving, say, a noun from an adjective. The language has a total of eight of these class-changing morphemes that are fairly regular and productive. All of them are suffixes, and the table below shows their meaning, an example, and their closest English equivalent.

Suffix	Function	English	Example
-do	State adjective from verb	-ly	ligado “lovely”
-(t)e	Verb from noun	-fy	safe “to snow”
-el	Adjective from noun	-y, -al	lakhel “royal”
-m	Agent noun from verb	-er	ostanim “hunter”
-mer	Adjective from verb	-able	cheremer “visible”
-nas	Abstract noun from verb	-ance	gonas “speech”
-(r)os	Noun from adjective	-ness	yaliros “happiness”
-(a)ti	Verb from adjective	en-	haykati “to anger”

For the most part, these can’t be combined. Instead, compounds are formed. As an example, “visibility” can be translated as cheremered “visible one”, compounding cheremer with the generic pronoun ed.

-do is very commonly used to make compounds of verbs (in the form of gerund-like adjectives) and nouns. An example might be sipedototac “woodcutting”, from which we could also derive sipedototakem “woodcutter”.

More derivation

The other productive derivational affixes don’t change a word’s part of speech, but slightly alter some other aspect. While the class-changers are all suffixes, this small set contains suffixes, prefixes, and even a couple of circumfixes. (We already met one of those in the Babel Text, as you’ll recall.)

-chi and -go are diminutive and augmentative suffixes for nouns. Most nouns can take these, although the meanings are often idiosyncratic. For example, jedechi, from jed “boy”, means “little boy”, and secago “greatsword” derives from seca “sword”.
-cat, as we saw in the Babel Text, turns a noun into a “mass” noun, one that represents a material or some other uncountable. One instance there was gadocat “brick”, meaning the material of brick, not an individual block.
a-an was also in the Babel Text. It’s a circumfix: the a- part is a prefix, the -an a suffix. Thus, we can make ayalian “unhappy” from yali “happy”.
Two other productive circumfixes are i-se and o-ca, the diminutive and augmentative for adjectives, respectively. With these, we can make triplets like hul “cold”, ihulse “cool”, and ohulca “frigid”.
The prefix et- works almost exactly like English re-, except that you can put it on just about any verb: roco “to write”, eteroco or etroco “to rewrite”.
ha-, another verbal prefix, makes “inverse” forms of verbs. For example, hachere might mean “to not see” or “to miss”. It’s different from the modal adverb an.
mo- is similar in meaning, but it’s a “reverse”: mochere “to unsee”.

That’s not all

Isian has a few other derivation affixes, but they’re mostly “legacy”. They aren’t productive, and some of them are quite irregular. We’ll meet them as we go on, though. For now, it’s time to switch to Ardari.

Let’s make a language – Part 14a: Derivation (Intro)

By this point in the series, we’ve made quite a few words, but a “real” language has far more. English, for instance, is variously quoted as having anywhere from 100,000 to over a million different words. How do they do it? Up to now, we’ve been creating words in our conlangs in a pretty direct manner. Here’s a concept, so there’s a word, and then it’s on to the next. But that only takes you a very short way into a vocabulary. What we need is a faster method.

Our words so far (with a few exceptions) have been roots. These are the basic stock of a language’s lexicon, but not its entirety. Most languages can take those roots and construct from them a multitude of new, related words. This process is called derivation, and it might be seen as one of the most powerful weapons in the conlanger’s arsenal.

How to build a word

Derivation is different from inflection. Where inflection is the way we make roots into grammatically correct words, derivation is more concerned with making roots into bigger roots. These can then be inflected like any other, but that’s for after they’re derived.

The processes of derivation and inflection, however, work in similar ways. We’ve got quite a few choices for ways to build words. Here are some of the most common, with English examples where possible.

Prefixes: morphemes added to the beginning of a root; “un-” or “anti-“.
Suffixes: morphemes added to the end of a root; “-ize” and “-ly”.
Compounding: putting two or more roots together to make a new one; “football” or “cellphone”.
Reduplication: repeating part or all of a root; “no-no”, “chit-chat”.
Stress: changing the stress of a root; noun “permit” and verb “permit“.

Stem changes (where some part of the root itself changes) are another possibility, but these are more common as inflections in English, as in singular “mouse” versus plural “mice”. Tone can be used in derivation in languages that have it, though this seems to be a little rarer.

Also, although I only listed prefixes and suffixes above, there are a few other types of affixes that sometimes pop up in derivation. Infixes are inserted inside the root; English doesn’t do this, except in the case of expletives. Circumfixes combine prefixes and suffixes, like German’s inflectional ge-t. The only English circumfix I can think of is en-en, used to make a few verbs like “enlighten” and the humorous “embiggen”. Finally, many languages’ compounds contain a linking element. German has the ubiquitous -s-, and English has words like “speedometer”.

Derivations of any kind can be classified based on how productive they are. A productive derivation is one which can be used on many words with predictable results. Unproductive derivations might be limited to a few idiosyncratic uses. These categories aren’t fixed, though. Over time, some productive affixes can fall out of fashion, while unproductive ones become more useful due to analogy. (“Trans-” is undergoing the latter transformation—ha!—as we speak, and some are pushing for wider use of the near-forgotten “cis-“.)

Isolating languages are a special case that deserves a footnote. Since the whole point of such a language is that words are usually simple, you might wonder how they can have derivation. Sometimes, they will allow a more “traditional” derivation process, typically compounding or some sort of affix. An alternative is to create phrases with the desired meaning. These periphrastic compounds might be fixed and regular enough in form to be considered derivations, in which case they’ll follow the same rules.

What it means

So we have a lot of ways to build new words (or phrases, for the isolating fans out there) out of smaller parts. That’s great, but now we need those parts. For compounds, it’s pretty easy, so we’ll start with those.

Compounding is the art of taking two smaller words and creating a larger one from them. (And it is indeed an art; look at German if you don’t believe me.) This new word is somehow related to its parts, but how depends a lot on the language. It can be nothing more than the sum of its parts, as in “input-output”. Or the compound may express a subset of one part, like “cellphone”.

Which words can be compounded also changes from language to language. Putting two nouns together (“railroad”) is very common; which one goes first depends, and it’s not always as simple as head-first or head-final. Combinations of two verbs are rarer in Western languages, though colloquial English has phrasal compounds like “go get” and “come see”. Adjective-noun compounds are everywhere in English: “redbird”, “loudspeaker”, and so on.

Verbs and nouns can fit together, too, as they often do in English and related languages. “Breakfast” and “touchscreen” are good examples. Usually, these words combine a verb and an object into a new noun, but not always. Instrumental compounds can also be formed, where the noun is the cause or means of the action. In English, these are distinguished by being noun-verb compounds: “finger-pointing”, “screen-looking”. They start out as gerunds (hence the -ing), but its trivially easy to turn them into verbs.

