Need a language for your fantasy campaign?

[McCoy]

Back when I was running Runequest, any time I had a map or inscription made by dwarves, everything was in English, but with the Futhark runes insted of the Roman alphabet.

Got to where my players could read Futhark as quickly as large print.

Now I wish I had known about Solresol, also know as langue musicale universale. Possibly the first created language, definitely the oldest surviving one, was invented by Jean Francois Sudre (1798-1866), a French music teacher, early in the 19th century. The "alphabet" is the seven-tone scale, the familiar Do Re Me Fa Sol La Si (in English we call that last note Ti, but I am told much of the non-english world calls it Si). If you adopt Solresol as your fantasy language, your fantasy alphabet only needs seven letters.

And if you use 7 letters for the seven sylables, most words will be five letters or less.

Good intro, with links to grammar and vocabulary, can be found at Mila la sidomido lasi Solresol! (http://www.ptialaska.net/~srice/solresol/intro.htm)

[McCoy]

Do refasi?

[keithcurtis]

I tried to compose an answer, but couldn't find a single word I wanted to use in the small E:SRS dictionary.

Interesting, but in a purely academic sort of way.

Keith "cute" Curtis

[AlHazred]

It's the kind of thing I'd use for a purely musical society. Like the one in the Belgariad, the island nation that Brand rules in the beginning of the series.

[Thia Halmades]

We used ... Suldovian for your the Sea Orks in my campaign (which also seems to be the source of the word "Klaive" from White Wolf, as their word for sword is astoundingly similar - too close phonetically to be a coincidence). JRR Tolkein developed his own Elven, although I generally use Latin. Lastly, I actually bothered to learn a little Romany (aka Gypsy) for running my Ravenloft campaign.

[Curufea]

I prefer real world languages, as they have the cultural roots and backgrounds from which language naturally grows.

Language and culture are too intermingled to be successfully isolated and still kept comfortably believable.

[McCoy]

Language and culture are too intermingled to be successfully isolated and still kept comfortably believable.
I disagree. Look at how much of Norman French culture survived translation into English, even with a few amusing mistranslations ("glass" for "squirrelskin," to cite one well known example).

[keithcurtis]

In that particular case, I think I prefer the mistranslation, regardless of how comfortable the original might be.

Keith "Can't imagine cutting a heel or a toe over it either" Curtis

[McCoy]

In that particular case, I think I prefer the mistranslation, regardless of how comfortable the original might be.

Keith "Can't imagine cutting a heel or a toe over it either" Curtis
Still seems to me an impractical choice for dancing shoes.

[keithcurtis]

Still seems to me an impractical choice for dancing shoes.

meh. They're majikal.

Keith "Bibiddy-bobbidy-boo" Curtis

[McCoy]

And now I'm disappointed. I had wondered if the signature five-note greeting in Close Encounters of the Third Kind was Solresol. After searching the web, apparently not. The G, A, F, F, C sequence was picked because Spielberg and Williams simply liked the sound of it. Can't find a translation for Sollafafado.

[Kristopher]

I need a language that would serve as a good basis for something that's opposite of most very old human languages, which seem to have a lot of short words and a lot of B and P and G noises. Something with a lot of long, even compound words... sybillant, smooth, kinda dry.

[McCoy]

I need a language that would serve as a good basis for something that's opposite of most very old human languages, which seem to have a lot of short words and a lot of B and P and G noises. Something with a lot of long, even compound words... sybillant, smooth, kinda dry.
Solresol has no b, p or g sound, but the words do tend to be short. Maybe you could make a lot of longer, compound words. Very smooth and sybillant thought.

[Pavanne]

I shall have to examine it in detail when I have more time.

Thank you for pointing this out. :)

[McCoy]

I shall have to examine it in detail when I have more time.

Thank you for pointing this out. :)
You're welcome.

[Evil Steve]

A quick swap of Go for Do, Be for Mi and Pe for Ti would still give you Solresol. And be slightly harder for the PCs to track down IRL.

[McCoy]

A quick swap of Go for Do, Be for Mi and Pe for Ti would still give you Solresol. And be slightly harder for the PCs to track down IRL.
Good point.

[Kristopher]

Partial threadjack: I am in need of a real language, any language, which tends towards longer words, and is atonal, to base something on. Dry and sibilent is better.

[Dale A. Ward]

Partial threadjack: I am in need of a real language, any language, which tends towards longer words, and is atonal, to base something on. Dry and sibilent is better.
I was going to suggest Welsh Gaelic until you mentioned dry and sibilant. It has, quite possibly, some of the world's longest (and most unpronounceable) words in the history of mankind.

