By now you may have seen my âHow to Make
a Languageâ Series. The information presented in those videos
represents what took me years to learn through pure trial and error, and it was intended
to give any beginners a head-start by outlining all the steps to take when creating a naturalistic
conlang. However, just as important as discussing the
things you should do when making a conlang is detailing what you shouldnât do when
making a conlang, as there are a number of common perils that beginning conlangers might
fall victim to. And what better way to teach you how to avoid
these than to let you learn from my mistakes. Today, weâre going to have a look at Thandian,
the first conlang I ever made⌠and, Iâm not going to lie, this is going to hurt. This thing has been collecting dust on my
harddrive for years now, and to this day I still canât stand to look at it. But now, Iâm finally going to put aside
my shame and look back through this ill-begotten mess in the hope that anyone watching this
may avoid suffering the same fate that I did⌠and before Conlang Critic can somehow get
his hands on it. But before we get to the language itself,
letâs start with a little stalling â I mean, background. I first had the idea to make my own language
about 6 years ago. I was reading the Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien, and the thing that caught my attention
most of all was the portrayal and application of the elvish languages, which were featured
pervasively throughout the text. I had already known that Tolkien had created
his own languages for his legendarium, but this was the first evidence I had that there
was actual structure behind it. It clearly wasnât random gibberish, there
was very apparent systematicity to it, and it reinforced the feeling that Middle Earth
had an intricately fleshed-out history and background of which the reader was being exposed
to only a small fraction. And so I thought to myself, âwouldnât
it be cool if I could do something similar?â At the time I had a worldbuilding project
I was working on for an RPG group I was involved with, and I thought I would try my hand at
creating a language for the setting to pull off a similar effect. Now, by this point, the only language that
I understood the grammar of on a technical level was Latin, since Iâd studied it in
High school and tried to teach it to myself for a few years afterward. And so when it came to my own language, I
kept all the grammar of Latin intact and just changed the phonological form of the roots
and affixes, producing a one-to-one relex of Latin. The only aspect of grammar that I changed
was reducing Latinâs five declensions and four verb conjugations down to exactly 1 noun
declension and 1 verb conjugation, because why would I possibly want more than one? That would just be confusing. And so I happily went along coining new words
as I needed them and working with a grammar that I was familiar with. But that all changed when I went to Turkey
for the first time in 2013. It suddenly struck me one morning about 3
months before the trip, that I should try learning as much Turkish as I could in the
time I had, just to see how much I could actually accomplish. I had mixed success, but I kept on with it
even after I got back home and Iâm still steadily learning it to this day. But in studying Turkish, I was exposed to
linguistic features and structures that I never would have thought possible; things
like agglutination, negative conjugations, question auxiliaries, and evidentiality. This totally revolutionized my view of how
language could work. So I naturally decided to take all the new
features Iâd seen in Turkish and include them in my language as well. As I continued learning Turkish, I started
developing interest in other languages, Greek, Finnish, Mandarin, and Classical Nahuatl to
name a few. And all the new grammatical concepts I came
across were copied whole-sale into my burgeoning language. And as I did this, I found more and more satisfaction
in developing the language further, to the point of neglecting all the other elements
of the world I was creating. My language was no longer just a small facet
of the worldbuilding process, it became a hobby independent of the project it was a
part of. I would spend hours ravenously searching through
Wikipedia pages looking for new pieces of grammar, and every time I came across something
Iâd never seen before, I said to myself âwell, Iâve gotta put this in there tooâŚâ
even if it made absolutely no sense with how the language worked already. Oh, whatâs this?... Switch reference? Thatâs neat, Iâll throw that in as well,
even though I already have multiple systems of referent tracking... And whatâs that? Some languages distinguish alienable and inalienable
possession? Well Iâm going to use that too⌠even though
Iâve already got three different ways of marking possession⌠And this went on and on and on, until eventually
the language became so bloated and unwieldy, such a patchwork monstrosity crammed with