Really, any words can be compounded. “Livestreaming” is an adjective-verb compound. “Aboveboard” combines a preposition and a noun. The possibilities are endless, and linguistic prescription can’t stop the creative spirit. You don’t even have to use the whole word these days. “Simulcast”, “blog”, and the hideous “staycation” are all examples of “blended” compounds.

All the rest

Compounds are all made from words or, more technically, free morphemes. Most of the other derivational processes work by attaching bound morphemes to a root. Some of these are highly productive, able to make a new word out of just about anything. Others are more restricted, like the rare examples of English reduplication.

Changing class

Most derivations of this type change some part of a word’s nature, shifting it from one category to another. English, as we know, is full of these, and its collection makes a good, exhaustive list for a conlanger. We’ve got -ness (adjective to noun), -al (noun to adjective), -fy (noun to verb), -ize (adjective to verb), -able (verb to adjective), and -ly (adjective to adverb), just to name a few. Two special ones of note are -er, which changes a verb to an agent noun, and its patient counterpart -ee.

In general, a language with a heavy focus on derivation (especially agglutinative languages) will have lots of these. One for each possible pair isn’t out of the question. Sometimes, you’ll be able to stack them, as in words like “villification” (noun to verb and back to noun) or “internationalization” (noun to adjective to verb to noun!).

Changing meaning

Those derivations that don’t alter a lexical category will instead change the meaning of the root. We’ve got a lot of options here, and English seems happy to use every single one of them. But we’ll look at just a few of them here. Most, it must be said, were borrowed from Latin or Greek, starting a couple hundred years ago; these classical languages placed a much heavier emphasis on agglutination than English at the time.

Negation is common, particularly for verbs and adjectives. In English, for example, we’ve got un-, non-, in-, dis-, de-, and a-, among others. For nouns, it’s usually more of an antonym than a negation: anti-.

Diminutives show up in a lot of languages, where they indicate “smallness” or “closeness” of some sort. Spanish, for instance, has the diminutive suffix -ito (feminine form -ita). English, on the other hand, doesn’t have a good “general” diminutive. We’ve got -ish for adjectives (“largish”) and -y for some nouns (“daddy”), but nothing totally regular. By a kind of linguistic analogy, diminutives often have high, front vowels in them.

Augmentatives are the opposite: they connote greatness in size or stature. Prefixes like over-, mega-, and super- might be considered augmentatives, and they’re starting to become more productive in modern English. By the same logic as above, augmentatives tend to use back, low vowels.

Most of the others are concerned with verbal aspect, noun location, and the like. In a sense, they replace adverbs or prepositions. Re-, for example, stands in for “again”, as pre- does for “before”. And then there are the outliers, mostly borrowed from classical languages. -ology and -onomy are good examples of this.

Non-English

We’ve heavily focused on English so far, and that’s for good reason: I know English, you know English, and it has a rich tradition of derivation. Other languages work their own ways. The Germanic family likes its compounding. Greek and Latin had tons of affixes you could attach to a word. Many languages of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific have very productive reduplication. Although I used English examples above, that’s no reason to slavishly follow that particular language when constructing your own.

In the next two posts, we’ll see how Isian and Ardari make new words. Each will have its own “style” of derivation, but the results will be the same: near-infinite possibilities.

Sound changes: everything else

Not every sound change works on just consonants or just vowels. Some can transmute one into the other. Others affect entire syllables or words. A few work on a different level entirely. So, we’ll finish this series by looking at these “miscellaneous” types of evolution.

Tones

Tones have to come from somewhere. One of the ways they can appear (tonogenesis) is through the loss of consonants preceding or following a vowel. A voiced consonant, for instance, can cause the vowel after it to be spoken at a lower pitch. If those consonant go away, the change in pitch can remain: a low tone. As another example, a number of consonant elisions led to the tonal system of Chinese, along with its restrictive syllable structure.

Once a language has tone, it becomes a target for evolution. Tones can change, merge, split, and disappear, exactly as phonemes. Unstressed syllables may develop a neutral tone, which might get reanalyzed as one of the existing tones. Sequences of tones can affect each other, as well, a complex process called tone sandhi.

Like any other part of language, tone is subject to the same forces that drive all sound change, which can be summed up as human laziness. More on that later.

Sandhi

The term sandhi comes from Sanskrit; roughly speaking, it means “joining”. In modern linguistics, it’s a catch-all term used for any kind of sound change that crosses the boundary between morphemes. The “linking” R in some English dialects is a kind of sandhi, and so is the use of the article “an” before vowels. Romance languages show a couple more instances of the process: Spanish de el → del; Italian della → dell’; the heavy use of liaison in French.

When sandhi becomes systematic, it can create new words, like Spanish del and al. These, of course, can then be changed by any other sound change. And it’s not limited to vowels. Consonants can also be affected by sandhi. The most common expression of this is anticipatory voicing across word boundaries, but other types of assimilation are equally valid.

Epenthesis

Epenthesis is the adding of a sound, the opposite of elision. It’s another way of breaking up a cluster that violates a language’s phonological rules or aesthetic sensibilities. Some epenthesis is a kind of sandhi, like English “an”, and the diaresis discussed last week is another form. Those aren’t the only possibilities, though.

An epenthetic vowel can be inserted between two consonants, and this will usually be a neutral vowel, whatever the language considers that to be. Schwa (/ə/) is a common choice, but /e/, /a/, and /o/ also pop up. /i/ and /u/, however, are usually too strong.

Similarly, strings of vowels may be broken up by epenthetic consonants. Again, something weak and unassuming is needed, something like /r/, /n/, /l/, /h/, or /ʔ/. /w/ and /j/ can be used as glides, as we have seen, but they’ll tend to be used only when they can relate to one of the vowels.

Another option for consonant clusters is an epenthetic consonant, one that bridges the gap between the two. Greek, for example, shows a sound change /mr/ → /mbr/, as seen in words like “ambrosia”. Many speakers of English insert epenthetic consonants like this all over, without even knowing it, like the [p] in “something”. (If this became phonemic, it would be essentially the same thing that happened to Greek.)

Haplology

Two syllables that are fairly close in sound may not stay together for very long. Haplology is a sound change that involves the deletion of one syllable of such a pair. It can be either one, and there’s no standard for how “close” two syllables need to be to trigger the change. English examples include the common pronunciations of “probably” and “February”, and others aren’t hard to find. (In another one of those linguistic oddities, “haplology” itself can fall victim to this, becoming “haplogy”.)

Applying the rules

Although there are plenty of other sound changes out there—again, I refer you to Index Diachronica for more—we have gathered enough over the last three posts to start looking at how to apply them to a conlang. There are plenty of programs out there that can do this for you, but it helps to know the rules. These aren’t set in stone, mind you, but you should have a good reason for breaking them. (That reason would probably lead to more conlanging, so I’m not complaining.)