I honestly can't think of a human language that meets those requirements, although I won't say that one doesn't exist.

[Kristopher]

I was going to suggest Welsh Gaelic until you mentioned dry and sibilant. It has, quite possibly, some of the world's longest (and most unpronounceable) words in the history of mankind.

I honestly can't think of a human language that meets those requirements, although I won't say that one doesn't exist.

There might not be a human language that meets those requirements.

Part of the point is that it needs to sound unlike all those ancient languages with all the short words, and all the Bs and Ps and Gs.

As much as I'm fascinated by the Sumerians, their langauge is a perfect example of the opposite of what I want. Looking at a listing of Sumerian words (http://www.sumerian.org/sumerlex.htm), many of them can be represented with two letters, and many of those begin or end with B or G.

[Cancer]

You might try Thai. Thai proper names tend to be longish. If this is a carryover from the language it might be a choice. I know nothing about the language, though.

[Kristopher]

You might try Thai. Thai proper names tend to be longish. If this is a carryover from the language it might be a choice. I know nothing about the language, though.

I'll look at it. What I know of Thai isn't promising for what I need, though.


Part of the problem I'm encountering is that normally, I get a lot of milage out of dabbling in something, extrapolating, and adapting it to what I need. The study of language doesn't look to be something many people only get a passing familiarity with -- it seems to be pretty much the realm of people who dedicate a lot of time to it. For example, most dictionaries and translation resources assume that you are familiar with the alphabet/script/writing system of the language you're looking at, and don't care about phoenetic transciptions. This makes it rather hard to find the kind of resources I need.

[Kristopher]

I had a basic idea of where I was originally going with this, but making up hundreds or thousands of words from scratch is a daunting task. The sound I'm going for is something like this (keep in mind that all the vowels are short if they're single, long if they're double):

"Zhenniver seh kwinn Zathilfskahn, sahn nin thenesh en kezen vor...vii entrel nef Zathevannil."

[Kristopher]

http://www.ancientscripts.com/

[Curufea]

Nice!

[PhilFleischmann]

And now I'm disappointed. I had wondered if the signature five-note greeting in Close Encounters of the Third Kind was Solresol. After searching the web, apparently not. The G, A, F, F, C sequence was picked because Spielberg and Williams simply liked the sound of it. Can't find a translation for Sollafafado.
Just let the meanings slip a little:
if the at what = ?
if bad what = "If something bad happens, so what?"
if snow no = "Don't (do something) if it's snowing."
always at what = "Always involved in something."


I need a language that would serve as a good basis for something that's opposite of most very old human languages, which seem to have a lot of short words and a lot of B and P and G noises. Something with a lot of long, even compound words... sybillant, smooth, kinda dry.
Hawaiian? It has long words and no B or G. It does have P, but you could substitute some other consonant if you like. Hawaiian only has 14 letters: 5 vowels and 9 consonants. And there are never two consonants in a row, and all words end with a vowel. This means that there are relatively fewer possible combinations of letters available to make words (relative to English or many other languages), which means words have to be longer in general to differentiate them.

The same would be true for Solresol - only 7 letters means that there can be no more than 3125 different 5-letter words. You'd probably need at least 10 times that many for a full language with a minimal practical range of expression.

[PhilFleischmann]

The same would be true for Solresol - only 7 letters means that there can be no more than 3125 different 5-letter words.
:o Whoops! Math error on my part. I used 5^7, rather than 7^5, like I should have. There can be 16,807 five-letter words in Solresol. Which still isn't quite enough for a robust language, but if you use up to 6-letter words, you can have 117,649 of them (plus all the shorter words), which should be more than enough. A typical pocket dictionary contains about 40,000 words, which is about the size of an average person's vocabulary.

The benefit of Solresol is that because each letter is a syllable, any combination of letters is guaranteed to be pronouncable, and thus potentially could be a word. Unlike in English (or most other languages) where a random string of letters, such as "LTFMUBBBDV" isn't and can't.

The potential problem of restricting the length of words (in Solresol or any other language) is that just about any combination of letters is likely to be a word, which can easily lead to confusion if mistakes are made (which they inevitably will be). For example, if you see the word "tabel" written, you can probably correctly assume the the intended word was "table". However, if "tabel" is also a word, you might not be able to tell that a different word was intended. If I say "silafa" when I meant "sollafa," there's no way you can tell I made a mistake, so you don't really get my intended message.