My language is a language of magic, however it's also a noble tongue that was used to store information as well. In some places it's also spoken as a native language. I'm far from finished with it, but I'll talk about some of the things that I think make unique. I made the grammar fairly simple, SVO, no conjugation blah blah, however, I think I have a few systems that make it very intuitive, straightforward and interesting. Spellspeak has something similar to grammatical gender, except it fucking makes sense. Nouns can be placed into specific classes based off of what the speaker knows about it. This changes the article to show if the noun is objectual, mundane, sapient, sentient, magical, righteous, evil, otherworldly, male, female, or neutral. For example in the sentence. "I fell because of the magical floor." The phrase, "the magical floor." would be "Vae glaav."
1:11 there actually is one instance of a new magic being created in Skyrim. Dragonrend, the shout used to defeat Alduin, was created entirely by humans
Not to mention Harry Potter, where a key plot point (spoilers ahead for Book and Film 6) is that Professor Snape creates his own spells - for instance, he invented the combat spell Sectumsempra.
I recommend use of an optative mood as well as imperative to express a magical purpose. Some spells are ordering something to appear, disappear or change; others about wishing something to be the case. In fact a language could have a special performative mood for performative sentence type, and spellcasting could be another thing like promising or swearing an oath. Swearing oaths are traditionally associated with seeking magical or divine help after all. On that same subject - a way to mark a sentence as specifically magical in intent, and hence separate it from innocent language, would be to require invoking a power in an instrumental role - "By the power of [God/the Devil/Zeus/Greyskull etc.]" The adverb "hereby" is essentially performative in meaning and could do a similar job: "I hereby command[perf.] fire to come into being".
Great video. Amazing analysis on how to both construct and break down a constructed language for a magic system and find an application for it. However, I for one find FUS RO DAH to be a very compelling way of telling someone "I would like to throw you off a cliff." in Dragon-tongue.
This was great! This has just sent me on a crazy inspiration chain along with your video about teleportation warfare, so I'm pretty psyched. I thought all the good worldbuilding/conlanging/etc topics were covered but I was definitely wrong; it's amazing how each of the videos had things I just completely didn't think of before. And I gotta say, you can make these FAST. I'll be waiting for the next one!
The language I'm working on is edited in the conworld to a magical language. The natural conlang was changed to have special cases and moods and stuff (not sure about the exact things yet) to be able to cast magic with it and be more regular to prevent mistakes.
Would a system where speakers of a particular language have to first invoke a magical entity's name(god, spirit, ect)then tell them to do a thing count as a magical language? For an example, instead of saying "ignite" in an imperative to light a fire, you have to directly address some sort of fire spirit then give it the "ignite" command to light a fire.) This hypothetical language might have a variety of formality divisions when it comes to vocabulary and grammer, so in order to cast some sort of spell you need to know the entity's name, and kind of speaking register you have to address it in. which includes whether or not it will respond to a direct command or a suggestion. As well as if you need to refer to the entity with some kind of honorific or epithet.
It's an interesting thought, I don't really see any reason you couldn't call that a magical language if speaking to the god requires that language specifically. It does bring up the question of how gods choose their magical language though, like there could be a whole set of different languages priests have to learn to communicate with the gods or similar gods could have the same languages, creating linguistic divisions in priesthoods.
the lack of any logic behind spells in harry potter was one of the reasons i never got into the series as a kid. i was much more interested in series like eragon which was the first time i ever encountered a hard magic system. the series even has a subplot where the main character accidentally curses someone instead of blessing them because he gets the grammar wrong in his spell.
I don't see the difference. Both series have magic words that do magic stuff. If you get a spell wrong in Harry Potter, it doesn't work or blows up in your face. This is even shown in the first book and movie with Wingardium Leviosa. I am way more familiar with the Harry Potter spells than Eragon since I've only seen the poorly adapted movie.
In addition to marking the object on the verb perhaps a mood that indicates the strength of the spell as well as what it does. So fire{at you by my hands intensely} I shoot a fire ball or fire{upon you} the person is engulfed in flames fire{within your spirit} you are motivated. Heal{upon you} you are healed. Heal{within your spirit} you are comforted Heal{you by my hands} I can aim where the healing energy flows Heal{you by their hands} energy is siphoned from someone else and redirected at you. because their is a marker for the. intensity of the magic perhaps to get away with speaking normally they use the form of the words which are the least magical. I find the idea really fun to play around with
The Belgariad is interesting because it mixes magic with language, but instead of being the word that causes the magic its the intent. Or in the book they say, "the will of the word". And it goes even farther showing that you dont even need to say the word, just have the will for the magic.
Hi, please, can you add subtitles? For a non English like myself this video gave me a headache I am really interested in your work but it was very difficult to follow so please But if it is too much work I am sorry, you can just ignore me
I do have scripts for the videos so it shouldn't be too difficult, I'll see about adding subtitles to the next video once it's done and then go back to the others if I can get them working properly
@@ABAlphaBeta It's definitely called BlackChancery on my system, there might be different versions though, the file says it's version 'Altsys Metamorphosis:4/30/93' if that helps
Shouldn't 'heal' be either second or third person subject, passive voice, i.e., 'be healed'? It's starting to seem like a good ritual language is all about creative use of prosody and morphosyntactics. That bit about language evolution at the end - especially about people learning fragments of a dead language just for the magic - reminds me of medieval priests reciting Latin liturgy they learned phonetically by rote without understanding a word of it.