First, evolutionary sound changes are regular. They’ll almost always happen when the right conditions are met. If you’ve got devoicing of final stops, as in German, then essentially every final stop is going to get devoiced. Sure, there may be exceptions, but those exceptions can be explained. Maybe those words appeared in their current forms after the sound change.

Second, remember that sound changes don’t care. This is a subset of regularity, but it bears repeating. A sound change will affect a word no matter what that word’s history. A particular evolutionary condition may be met because of an earlier sound change, but later changes won’t know that. They’ll only “see” a word ripe for alteration.

Third, sound changes operate on a lower level. They’re “below” grammar and, as such, aren’t affected by it. But this means that grammatical ambiguity can arise, as when sounds of case endings are merged or dropped. (This one happened in both English and the Romance languages.) Speakers will then need to find ways of clearing things up, leading to innovations on the grammar side of things.

Fourth, sound change stems from laziness, a desire to minimize the effort required in speaking and conveying our thoughts. Weak sounds disappear, dissimilar sounds merge, and it’s all because we, as a whole, know we can get away with it. As long as there’s enough left to get the message across, all else is simply extraneous baggage. And that’s what’s most likely to change.

Finally, evolution is unceasing. When it comes to language, the only constant is change. Even our best efforts at writing and education and language academies can’t stop sound change. There will always be differences in speech. Those will form dialects, and then those may split into new, mutually unintelligible languages.

Sound changes: vowels

In this part of our little series, we’ll look at some of the sound changes that can affect vowels. Since there tend to be far fewer vowels than consonants in a language’s phonemic inventory, there aren’t as many places for these sound changes to go. For the same reason, however, the vowel system of a language is more prone to change, with new phonemes coming into use and old ones disappearing.

Vowels

Before we begin, think of (or look at) the IPA vowel chart. It’s usually depicted as something like a trapezoid, but it’s just as easy to imagine it as a triangle with vertices at /i/, /a/, and /u/. All the other vowel sounds—/e/, /y/, /ø/, and so on—are along the sides or in the middle. This conception will make a few of the sound changes described below seem more obvious.

Umlaut

The process of umlaut, as found in German, is an example of a larger phenomenon used referred to as fronting. Either term is fine for amateur conlangers, because everyone will know what you mean. Whatever you call it, it’s a change that causes vowels to move towards the front of the mouth.

Most commonly, fronting occurs under the influence of an /i/ sound. (In that, it’s almost like a kind of vowel harmony, or the vowel version of assimilation.) Sometimes, the /i/ later disappears, leaving behind the affected vowel as its only trace.

The Germanic languages embraced fronting to varying degrees, and they’re the best example around. German itself, of course, has the front rounded vowels ü and ö; the diacritic is often called an umlaut for just this reason. Old English, meanwhile, back /ɑ/ was fronted to /æ/. Swedish brought its /uː/ frontward to become /ʉː/. And the list goes on.

Fronting doesn’t always happen, so the back vowels aren’t totally lost. Instead, it can become a way to add in more front vowels; overall, languages tend to have more in the front than the back. Or it can cause mergers, as [y] becomes reinterpreted as /i/. This very thing happened in Greek, for instance.

Raising and lowering

Instead of bringing a vowel to the front, raising brings it up. Usually, this moves a sound one “step” up on the vowel chart: /a/ → /e/ → /i/. Intermediate steps like /ɛ/ can come into play, as well. An example of this process happening right now is in my own dialect of US Southern English, where some vowels are raised before nasal sounds. Thus, “pin” and “pen” sound alike.

The environment usually causes raising, but it’s not any specific sound that triggers it. Nasals can, as they do for me, but raised vowels later in the word can do it, too. So can other consonants. In general, it works out to yet another form of assimilation—vowels will tend to be raised by proximity to other “high” sounds. The reason it works so well for nasals is because they’re the highest in the mouth that you can get: in the nose.

Unlike fronting, raising seems to be more “effective”. But this makes it possible for other sound changes to come into play, sweeping into the vocalic void left behind. If raising gets rid of most instances of /a/, for example, some other sound will likely change to fill that gap.

The opposite of raising, lowering, is one such way of accomplishing this. It’s the same thing as raising, but in reverse: /u/ → /o/ → /a/ is a common trend. Front vowels appear to be harder to lower, likely from the massive influence of /i/, but it’s possible to do, say, /e/ → /ɛ/.

Nasalization

Vowels near nasal sounds might assimilate to them, in a change called nasalization. If the change is thorough enough, it can even result in the loss of the nasal consonant, leaving only a nasal vowel. That was the case in French and Portuguese, both of which have a set of nasalized vowels.

Any of the nasal sounds work for this, from /m/ to /ɴ/, but the “big three” of /n/, /m/, and /ŋ/ are the most common in languages, in that order. They’ll be the likely suspects. If nasalization occurs, then it will probably be on those vowels that precede these sounds; vowels following nasals are less susceptible to the change. Nasals at the end of a word or right before another consonant are the best candidates for the total nasalization that results in their disappearance.

A similar change can occur with /r/-like (rhotic) sounds, but this is much less common. It is a way to get a series of rhotic vowels like those in American English, and it’s conceivable that the difference between “regular” and “rhoticized” could become phonemic.

Lengthening and shortening

Solitary vowel phonemes can, in some cases, become long vowels or diphthongs. On the other hand, it’s easy for those to revert to short vowels. (And those can be shortened further, dropping out altogether, but we’ll get to that in a moment.)

These changes are very connected to the stress pattern of a word. Stressed vowels are more likely to be lengthened or broken into diphthongs. Unstressed vowels, by contrast, get the opposite treatment: reduction and shortening. That’s not the only reason these processes can happen, but it is the primary one.

The total elision of unstressed vowels is also quite possible. This can happen between consonants (syncope), at the beginning of a word (apheresis) or at its end (apocope). All of these are historically attested, both in natural language evolution and in borrowed words. Syncope, for example, occurs in British English pronunciations of words like secretary, while apocope turns American “going” to “goin'”.

Combining and breaking

Two vowels that end up beside each other (probably because of consonant changes) can create an unstable situation. Like the case of consonant clusters, vowel clusters “want” to simplify. They can go about this in a couple of different ways.

The easiest way is for the two to combine into a diphthong or long vowel. Where this isn’t possible, one of the vowels may assimilate to the other, much like consonants. Alternatively, the two might “average out”, fusing into a sort of compromise sound, like /au/ → /o/ (or /oː/, if that’s possible in the language).

Another potential outcome is a separation into two syllables by adding a glide. For example, one form of this diaresis is /ie/ → /i.je/. Once the vowel cluster is broken apart, other sound changes can then alter the new structure, potentially even re-merging the cluster.

Onward

Plenty of other vowel changes exist, but these are the most common and most defining. Next time, we’ll wrap up the series with a look at some of the sound changes that sit outside of the usual consonant/vowel dichotomy, as well as those that can affect a whole word. Also, we’ll conclude with a few rules of thumb to help you get the most out of your conlang’s evolution.

