Creating a Naming Language Builder for my Story Worlds || Conlanging Vlog 1
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- Опубліковано 18 чер 2024
- Welcome to my first foray into conlanging, specifically with naming languages! I am going to go through my goals for creating naming languages for my novels, the program I created to build these, and show you the first naming language I am making! Future videos will dive in deeper as I continue to expand this program and the naming languages I can build.
IPA Chart: International Phonetic Association, CC BY-SA 3.0 creativecommons.org/licenses/..., via Wikimedia Commons
--- Conlanging Resources: ---
How to Create a Language: Dothraki Inventor Explains | WIRED
• How to Create a Langua...
On Worldbuilding: Place Names - countries, cities, places by Hello Future Me
• On Worldbuilding: Plac...
Language Creation: The Basics by Artifexian (and he has tons of other videos too)
• Language Creation: The...
The Art of Language Invention: From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building by David J. Peterson
www.amazon.com/Art-Language-I...
The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rodenfelder
www.amazon.com/Language-Const...
00:00 The Need for Naming Languages
04:59 Conlang Basics
13:34 Program Tour
26:56 My First Naming Language
42:24 More Langs to Come
----- LINKS -----
Website: www.madelinejameswrites.com/
Instagram: / author_mjames - Розваги
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Nice tool. I'm a long time conlanger, with a linguistics degree, and I'm actually primarily interested in onomastics (the linguistics of names). I've been on-and-off working on an analogue tool to help people come up with linguistically plausible names without having any linguistic knowledge at all. It's always interesting to see how other folks approach it. I have often found existing name generators lacking in various ways and have always envied folks that can write their own.
A few notes you may find useful:
1. If you want a rule to describe "s", you can use the word "sibilant". This refers to all s-like sounds, such as z,sh,zh and a bunch of others found in other languages. It's a useful category, because a) rules tend to affect categories of sounds rather than single sounds (though some categories are so small that it appears to only a single sound in any given language), and b) it's not only "s" that is weird, that's just the letter that's most commonly used to write that particular weirdness in English (and a few other European languages.)
2. It's totally ok to have two morphemes that are identical in form (look and sounds the same). This kind of syncretism can definitely cause ambiguity and be confusing, but used very sparingly, I think it adds a layer a verisimilitude to a conlang without adding a lot to the workload. How easy that would be to code in Java, I would never know, though.
3. There are a couple of other "conlangy" things that can help with naming languages. I think these two things are the most useful because they are highly productive, allowing a large number of additional plausible options from a small set of additional rules. They are:
3a. A set of rules defining how roots combine. Root+affix is easy, but what happens when you have root+root? Do you just stick them together or do you need an infix between them? Which one forms the head of the word - is "water+market" a market selling water, or a lake near a market(English only allows the first reading, other languages only allow the second)? Do you always write them as single word or do you write them split up (English has compounds words just as long as German ones, but English puts spaces between each root and German doesn't, so the German ones look longer)? Are there different rules for nouns, verbs and adjectives, or can all be joined in the same method? Can roots even be combined (some languages strongly prefer not to compound roots at all, and others only allow a single root in names)?
3b. Are there variant forms of common affixes that a phonologically conditioned? For example, if /f/ always becomes /p/ after nasals, then a suffix starting with an /f/ will instead start with a /p/ when attached to any word that starts ends with a nasal. The larger the set of phonological contexts that trigger the change, the more apparent it's going to be that there are multiple variants of the same affix.
Anyway, I hope you continue with your conlanging journey, and build a great many wonderful naming languages from it!
I can never turn down advice from an expert! Thank you so much. Sibilant sounds way better and I'm glad there's actually a term for what I was finding! And thank you for suggestions, I like the idea of playing around with those rules and I'm going to try to add them into the program so I can use them for my main language! There's so much to learn but I hope I can keep building up my program with each language and add more options and rules. Thank you again for the input, I very sincerely appreciate it.
as a compsci major, and someone whos dabbled a bit in conlanging and linguistics this is utterly fascinating to me :)
☺️ definitely a merging of two interests haha
such a cool approach to a naming language! one of my favorite things about the worldbuilding community on UA-cam is how each creator brings their specific expertise to their process!
You are blowing me away with your commitment to world building!
Thank you ☺️
The distinctiveness of names being recognizable as being from specific regional languages is something I've leaned into with my own conlanguages. Most of the characters in my world can be reasonably identified as being from specific cultures or nations based on patterns in their names. A few neighbouring nations have similar sounding languages, but even in those cases, I prefer names which include distinctive elements to separate them.
Exactly! It helps a lot when peoples minds subconsciously figure out all those details on your own and you don't have to explain it as much
I haven't watched your entire video yet but I will. However, after your introduction the first thing that came to mind was to recommend Biblaridion's Conlang course to you. It's an eight part series, with each part between ten and twenty minutes.
For naming languages, it's likely you'll need a proto-language (mother language) first as that will generate the original name that'll then change over the years to your current name.