One way I thing is a good way to avoid pronouns especially "I" is to address a patron god. So instead of a spell like "I summon fire" have "lord Ignis bring fire".
i was working on a magic system in which u could forge magic stones which have a special ability, and then there has to be a special command being carved into the stones and bc of that every brand has their own commands based on their dialect and abbreviations, of which there are a lot because it is hard to carve a long text into a small stone so for example "reves e dnart" (lit. sun may burn you) became in 1 brand "revert" while in an other brand it became "ve'edna", this spell makes someone burn like if they have been in the sun for weeks, literally bruning their skin away, but its easily stopped by not showing any skin to the sun later brands started to specialize their stone types and made basically entirely new languages so u got dna, which is BURN.2S.OBJ attach the optative e- in front of it to get "edna" (which is a spell that lets something inflammable light on fire which u touch), it literally means "may you burn", but if u put something before that u get how u want to burn something, for example with the sun "ve"- to get ve'edna with a glottal stop in between, tho they r making it so u can say "vēdna" instead, which saves a character in their script and is a phonological change, tho in some dailects it should be said as "veinda" with their changes so as the dialects spread further and further it becomes harder to write it down and say it out loud, especially since u can only have 1 sound per character
btw how the carving works is similar to computer languages u got wild magic (binary in computers) which u can use, but u need to order the wild magic to use it and so u need special letters to do so (like how we use 0 and 1, tho they have far more than just 2 components), then u order those letters into components, which r linked to sounds in the language, those sounds r linked back to other letters which r used to write it with so u gotta do the entire process of ordering it every time u want to use a different sound or symbol
If you wanna make fire, you just yell bazinga.
blazinga!
brisingr!
Instablaster
In Wiz Biz, it was, "Bippity, boppity, boo."
That's how you get hit
My language is a language of magic, however it's also a noble tongue that was used to store information as well. In some places it's also spoken as a native language. I'm far from finished with it, but I'll talk about some of the things that I think make unique.
I made the grammar fairly simple, SVO, no conjugation blah blah, however, I think I have a few systems that make it very intuitive, straightforward and interesting.
Spellspeak has something similar to grammatical gender, except it fucking makes sense. Nouns can be placed into specific classes based off of what the speaker knows about it. This changes the article to show if the noun is objectual, mundane, sapient, sentient, magical, righteous, evil, otherworldly, male, female, or neutral.
For example in the sentence. "I fell because of the magical floor." The phrase, "the magical floor." would be "Vae glaav."
After learning how to code, I really want a magic language that is coding
you should check out noita
You’d have to recite a whole paragraph just for a single fireball lmao
@@kindlyevilbgmfunction summon(fireball) {
range = 10;
speed = 8;
impact = 30;
size = 10;
}
1:11 there actually is one instance of a new magic being created in Skyrim. Dragonrend, the shout used to defeat Alduin, was created entirely by humans
Not to mention Harry Potter, where a key plot point (spoilers ahead for Book and Film 6) is that Professor Snape creates his own spells - for instance, he invented the combat spell Sectumsempra.
I recommend use of an optative mood as well as imperative to express a magical purpose. Some spells are ordering something to appear, disappear or change; others about wishing something to be the case.
In fact a language could have a special performative mood for performative sentence type, and spellcasting could be another thing like promising or swearing an oath. Swearing oaths are traditionally associated with seeking magical or divine help after all.
On that same subject - a way to mark a sentence as specifically magical in intent, and hence separate it from innocent language, would be to require invoking a power in an instrumental role - "By the power of [God/the Devil/Zeus/Greyskull etc.]" The adverb "hereby" is essentially performative in meaning and could do a similar job: "I hereby command[perf.] fire to come into being".
Great video. Amazing analysis on how to both construct and break down a constructed language for a magic system and find an application for it. However, I for one find FUS RO DAH to be a very compelling way of telling someone "I would like to throw you off a cliff." in Dragon-tongue.
This was great! This has just sent me on a crazy inspiration chain along with your video about teleportation warfare, so I'm pretty psyched. I thought all the good worldbuilding/conlanging/etc topics were covered but I was definitely wrong; it's amazing how each of the videos had things I just completely didn't think of before. And I gotta say, you can make these FAST. I'll be waiting for the next one!
The language I'm working on is edited in the conworld to a magical language. The natural conlang was changed to have special cases and moods and stuff (not sure about the exact things yet) to be able to cast magic with it and be more regular to prevent mistakes.
This was great, please consider making more videos about magical languages!
Would a system where speakers of a particular language have to first invoke a magical entity's name(god, spirit, ect)then tell them to do a thing count as a magical language?
For an example, instead of saying "ignite" in an imperative to light a fire, you have to directly address some sort of fire spirit then give it the "ignite" command to light a fire.)