Sound changes: consonants

Languages change all the time. Words, of course, are the most obvious illustration of this, especially when we look at slang and such. Grammar, by contrast, tends to be a bit more static, but not wholly so; English used to have noun case, but it no longer does.

The sounds of a language fall into a middle ground. New words are invented all the time, while old ones fall out of fashion, but the phonemes that make up those words take a longer time to change. This does, however, occur more often than wholesale grammatical alterations. (In fact, sound change can lead to changes in grammar, but it’s hard to see how the opposite can happen.)

This brief miniseries will detail some of the main ways sounds can change in a language. The idea is to give you, the conlanger, a new tool for making naturalistic languages. I won’t be covering everything here—I don’t have time for that, nor do you. Examples will be necessarily brief. The Index Diachronica is a massive catalog of sound changes that have occurred in real-world languages, and it’s a good resource for conlangers looking for this sort of thing.

Consonants

We’ll start by looking at some of the main sound changes that can happen to consonants. Yes, some effects are equally valid for consonants and vowels, but I had to divide this up somehow.

Lenition

Lenition is one of the most common sound changes. Basically, it’s a kind of “weakening” of a consonant into another. Stops can weaken into affricates or fricatives, for instance; German did this after English and its relatives broke away, hence “white” versus weiß. Another word is “father”, which shows two examples of this—compare it to Latin pater, which isn’t too far off from the ancestral form. (Interestingly, you can even say that “lenition” itself is a victim.)

Fricatives can weaken further into approximants (or even flaps or taps): one such change, of /s/ to /h/, happened early on in Greek, hence “heptagon”, using the Greek-derived root “hepta-“. Latin didn’t take this particular route, giving us “September” from Latin septem “seven”.

Approximants don’t really have anywhere to go. They’re already weak enough as it is. The only place for them to go is away, and that sometimes happens, a process called elision. Other sounds can be elided, but the approximants are the most prone to it. In English, for instance, we’ve lost /h/ (and older /x/) in a lot of places. (“im” for “him” is just the same process continuing in the present day.)

Lenition and elision tend to happen in two main places: between vowels and at the end of a word. Those aren’t the only places, however.

Assimilation

Assimilation is when a sound becomes more like another. This can happen with any pair of phonemes, but consonants are more susceptible, if only because they’re more likely to be adjacent.

Most assimilation involves voicing or the point of articulation. In other words, an unvoiced sound next to a voiced one is an unstable situation, as is a cluster like /kf/. Humans are lazy, it seems, and they want to talk with the least effort possible. Thus, disparate sequences of sounds like /bs/ or /mg/ tend to become more homogenized. (Good examples in English are all those Latin borrowings where ad- shows up as “al-” or “as-“, like “assimilation”.)

Obviously, there are a few ways this can play out. Either sound can be the one to change—/bs/ can end up as /ps/ or /bz/—but it tends to be the leading phoneme that gets altered. How it changes is another factor, and this depends on the language. If the two sounds are different in voicing, then that’ll likely shift first. If they’re at different parts of the vocal tract, then the one that changes will slide towards the other. Thus, /bs/ will probably come out as /ps/, while /mg/ ends up as /ŋg/.

Assimilation is also one way to get rid of consonant clusters. Some of the consonants will assimilate, then they’ll disappear. Or maybe they won’t, and they’ll create geminates, as in Italian

Metathesis

Anyone who’s ever heard the word “ask” pronounced as “ax” can identify metathesis, the rearranging of sounds. This can happen just about anywhere, but it often seems to occur with sound sequences that are relatively uncommon in a language, like the /sk/ cluster in English.

This one isn’t quite as systematic in English, but other languages do have regular metathesis sound changes. Spanish often swapped /l/ and /r/, for example, sometimes in different syllables. One common thread that crosses linguistic barriers involves the sonority hierarchy. A cluster like /dn/ is more likely to turn into /nd/ than the other way around.

Palatalization, etc.

Any of the “secondary” characteristics of a consonant can be changed. Consonants can be palatalized, labialized, velarized, glottalized, and so on. This usually happens because they’re next to a sound that displays one of those properties. It’s like assimilation, in a way.

Palatalization appears to be the most common of these, often affecting consonants adjacent to a front vowel. (/i/ is the likely culprit, but /e/ and /y/ work, too.) Labialization sometimes happens around back rounded vowels like /u/. Glottal stops, naturally, tend to cause glottalization, etc. Often, the affecting sound will disappear after it does its work.

Dissimliation

Dissimliation is the opposite of assimilation: it makes sounds more different. This can occur in response to a kind of phonological confusion, but it doesn’t seem to be very common as a regular process. Words like “colonel” (pronounced as “kernel”) show dissimilation in English, and examples can be found in many other languages.

Even more…

There are a lot of possible sound changes we haven’t covered, and that’s just in the consonants! Most of the other ways consonants can evolve are much rarer, however. Fortition, for example, is the opposite of lenition, but instances of it are vastly outnumbered by those of the latter.

Vowels present yet more opportunities to change up the sound of a language, and we’ll see them next week. Then, we’ll wrap up the series by looking at all the other ways the sound of a word can change over time.

Let’s make a language – Part 13b: Numerals (Conlangs)

For the first time in this series, not only will we be able to treat Isian and Ardari in the same post, but we’ll actually look at them at the same time. We can do this thanks to the similarity in the way they treat numerals. Sure, there are differences, and we’ll see those as we go, but the highlights don’t change that much from the “simple” Isian to the “complicated” Ardari.

The numerals

First off, both conlangs use a decimal system, like most languages in common use today. Both are based around the number ten, but in slightly different ways. Ardari is a more “pure” decimal language, although it has a little bit of vigesimal contamination; Isian, on the other hand, likes to work with hundreds for larger numbers. Although that may sound odd, think about how we do it in English: a million is a thousand thousands, a billion a thousand millions, and so on.

Before we get to the meaty grammar bits, here’s a table of numeral words in both conlangs. It shows all numerals up to twenty, all the multiples of ten up to a hundred, and a few selections to illustrate the numbers in between.

Number	Isian	Ardari
1	yan	jan
2	naw	wegh
3	choy	dwas
4	khas	fèll
5	gen	nibys
6	hod	sald
7	sowad	chiz
8	nicul	ghòt
9	pir	ang
10	pol	kyän
11	poloyan	vänja
12	polonaw	braj
13	polochoy	kyävidas
14	polokhas	kyävèll
15	pologen	kyuni
16	polohod	kyävisald
17	polosowad	kyävichiz
18	polonicul	kyävijòt
19	polopir	kyäveng
20	nopolic	darand
21	nopoloyan	darandvi jan
22	nopolonaw	darandvi wegh
30	choypolic	dwaskyän
33	choypolochoy	dwaskyänvi dwas
40	khaspolic	wedarand
50	gempolic	byskyän
60	hobolic	dwasrand
70	subolic	chiskyän
80	nilpolic	fèldarand
90	pirpolic	änkyän
100	cambor	grus

In both languages, the default form of a numeral is as an adjective. For Ardari, this requires adjective inflection for the first four, including changing for the gender of their head nouns. On the Isian side, every number but yan “one” will have a plural head noun, but there is otherwise nothing to worry about.