as many features as I could possibly squeeze in, most of which I didnât even fully understand,
that it became impossible to keep track of which strategy to use in which instances,
and even very simple sentences became difficult to translate, until finally, I had to take
a step back and see my beloved creation for what it had become â utter trash. And after investing a yearâs work into it,
I was forced to consign Thandian to an isolated corner of my conlanging folder where it has
festered ever sinceâŚuntil today. So lets take a closer look and dissect the
hulking corpse of this linguistic abomination to see what went so horribly wrong. Oh boy⌠what have I got myself into? Letâs start with theâŚuh⌠phonology,
if you could even call it that. This is the consonant inventory of Thandian. Does that seem familiar to you at all? Here, maybe this will help. Yep. Exactly the same as English. And the vowels arenât much better either,
basically Englishâs vowel inventory with a bit less variation. This seems to have been one area where I was
apparently reticent to deviate from English. At the time my understanding of phonology
more or less boiled down to âthereâs all the sounds we have in English, and then thereâs
a couple of other weird ones, but I wonât include any of those because I donât want
my language to be weird.â And of course, there was no allophonic variation
of any kind, at least none that I defined explicitly, and there were no rules defining
syllable shapes or phonotactics. I didnât even know how the IPA worked at
the time, so all that was well beyond me. I would have thought coming up with a bad
romanization system for a language that has pretty much exactly the same phonetic inventory
as English would be basically impossible, but somehow I managed it. E, I, and O, for [É], [ÉŞ] and [É] makes
enough sense, as does using a schwa for /É/, but the good stuff ends there. [ĂŚ] contrasts with [a], so I decided to represent
the former with an A, and the latter with a double A. And if there were ever any doubts that Iâm
a native English speaker, I decided to Romanize [u] and [i] with a double O and E respectively. And as if that wasnât bad enough, I chose
to represent the diphthongs ei, ai, and ou with macrons. My god. But the worst part was actually in the consonants. Clearly, I was influenced by Klingonâs use
of mixed case for its romanization, so I decided to use the same trick for any consonants I
didnât know how to Romanize, which turned out to consist of exactly one sound: the voiced
dental fricative [Ă°]. I wanted a way to differentiate it from the
voiceless dental fricative, which English spelling doesnât, so I decided to Romanize
it⌠with a capital TH. Yeah. Again, this was the only place where capital
letters were used to distinguish sounds, so when looking at the language written down,
youâre immediately confronted with all the capital THs that stick out like a sore thumb
and it looks atrocious. What was I thinking?! The only part of the language that at least
kind of holds up is the script. Itâs got a fairly consistent aesthetic to
it, and I went to the trouble of adding serifs to make it look like it was carved into stone,
which is what I was going for. You can tell I was trying for a sort of featural
script, where sounds with similar phonetic characteristics are represented with similar-looking
characters⌠except itâs kind of hard to encode phonetic information in symbols when
you have absolutely no idea how phonology works in the first place. So you can see that the sounds are grouped
based on which corner the intersection occurs in, so top left is post-alveolar fricatives
and affricates, top right is dental and alveolar fricatives, bottom left is alveolar and velar
stops, and bottom right are labial stops and fricatives. Of course, I just made these groupings based
on how similar I subjectively felt the sounds to be. I could have easily taken a quick glance at
the IPA to get a clearer idea of how the sounds were related, but for some reason I just didnât
care to do that. I was far more concerned with expanding the
grammar. And speaking of the grammar, thatâs where
things get even worse⌠After all the innumerable additions I pulled
from every language I could find resources for, this is how the grammar ended up. Yep. A list of stems on one side, and a list of
affixes on the other. Of course, it was all perfectly regular, and
didnât have any features that I deemed âirrationalâ, like grammatical gender or any form of agreement,
but damned if it didnât have everything else under the sun. Thandian has 6(!) different grammatical numbers:
singular, dual, paucal, plural, distributive, and collective, and these were marked on both
nouns and verbs. The verbal affixes include markers for the
subject and the object, and the object markers can also be used for indirect objects and
I guess other roles as well if you wanted. But all those same roles are also marked on
nouns via case marking, so thereâs a whole lot of double-marking going on. Nouns are marked for one of 15 cases. I remember seeing Finnishâs grammar for