This hypothetical language might have a variety of formality divisions when it comes to vocabulary and grammer, so in order to cast some sort of spell you need to know the entity's name, and kind of speaking register you have to address it in. which includes whether or not it will respond to a direct command or a suggestion. As well as if you need to refer to the entity with some kind of honorific or epithet.
It's an interesting thought, I don't really see any reason you couldn't call that a magical language if speaking to the god requires that language specifically. It does bring up the question of how gods choose their magical language though, like there could be a whole set of different languages priests have to learn to communicate with the gods or similar gods could have the same languages, creating linguistic divisions in priesthoods.
the lack of any logic behind spells in harry potter was one of the reasons i never got into the series as a kid. i was much more interested in series like eragon which was the first time i ever encountered a hard magic system. the series even has a subplot where the main character accidentally curses someone instead of blessing them because he gets the grammar wrong in his spell.
I don't see the difference. Both series have magic words that do magic stuff. If you get a spell wrong in Harry Potter, it doesn't work or blows up in your face. This is even shown in the first book and movie with Wingardium Leviosa. I am way more familiar with the Harry Potter spells than Eragon since I've only seen the poorly adapted movie.
Thank you! It's very good
So proto-afro-asiatric is analogous to indo-european, is that right? It's the primordial language of the afro-asiatic languages?
Nice video bud
In addition to marking the object on the verb perhaps a mood that indicates the strength of the spell as well as what it does. So fire{at you by my hands intensely} I shoot a fire ball or fire{upon you} the person is engulfed in flames fire{within your spirit} you are motivated.
Heal{upon you} you are healed. Heal{within your spirit} you are comforted
Heal{you by my hands} I can aim where the healing energy flows
Heal{you by their hands} energy is siphoned from someone else and redirected at you.
because their is a marker for the. intensity of the magic perhaps to get away with speaking normally they use the form of the words which are the least magical.
I find the idea really fun to play around with
The Belgariad is interesting because it mixes magic with language, but instead of being the word that causes the magic its the intent. Or in the book they say, "the will of the word". And it goes even farther showing that you dont even need to say the word, just have the will for the magic.
Hi, please, can you add subtitles? For a non English like myself this video gave me a headache
I am really interested in your work but it was very difficult to follow so please
But if it is too much work I am sorry, you can just ignore me
I do have scripts for the videos so it shouldn't be too difficult, I'll see about adding subtitles to the next video once it's done and then go back to the others if I can get them working properly
What's that fancy font you use at 4:36 for the word Kxin ?
It's called Black Chancery
@@kayinth9136 Are you sure? I also use Black Chancery in my videos and it never does decorated capitals like that
@@ABAlphaBeta It's definitely called BlackChancery on my system, there might be different versions though, the file says it's version 'Altsys Metamorphosis:4/30/93' if that helps
I think a language made for magic would place more importance object and verb and drop the subject if it's the 1st person singular pronoun
Shouldn't 'heal' be either second or third person subject, passive voice, i.e., 'be healed'?
It's starting to seem like a good ritual language is all about creative use of prosody and morphosyntactics.
That bit about language evolution at the end - especially about people learning fragments of a dead language just for the magic - reminds me of medieval priests reciting Latin liturgy they learned phonetically by rote without understanding a word of it.
I put it with a first person subject so it's like I heal X, so if another person is the object you heal them or if you're the object it heals yourself
@@kayinth9136 I noticed. My point is there are probably grammatical structures more fit for purpose.
One way I thing is a good way to avoid pronouns especially "I" is to address a patron god. So instead of a spell like "I summon fire" have "lord Ignis bring fire".
Conlanging
:)
i was working on a magic system in which u could forge magic stones which have a special ability, and then there has to be a special command being carved into the stones and bc of that every brand has their own commands based on their dialect and abbreviations, of which there are a lot because it is hard to carve a long text into a small stone
so for example "reves e dnart" (lit. sun may burn you) became in 1 brand "revert" while in an other brand it became "ve'edna", this spell makes someone burn like if they have been in the sun for weeks, literally bruning their skin away, but its easily stopped by not showing any skin to the sun
later brands started to specialize their stone types and made basically entirely new languages
so u got dna, which is BURN.2S.OBJ attach the optative e- in front of it to get "edna" (which is a spell that lets something inflammable light on fire which u touch), it literally means "may you burn", but if u put something before that u get how u want to burn something, for example with the sun "ve"- to get ve'edna with a glottal stop in between, tho they r making it so u can say "vēdna" instead, which saves a character in their script and is a phonological change, tho in some dailects it should be said as "veinda" with their changes so as the dialects spread further and further it becomes harder to write it down and say it out loud, especially since u can only have 1 sound per character
btw how the carving works is similar to computer languages
u got wild magic (binary in computers) which u can use, but u need to order the wild magic to use it and so u need special letters to do so (like how we use 0 and 1, tho they have far more than just 2 components), then u order those letters into components, which r linked to sounds in the language, those sounds r linked back to other letters which r used to write it with
so u gotta do the entire process of ordering it every time u want to use a different sound or symbol