We can use numerals directly as nouns in Ardari, just like any adjective, but we can’t in Isian, since it doesn’t allow adjectives without head nouns. Instead, we can use the “dummy” noun at: naw at “two things”. (For “one”, we’d use the singular yan a.)

Creating higher numbers in Ardari is, surprisingly, fairly straightforward. As you can see in the table above, numbers like 21 are constructed using the linking conjunction -vi, which appears on everything but the last noun or adjective in the phrase. Thus, darandvi jan is literally “twenty and one”. This pattern extends throughout the system: 123 is grusvi darandvi dwas.

In Isian, things get a little hairier. Up to 109, you take the “tens” numeral, strip off the final -ic, add on a linking -o-, and add the “ones” numeral: nopolic “twenty” plus yan “one” equals nopoloyan “twenty-one”. Past that, you have to make a phrase like polopir cambor at wa nilpolochoy “1,983”, but this takes you all the way to 9,999.

For positively huge numbers, you need more numerals. Isian has two native higher powers: jagor “ten thousand” and ilicor “million”, which can be used just like cambor “hundred”. As an example, the large number 1,048,576 would be represented in Isian by the mouthful ilicor at wa khas jagor at wa nilpologen cambor at wa subolohod. Yes, our way looks more compact, but imagine writing it out.

Ardari instead has separate words for each power of ten up to a million: ulyad “thousand”, minyir “ten thousand”, ovòd “hundred thousand”, and akrèz “million”; these can be “stacked” into a -vi phrase with the others. Our same example in the paragraph above, 1,048,576, then becomes akrèzvi fèll minyirvi ghòt ulyadvi nibys grusvi chiskyänvi sald. (As a shorter alternative, one can simply recite the digits in order, putting yvi before the last: jan zu fèll ghòt nibys chiz yvi sald.)

That last example shows the Ardari word for zero, zu. Isian has one, too: anca. However, it has an added wrinkle in that it doesn’t work the same way as the other numerals. To say “zero” as a noun, instead of using anca at “zero things”, you say anocal, the Isian word for “nothing”.

Our number is up

That’s all there is to it for counting numerals in our conlangs. They’re fairly simple, mostly because I stuck to a decimal number system. If you want to use something more “exotic”, like base-12, well, have fun with that. I’ve tried, and it’s a lot harder than it looks. Still, the “dozenal” people don’t seem to mind. Also, there’s a lot of grammar stuff I could have added, and we haven’t covered ordinal numbers, but those can come later. We can count in our languages now, and that’s good enough for the time being.

Let’s make a language – Part 13a: Numerals (Intro)

After learning how to speak, counting is one of the first things children tend to figure out, for obvious reasons. And language is set up to facilitate learning how to count, simply because it’s such an important part of our existence as human beings. The familiar “one, two, three” of English has its counterparts around the world, though each language has its own way of using them.

These numerals will be our focus today. (Note that we can’t really call them numbers in a linguistic context, because we’re already using the term “number” for the singular/plural distinction.) Specifically, we’ll look at how different languages count with their numerals; in math terms, these will be the cardinal numbers. In a later post, we can add in the ordinal numbers (like “first” and “third”), fractions, quantities, measurements, and all that other good stuff. For now, let’s talk about counting.

Oh, and since numerals lie at a kind of intersection of linguistics and mathematics, it’ll help if you’re familiar with a few concepts from math. While we won’t be going into things like positional number systems—I’ll save that for a post about writing systems, far into the future—the concept of powers will be important. More information shouldn’t be that hard to find on the Internet, so I’ll leave that in your capable hands.

Count the ways

How a language counts is highly dependent on its culture. Remember that counting and numeral words predate by far the invention of writing. Now think about how you can count if you can’t write. One of the best ways is by using parts of your body. After all, it’s always with you, unlike a collection of stones or some other preliterate method. Thus, bodily terms often pop up in the context of numerals.

In fact, that’s one of the simplest methods of creating numerals: just start numbering parts of your body. A few languages from Pacific islands still use this today, and it’s entirely possible that it’s how all ancestor languages did it. Words for the fingers of one hand usually cover 1-4, with the thumb standing for 5. After that, it depends on the language. Six could be represented by the word for the palm or wrist, and larger numbers by points further up the arm. In this way, you can continue down the opposite arm, to its hand, and then on to the rest of the body.

Once you need to work with larger numbers, however, you’ll want a better way of creating them. The “pointing” method is inefficient—you need to remember each point on the body in order—and there are only so many body parts. This is fine for a hunter-gatherer society, and many of those have a very small selection of numerals (anywhere from one to five), using a word for “many” for anything higher. But we “advanced” peoples do need to refer to greater quantities. The solution, then, is to use a smaller set of numerals and construct larger ones from that. That’s how we do it in English: “twenty-five” is nothing more than “twenty” plus “five”.

For our language, the key number is 10. Every number up to this one has its own numeral, while larger ones are mostly derived. The only exceptions are words like “hundred” and “thousand” which, incidentally enough, represent higher powers of 10. Thus, we can say that English uses base-10 counting—or decimal, if you prefer fancier words.

At the base

Every language with a system of numeral words is going to have a numerical base for that system. Which number is used as the base really has a lot to do with the history of the language and how its people traditionally counted. Not every number is appropriate as a base; Douglas Adams once said that nobody makes jokes in base-13, and I can state with confidence that nobody counts in it, either. Why? Because 13 is awkward. It’s a prime number with essentially no connection to any part of the body. Since counting probably originated with body parts, there’s no reason for a culture to ever develop base-13 counting. Other numbers, though, are quite suitable.