the first time and being blown away by the sheer number of cases it had. Latinâs case system, the only one Iâd
known until that point and the one I had copied one-for-one, was miniscule by comparison,
so, not to be outdone, I decided I needed to have at least as many noun cases as Finnish. Itâs a good thing I didnât know about
Tsez at the time... for the sake of my own sanity. The cases include two separate genitives,
one for alienable possession and one for inalienable possession, one specifically to mark the topic
and comment of a copula, and two opposing trios of cases for discussing position and
motion in space, and the other for position and motion in time. This disentangling of time and space is actually
quite a persistent feature across the whole language. Like, for every adjective to do with dimensionality
there are two separate roots, one for space and one for time, which seemed like a good
idea when I first made it because theyâre two different concepts and therefore they
should get two different words. Which would be fine, and in fact even kind
of interesting for an auxlang or an engelang, but not for a naturalistic language; Iâm
not sure if a natural language has ever even existed that doesnât describe temporal relationships
in terms of spatial ones. And thereâs a bunch of things like that
that just come across as artificial, like how thereâs three different words for good:
one that means morally good, one that means well or favorable, and one that means adept
or skillful. Now this isnât necessarily unnaturalistic
and could be an interesting feature if there was etymology behind these words and how they
came to coexist, but here it just feels so forced and inorganic. I was clearly putting these differences in
just because I felt obligated to create as many distinctions as possible. Along those same lines, when I first made
the verb system, the past tenses consisted of the perfect, the imperfect, and the pluperfect,
ported over exactly as they were in Latin. But then I realized I didnât know whether
to use the perfect or imperfect to translate past simple sentences in English, so I made
a separate past simple tense to cope with that. And then I realized that I had no way of handling
past perfect continuous sentences, so I made a new aspect for that, and then I learned
about languages that have tenses that distinguish between the near past and far past, so then
I had to make those tenses as well, and the simple, completed, and continuous aspects
could be applied to all of those too⌠again, itâs not necessarily unnaturalistic to have
a language with all these different tenses, but I wasnât thinking about things in terms
of their evolution or usage, I was just shoehorning in as many affixes as I possibly could just
for the sake of it. The derivational affixes are remarkably English-y,
with many of them being labelled in terms of their English equivalents. Thereâs a nominalizing suffix thatâs supposed
to mean the same thing as the â-nessâ suffix in English, so, turning adjectives
into nouns, but thereâs another suffix thatâs supposed to mean the same thing as the â-tudeâ
suffix, and another for the â-ityâ suffix, even though all three of these do basically
the same thing in English, and the only reason we have them all is because of various historical
shenanigans. And, looking at these notes now, I have no
idea whether any of these suffixes can be applied to any adjective, or if a given adjective
can only take one of the three. Speaking of adjectives, they might be the
most embarrassing element in all of this. From my countless hours spent pouring over
Wikipedia, the only real thing I learned about adjectives beyond the basics was that they
sometimes agree in case and number with the nouns they modify, which I knew I didnât
want to do because that was, in my mind, âirrationalâ. But I felt like I had to have some sort of
special morphology for them, so I did a google search and found a powerpoint from a middle
school English class that claimed there were four types of adjectives: descriptive, resultant,
limiting, or verbal, so I just made an affix for each of those. And likewise, adverbs are classified as either
adverbs of time, space, manner, degree, or frequency, all of which get their own affixes. *sigh*⌠dear God, that is painful. And by the way, the verbal adjective is apparently
different from the participle, which is also different from the gerundive, and I couldnât
tell you for the life of me what the difference is supposed to be. All of these decisions were simply motivated
by my insatiable compulsion to throw in as much morphology as I could, the end result
of which was essentially a poor manâs version of ithkuil if it was made by someone who had
no idea how language works who simultaneously insisted that it was all perfectly naturalistic. So, what can we take away from this? Number 1, Always keep your goals in mind. Whenever you set out to make a new conlang,
itâs critically important to establish your goals from the very beginning and let them