Tolkien had some fun with this when he generated Bree Hill and Chet Wood. A book, or a website, on British place names may be helpful.
Obviously, having written this and not yet, but I definitely will, watched your whole video you may have covered all this. Apologies if this is the case.
Thank you for the recommendation! I think I've watched a couple of those videos but I haven't finished them yet. I will put it on my list to do so!
I definitely haven't gotten into proto-languages yet, they sound really powerful though. I will want to figure out how to incorporate that at some point but it wasn't immediately necessary for this project based on how geographically separated the different nations are. I'm going to keep a couple of similarities between the main and invading nation languages to provide a hint of similarity but honestly there's going to be so few names I don't know if it will be noticeable either way. Hmm
@madelinejameswrites I've watched all your video now, and I don't need to change what I've said above.
Please treat yourself to two hours or so watching Biblaridion's Conlang course because I'm sure it'll inspire you. (Please keep a notebook nearby and be ready to press pause.) Proto-langs are fun because it can serve as your spell-language too. And the various changes a language can go through will give you distinct daughter languages (e.g. Romanian, Pashto and English are descended from a common ancestor) that have some similarities.
With place names, your jungle culture may have terms like clearing, crossing, ford, cave, camp, berry bushes, etc. Eventually moving to home, homestead, farm, etc. Place is rather useful. Your invaders may bring in terms like fort, castle, base, etc and maybe tack them on to the native name too (Bree hill again).
Your naming generator threw up some combinations which look nice. 'mrav' could be pronounced 'um rav' 'em rav' or it could be a vocalic constant (eg the 'thm' in rhythm).
When I've been generating names for The Parliament of Stars I took simple roots, say 'varan' then made variants, such as 'faran', 'valan' before adding a suffix that indicated gender (son, daughter, child) or a second component (priest, warrior, bear, sword).
I'm looking forward to seeing how this side of your work develops.
Oh, a good example of 'how not to do' place-names is The Kingdoms of Kalamar Atlas. It's a lovely book but many of the place-name elements mean city, town and village (eg -olen, -ven, -den) which looks made up. Much better to have homestead/dwelling place (hām), farm (tūn) and ford instead. Cites evolve from small settlements, as a general rule, so their name hearkens back to their origin.
OH YEAH LET'S GO! For what I'm doing this time, I'm straigtening wire to make feather shafts for my wings.
Oh nice!!
OMG Madeline the fact that you casually brought up a programming software to make your conglang is so god tier. I went to school for programming and music so it's always so nice to see other females coding :)!
😂 my ego will gladly accept that today. And Yes! We need more women in coding!
Additional comment on honorifics being attached to names. In my work in progress I run into this initially and do not explain it, however, as the story progresses, the meaning and use of "Ekia" and "Ekias" ("Lady" and "Lord" respectively) preceding a character's name does become apparent without unnecessary exposition.
That makes sense, I feel like you can definitely get away with that for a commonly used language where patterns can be picked up on! I definitely think I want to use some for my main language but I haven't decided exactly what they'll be yet
In my world I use the deities for cities. Example the first ruler of a clan of dwarves is named after their goddess. When I show different languages is in texts, Spells, names of places and ruines. Nüna-Bröl as an example would have have germanic sounds. phonetics. This is a very fun rabbit hole to fall into.
Oh that is fun for sure! And a good way to feed in myth/religion too
I've done syllable splatting in JavaScript in a webpage copy pasted in my blog, so this is waaaaaaaaay beyond that, but utterly fascinating
And I still feel like I'm only touching the tip of the iceberg 😅
Embarrassing example-
vincesalienzoo.blogspot.com/2023/12/adventure.html
In Russian culture, it's not very common to use the mother's name. By default, children are given their father's name. However, if the parents or the child themselves decide to use the mother's name, there is no gender division; a man can have his mother's name as a middle name. Nevertheless, in 99% of cases, the father's name is used.
Regarding suffixes, they are typically like "vich" and "vna", and they depend on the individual's gender, not the gender of the parent whose name is being used as a middle name:
Father's name Alexandr - male child: Alexandrovich; female child: Alexandrovna;
Andrey - m: Andreevich; f: Andreevna;
Mother's name Tatyana - m: Tatyanovich; f: Tatyanovna;
Lidya - m: Lidyevich; f: Lidyevna.
Thank you! I really appreciate it. I'll add that to my notes.
NIce video, it is a pity though about your poor relationship with the IPA. I loved the concept on your personal names; I thought that was nice, different and unique. I know what it takes to write a program to generate intellegible place names: I did it myself in Python.
It's definitely a lot for sure and thank you!!
Why do words in Russian never begin in 'a'? What about "Арбуз"(watermelon) or "Аист"(stork) etc. Or do you mean by that some old words that were originally Russian?
Hmm it was just the research I found about names, maybe it was incorrect! I'll have to look into it