Decimal (base-10) counting is, far and away, the most common in the world. Look at your hands, and you’ll see why. (Unless, of course, you don’t have ten fingers.) Counting in decimal is just the finger counting most of us grew up with, and decimal systems tend to have new words for higher powers of 10. In English, we’ve got “hundred” and “thousand”, and these are pretty common in other decimal languages. For “ten thousand”, we don’t have a specific native word, but Japanese (man) and Ancient Greek (myrioi) do; the latter is where we get the word “myriad”.
Vigesimal (base-20) is not quite as widespread as decimal, but it has plenty of supporters. A few European languages use something like base-20 up to a certain point—one hundred, in fact—where they switch to full decimal. But a “true” vigesimal system, using powers of 20 instead of 10 (and thus having separate words for 400, 8,000, etc.), can be found in Nahautl (Aztec) and Maya, as well as Dzongkha, in Bhutan. Like decimal, vigesimal most likely derives from counting, but here it would be the fingers and the toes.
Quinary (base-5) turns up here and there, particularly in the Pacific and Australia. Again, it comes from counting, but this time with only one hand. It’s far more common for 5 to be a “sub-base” in a greater decimal system; in other words, 10 can be “two fives”, but 20 is more likely to be “two tens”. The alternative, where the core terms are for 5, 25, 125, and so on, doesn’t seem to occur, but there’s no reason why it can’t.
Duodecimal (base-12) doesn’t appear to have an obvious body correlation, but it actually does. Using the thumb of one hand, count the finger bones on that hand. Each finger has three of them, and you’ve got four non-thumb fingers: 3 × 4 = 12. There are a few languages out there that use duodecimal numerals (including Tolkien’s Quenya), but base-12 is more common in arithmetic contexts, where its multiple factors sometimes make it easier to use than decimal. Even in English, though, we have the “dozen” (12) and “gross” (144).
Other numbers are almost never used as the “primary” base in a language, but a few can be found as “auxiliary” bases. Base-60 (sexagesimal), like our minutes and seconds, is entirely possible, but it will likely be accompanied by decimal or duodecimal sub-bases. Some languages of Papua New Guinea and thereabouts use a quaternary (base-4) system or, far more rarely, a senary or base-6 system. Octal (base-8) can work with finger counting if you use the spaces between your fingers, and a couple of cultures do this. And, of course, it’s easy to imagine an AI using octal, hexadecimal (base-16), or plain binary (base-2).

Word problems

In general, numerals up to the primary base are all going to be different, as in English “one” through “ten”. A few powers of the base will also have their own words, but this will be dependent on how often the speakers of a language need those higher numbers. “Hundred” and “thousand” suffice for many older cultures, but the Mayans could count up to the alau, 20⁶ or 64 million, China has native terms up to 10¹⁴ (a hundred trillion), and the Vedas have lots of terms for absurdly large numerals.

No matter what the “end” of the scale, most of the numbers in between will be somehow derived. Again, the more often numbers are used, the more likely they’ll acquire specific terms, but special forms are common for multiples of the base up to its square (100 in decimal, 400 in vigesimal, and so on), like our “twenty” or “eighty”. Intermediate numbers will tend to be made from these building blocks: multiples and powers of the base. How they’re combined is up to the language, but the English phrasing, for once, is a pretty good guide.

Some languages work with a secondary base, and these may affect the way numeral words work. Twelve and twenty can almost be considered sub-bases for English with words like “dozen” and the peculiar method of constructing numbers in the teens. Twenty is a stronger force in other European languages, though. French is an example here, with 80 being quatre-vingts, literally “four twenties”. In contrast, a full vigesimal system can function just fine with the numeral for twelve derived as “ten and two”, using 10 as a sub-base, although I’m not aware of an example. Any factor can also work as a sub-base, especially in base-20, where 4 and 5 both work, or base-60, where you can use 6 and 10.

Irregularity is everywhere in natural languages, and that includes numerals. There always seem to be a few outliers that don’t fit the pattern. English has “eleven” and “twelve”, of course; it gets them from Germanic, as do many of its cousins. Spanish, among others, has veinte for 20, whereas other multiples of ten are constructed fairly regularly from their “ones” (treinte, etc.). Other examples abound.

Fitting in

How numeral words fit into a language is also a major variable. Sometimes, they’re a separate part of speech. Or they can be adjectives. Or nouns. Or some combination of all three. If they’re adjectives or nouns, then they may or may not participate in the usual grammar. Latin, for instance, requires small numerals (up to four) to be inflected, but everything larger is largely fixed in form. English lets numerals act as adjectives or nouns, as needed, and some dialects allow nouns following adjectival numerals to ignore grammatical number (“two foot of rope”, “eight head of cattle”). It’s really a mess most everywhere.

For a conlang, it’s going to come down to the necessities. Auxlangs, as always, need to be simple, logical, and reasonable, so it’s best not to get too crazy, and this extends to all aspects of numerals. You’re not going to get many followers if you make them start counting by dozens! (Confession time. I did this for a non-auxlang over ten years ago, and I still forget it uses duodecimal sometimes! Imagine how that would be for a language intended to be spoken.)

Fictional languages get a little bit of a pass. Here, it’s okay to go wild, as long as you know what you’re doing. Non-decimal bases are everywhere in conlangs, even in “professional” ones like Tolkien’s. With non-humans, you get that much more rope to hang yourself with. Four-fingered aliens (or cartoon characters) would be more likely to reckon in an octal system than a decimal one. Depending on how their digits are made, you could also make a case for base-6 or base-9, by analogy with Earthly octal and duodecimal finger counting. Advanced races will be more likely to have a sophisticated system of higher powers, like our billion, trillion, etc. And so on.

More than any other part of this series, numerals are a part of a culture. If you’re making a conlang without a culture—as in an auxlang—then think of who the speakers will be, and copy them. Otherwise, you might need to consider some of the aspects of your fictional speakers. How would they count? How would they think of numbers? Then you can start making your own.

Race in writing

Race is a hot topic in our generation. Racism, equality, diversity, affirmative action…you can’t get away from it. Even the very month we’re in has long been declared Black History Month. Scientifically, we are told that race doesn’t really matter. Socially, we’re told it shouldn’t matter. And yet human nature, our predisposition towards clannish, us-against-them xenophobia, keeps race constantly in the news. Whether it’s a white cop shooting a black teenager or the Academy Awards being called out as “too white”, racial tension is a fact of life as much in 2016 as in 1966.

But that’s the real world. In fiction, race has historically been somewhat neglected. In most cases, there’s a very good reason for that: it’s not important to the story. Many genres of fiction achieved the Holy Grail of colorblindness years ago, when such a thing was all but inconceivable to the rest of the world. Indeed, for a great many works, it doesn’t matter what color a character’s skin is. If you’re pointing it out, then, like Chekhov’s gun, it’s probably important. A story where racial tension plays a direct role in character development is going to be very dependent on character race. A lot of others simply won’t.

That’s not to say that it should be entirely ignored. After all, real-world humans have race, and they identify more with people of their own race. And, of course, a mass-media work needs to be very careful these days. One need only look at Exodus: Gods and Kings and the accusations of “whitewashing” it received. Also, when moving stories from the page to the screen, a lack of racial characterization in the book can lead to some…interesting choices by the studio. (I’ll gladly admit that I was surprised to see who was cast as Shadow in American Gods.)

Does it matter?

When you’re planning out a story—if you’re the type to plan that far ahead—you should probably already have an idea what role race will play in the grand scheme of things. Something set in the American South in the 60s (1960s or 1860s, either one works) will require more attention to detail. Feudal Japan, not so much.