dictate every decision you make. The only objective measure of how âgoodâ
or âbadâ a conlang is how well it fulfils its stated goals. If your goal is to make a naturalistic language,
like mine supposedly was, then your number one priority should be to ensure that everything
you put in the language could plausibly occur in a natural language. This was my first mistake. Thandian was supposed to be a naturalistic
language, spoken by a fictional population of native speakers, but I didnât actually
do anything to make the language appear naturalistic, and indeed, did things that made it unnaturalistic. I assumed what I was doing was naturalistic
because I was copying these features from natural languages, but that doesnât make
a feature naturalistic in and of itself. For example, when I learned that in Latin,
the suffix â-queâ conveyed the same meaning as the word âandâ in English, that was
all the justification I needed to make a whole series of âconjunctive affixesâ, after
all, Latin does it, so why canât I? But what I didnât know was that the Latin
â-queâ suffix was just the result of a separate word being spoken in the same breath
as the noun it goes with, which isnât too different from what sometimes happens in English. Knowing this, my âconjunctive affixesâ
now look entirely nonsensical. As you might expect, the best way to combat
things like this is to learn as much as you can about how natural languages work, not
just what their features are, but how those features come to be. Number 2, in the words of Antoine de Saint-Exupery
âA designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but
when there is nothing left to take away.â This applies especially, though not exclusively,
to naturalistic conlangs. This is actually a common pitfall of many
beginning conlangers, sometimes called a Frankenlang, where one throws in everything they know about
language into one hideous amalgamation, and this is exactly the trap that I fell for. I was under the impression that putting more
structures and features into the language would make it more interesting, but thatâs
really not the case. In fact, you can actually make a conlang more
interesting by omission. For instance, what if when making your language,
you decide that verbs arenât going to have a morphological future tense? How will the language cope with future statements? Maybe it uses an auxiliary verb, maybe just
uses adverbs or time phrases, or maybe some combination of particles. Any of these would be much more interesting
than just making another affix. For every feature you introduce, always consider
how it interacts with what youâve already created. And when encoding grammar, try seeing if you
can find a way to convey the meaning with what youâve already got before creating
something brand new. And number 3, Practice makes perfect. Just like learning any new skill, when you
first get into conlanging, youâre more than likely going to struggle, but donât let
that discourage you. Itâs pretty much inevitable that youâll
eventually have to seriously overhaul or even completely scrap a project youâve invested
a lot of effort into. But itâs not a waste of time, because youâll
have learned what to do differently for the next project. After I realized how terrible Thandian was,
I started a new language, one where this time, I was a lot more selective in what I decided
to include. and I knew from the outset that I wanted it to be as naturalistic as possible
It had things like irregularity, multiple paradigms for nouns and verbs, and a gender
system, ⌠and it also sucked, but it was definitely a major improvement, so I made
another language, and then another, and another, and with every new project I got slightly
less terrible. Even today, while I have four or five languages
that Iâm pretty satisfied with, I still have to go back and make revisions periodically. Itâs a long, long learning process, but
if you stick with it, youâll ultimately reach a level where all the innumerable facets
and decisions that once seemed so daunting become second nature to you. So, beyond any of the technical details, these
are perhaps the three most important adages for a conlanger to live by. Unfortunately for me, I had to learn them
the hard way, but hopefully youâre now better equipped to do what I could not. So go forth, then, and conlang! Now if youâll excuse me, Iâm going to
do something I should have done a long time ago⌠Ah⌠good riddanceâŚ
[uj] This is why I have completely abandoned my attempt to create an English-language abjad and an /r/emojilang-based system of hieroglyphics for my world...
[j] ...because as we all know, the glorious Queen's English will be the unchanged language of humanity forever.
God I wish I knew enough about linguistics to create what this guy considers a failure.
/uj The stages this guy went through are pretty similar to my experience.
I think some guy postulated a general development that conlangers go through from relexes and copying languages they know, to kitchen sink messes, then on to better languages.
tl;dw