Futuristic science fiction deserves special mention here. It’s common for this type of story, when it involves a team of characters, to have a certain ratio of men to women, of white to non-white, as if the author had a checklist of political correctness. But why? Surely, for an important mission like first contact or the first manned Mars mission, the job would go to the most qualified, whoever they were. That assumes rational decision-making, though, and that’s something in short supply today. There’s not much reason to assume that will get any better in the coming decades.

For other genres and settings, race should play second fiddle to story concerns. Yes, it can make for an interesting subplot if handled well, but it’s too easy to make a minor detail too important. Ask yourself, “If I changed this character’s race, what effect would that have on the rest of the story.” If you can’t think of anything, then it might not be quite as pertinent as you first thought.

When it does matter

Very often, though, the answer to that question will be a resounding “yes”. And that’s where you need to delve into the bottomless pit of psychology and sociology and the other social sciences. Lucky you.

If you’re fortunate enough to be working with a specific period and location in history, then most of the work is already done for you. Just look at what race relations were like in that time and place. You’ve always got a little bit of leeway, too. People are not all alike. You can be a pre-Civil War southerner against slavery, or a 1940s German sympathetic to the Jews.

Writing for the future is a lot tougher. A common assumption, especially for stories set more than a century or so ahead of our time, is the end of racism. In the future, they argue, nobody will care what color your skin is. The Expanse series works this in a great way, in my opinion. The whole solar system is full of a mishmash of Earth cultures, but nobody says a word about it. It’s not white against black, it’s Earth against Mars.

You can also go the other way and say that race will become more of a factor. The current political climate actually points this way on topics like immigration. But other factors can lead to a “re-segregation”. Nationalist tendencies, waves of refugees, backlashes against “cultural appropriation”, and simple close-mindedness could all do the trick. Even social media can play a role. While it’s true that there aren’t many paths back to the old days of separate water fountains, we’re not too far from strictly separated racial ghettoes already.

The worldbuilding process should be your guide here. What made the world—more specifically, the story’s setting—the way it is?

When it’s different

All that above, of course, presumes you’re dealing with human race. Alien races are completely different, and I hope to one day write a series on them. For now, just know that the differences between humans and aliens utterly dwarf any difference between human races. Aliens might not perceive a distinction between white and black; conversely, an alien appearance can hide a number of racial distinctions. For fantasy, substitute “elves” or whatever for “aliens”, because the principle is exactly the same.

In fact, this whole post I’ve been using “race” as a broad term that encompasses more than just traditional notions of skin pigmentation. In the context of this post, any social subgroup that is largely self-contained can be considered a race, as can a larger element that shows the behavior of a race. Jews and Muslims can be treated as races, as can fantasy-world dark elves. As long as the potential for discrimination based on a group’s appearance exists, then the race card is on the board.

As always, think about what you’re creating. Where does race fit into the story? Try to make it a natural fit, don’t shove it in there. And this is one of those cases where a lot of popular fiction can’t really help you. White authors tend to write white characters by default, because it’s easiest to write what you know. (A counterexample is Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen series, where half the main characters are black, and you’d never know it except from the occasional hint dropped in narration.)

It’s also all too easy to go to the other extreme, to fill a story with a racial rainbow and put that particular difference front and center when it doesn’t help the story. Honestly, that’s just as bad as saying, “Everybody’s white, deal with it.” If it doesn’t matter, don’t even bring it up. If it does matter, make it matter. Make me care about the struggle of the minority when I’m reading that kind of story, but don’t put it in my face when I’m trying to enjoy a sword-and-sorcery romp where everybody is against the Dark Lord.

In the end, the best advice I can give is twofold. First, learn about your setting. How does it affect racial relations? Second, think about your characters. Put yourself in their shoes. How do they see members of other races, or their own? How are they affected by the society they live in? It’s hard, but writing always is, and this is a case where the payoff is a lot harder to see. But keep at it, because it really is worth it.

Let’s make a language – Part 12b: Questions (Conlangs)

How do we form questions in Isian and Ardari? The answer, you will see, is quite simple.

Isian

Isian, fittingly, doesn’t have a lot of question “morphology”. Yes-no questions are made in the simplest possible manner, by nothing more than rising intonation. This means, however, that the meaning of, say, so il til can be one of two things. With falling or level pitch, it’s a statement “you are there”. Go up in pitch as you near the end, and it becomes so il til?, the interrogative “are you there?”

The answer to such questions will usually be a simple sha “yes” or num “no”. If you need more, Isian allows you to add it by repeating the verb: sha, en “yes, I am”. (Note that I’m using English punctuation as a convenience, but also because there would be a slight pause between answer word and verb.)

If you prefer the vernacular, you’ve got shasha, which is more like “yeah”; noy is the negative counterpart, and its best translation might be “nope”. A wishy-washy reply would be momay “maybe”, while genuine ignorance can also be expressed by ekh “I don’t know”.

Negation in Isian is accomplished with the adverb an, as you’ll recall, and this extends neatly into the realm of the question. We can just as easily ask so an il til? “aren’t you there?” We don’t have to worry about double negatives, though; proper responses would be sha, en or num, an en.

Isian even gives you a couple of tags. These are highly discouraged in formal speech or writing, but common among friends and family. The one that concerns us most is ey, which works like English “isn’t it” and friends: so il til, ey? thus means something more like “you’re there, aren’t you?”

For the more general wh-questions, we have a family of fronted interrogatives:

con “who” (only used for people)
cal “what” (never used for people)
cazal “where”
carec “when”
canyo “why”
cadro “how”

These go at the front of a sentence, which is otherwise unchanged, except for a bit of rising intonation at the end. An example of each might be:

con so il? “who are you?”
cal to e? “what was that?”
cazal so wasal? “where are you going?”
carec is cosa? “when did they come?”
canyo so kil to “why do you say that?”
cadro so il “how are you?”

The more formal a situation, the more answer is required. Common speech can get away with single-word answers, but writing might need whole sentences. The rules are broadly similar to those in English, but Isian is overall more relaxed.

Ardari

Ardari’s interrogatives are built around the particle qö, which begins all questions. For yes-no questions, it’s all you need, other than the requisite intonation: qö sy pren èllè? “are you there?”

Valid responses will start with è “yes” or kyu “no”, usually repeating the verb in more formal speech and writing. Thus, there is a distinction between è “yes” and è èllo “yes, I am” in Ardari.

The same particles, when placed at the end of a sentence, can also function as tags expressing an expected reply. In these cases, the question particle isn’t needed, only the intonation: sy pren èllè, kyu? “you’re there, aren’t you?”

For wh-questions, the basic premise remains the same. The particle qö goes at the beginning of the sentence, but the question word stays where it is. As for the question words themselves, Ardari has eight of them, shown here with examples:

qom “what”: qö qom pralman èlla? “what was that?”
qomban “who”: qö sy qombane èllè? “who are you?” (lit. “you are whom?”)
qomren “where”: qö sy qomren chinès? “where are you going?”
qomlajch “when”: qö ajo qomlajch toned? “when did they come?”
qoman “which”: qö sy qomane lyebè? “which do you like?”
qabre “how”: qö ysar zalman qabre troded? “how did they know that?”
qömjas “how many”: qö a qömjasòn byzrell perada? “how many books does he have?”
quld “why”: qö ti quld ajnadyt? “why was she crying?”

Of these eight, qom, qomban, and qomren inflect like neuter nouns, while qoman and qönjas act like neuter adjectives. The rest function as adverbs. In all cases, if they would be the first word in a sentence, Ardari allows you to omit the initial qö, as it’s subsumed into the question word itself. (They’re all derived from it, in case you hadn’t noticed.)

Answering these questions requires only the bare minimum. Ardari is very lenient on how you reply, and even in formal situations you can get away with a response of only a word or two. For instance, qö sy qomren chinès? above can be answered with just mynin tyèk “my house”. Even inflections can be largely ignored in this form, though you’ll need them for an extended answer: my mynin tyèke lim chinos.

One added wrinkle involves single-word answers of pronouns. In this case, Ardari uses the vocative, which otherwise doesn’t appear often. Thus, qö sy qombane èllè? can be answered with myne “Me!” Simple my, on the other hand, would be ungrammatical.

Next up

I know the question you might be asking right now. “What’s in the next part?” The truth is, I don’t know yet. I’m thinking about taking a bit of a diversion into more general conlanging issues. We’ll get back to the step-by-step guide to making languages a little bit down the road. Whatever I decide, I’ll see you next week.

On writing and dialects

I’ve been seriously attempting to write fiction for over five years now, and I’m still learning new things about the craft all the time. One of those things concerns my own style of writing, and it’s the main reason I object to one of the fundamental maxims of creative writing.

“Writing itself isn’t the hard part,” the saying goes. To some extent, that’s true. Coming up with a believable, interesting, story with believable, interesting characters is hard. Planning, plotting, characterizing, worldbuilding, all of that is supremely difficult, to the point where the mechanics of writing get lost in the noise. Especially nowadays, when everything is done on a computer, and most “writing” is actually typing on a keyboard, the physical act of writing is a small fraction of the effort that goes into creating a story.

Move one level up, to the words you’re putting on-screen, and things don’t really change all that much. You’re still in the rote mechanics of writing, but now at the level of grammar and syntax. As long as you can touch-type (and you’ll eventually learn how, if you keep at it long enough), writing—typing, if you prefer—the words is almost reflexive. As long as you speak English, putting the right words together comes naturally. Except that it doesn’t, and therein lies my problem.

Southern Man

The reason is simple: when I write a story in “standard” English (for me, that would be General American), I’m not speaking my native language. I’m American, and I’m effectively monolingual, despite a couple of years of Spanish classes in high school and fifteen more of amateur linguistic study. It’s not that I can’t speak or write English, it’s that I’m not used to speaking the standard.

As we say around here, I’m Southern-born and Southern-bred. I’m a child of the South. That’s where I was born, it’s where I live, and it’s probably where I’ll die. And even if you don’t know the first thing about American regional politics, you likely know about the Southern dialect.

It’s not different enough from the rest of the country to really be considered its own language. I can still understand just about any other American speaker, as well as most other English dialects (although those from northern England and parts of Australia sometimes baffle me), and they can likewise understand the vast majority of what I’m saying. But it is different, and it can be startling if you don’t know what to expect. Just like I sometimes struggle to figure out some of the words Jeremy Clarkson is saying, I know that plenty of people would need subtitles for Hatfields & McCoys. (Technically, that’s Appalachian, not Southern, but I’ll get to that in a minute.)

In writing, it doesn’t seem quite so bad, since the pronunciation differences, like the characteristic Southern drawl, don’t show up. But phonology isn’t the only part of a dialect. Words matter, despite what the writing self-help guys say. Y’all, for example, is the quintessential Southern word, yet I don’t think I’ve used it once in any of the stories I’ve written since the start of the decade. Why? Because that would immediately mark the whole work as “dialectal” or, worse, “substandard”. And I don’t think I want that.

Talking the talk

But sticking to the standard—whatever that is for English—means that I have to write at a level I’m not exactly comfortable with. It gets even worse because “Southern” refers to not one single dialect, but a group of them. Where I grew up, which isn’t all that far from where I’m living now, the local speech is closer to Appalachian, the talk of hillbillies living in the mountains, than the “General Southern” of the Deep South area that stretches from Charleston to Jackson. Appalachian has its own speech patterns, its own curious vocabulary, and a few peculiar grammatical constructions that make it a dialect of its own. (And that has slight regional differences, but those need not concern us here.)

So I’m not “going up a level” when I’m writing in standard American English. I’m going up two. I have to raise my standards just to get to what is widely considered the least standard of all the American dialects. Then I need to go from there up to the true literary language. It’s a kind of diglossia, if you think about it. I speak the homespun mix of Southern and Appalachian at home, among friends and family; its how I was raised to talk. For talking to others in the region, I use a more generic Southern, dropping the Appalachianisms while keeping the drawl and the y’all. Again, I learned that by osmosis: listening to people, watching the local news, etc.

Neither my home “idiolect” nor the Southern dialect are written, except in the written emulation of speech. They don’t need to be. That’s not what they’re for. But standard English is different. I don’t hear it spoken around me casually, only formally or in the media. I learned it in school, and I had to learn how it differs from the English I’m used to.

The crux of the problem, then, is this: where is the line between dialect and language? I’ve found that, when you’re writing, it’s a lot closer than you might think. I’m constantly slowed by the internal translation from Southern to General American, and it is not a perfect match. It’s the little things that trip me up, like the past perfect (in my spoken dialect, had went is an acceptable substitution for had gone), -ward versus -wards (Southerners that I’ve heard prefer towards, but most Americans use toward), and serial verbs in the future tense (try to or try and? go get or go and get?). At times, it really is like I’m writing in a different language.

(That’s not even including the Americanisms I find illogical. Like British writers, I consistently keep punctuation out of quotation marks, unless it’s part of the quote. I’m told that this is actually common practice among programmers. That makes sense, because programming languages won’t let you do it the “wrong” way. HTML, unfortunately, explicitly supports “Americanized” closing tags.)

Plain speech

Of course, the creative part of creative writing is always going to be the most important. There’s no denying that. I tend to write in a seat-of-the-pants style, where I don’t plan much in advance, instead letting things happen naturally. (I’ll talk about that in a future post.) But that very style means that I’m often stuck, as I have to stop typing to think of a name or a part of a character’s back-story. The dialectal difference is just one more thing to worry about.

If I were a better writer, I might be able to turn this liability into an advantage. Maybe there’s a market out there for books written in a Southern style, full of colloquialisms and colorful figures of speech. I don’t know, but I doubt I could be the one to pull it off. For now, I’ll stick with the standard, as hard as it is. It’s not art if you don’t suffer, right?