Entry tags:

30 days method, fantasy, worldbuilding

Worldbuilding Project : Day Nine - Language
Once again the quoted text comes from 30 Days of World-Building by Stephanie Bryant.

Day Nine - Language

Listen to how different syllables sound to you. Do they excite you? Do you associate a particular sound with an emotion or place or memory? Write down some generic preferences for your languages-- "I want the language spoken by the elves to sound like water, and the language spoken by the dwarves to sound like gravel rubbing together" and then go listen to what those things sound like. Write down the syllables you hear when you run a faucet or sit by a stream, for instance. Those sounds will be your "root" syllables when making up your names for places and people and things.

I have a sore throat today and feel terrible which probably explains why I'm not especially enthusiastic about this exercise. I just want to go to bed and curl up.

But we persevere.

As it happens I actually own a book on creating fantasy languages and I'll probably use this to get a grip on my languages. I don't know about the North-Western language except thatA I want the Northern League's language to sound somewhat germanic while the southern languages have a more romance feel without either actually being completely cribbed from German and Latin. Having said that I probably won't go beyond naming places and characters so cribbing might not matter so much. We'll see when I get to it.

The desert region is different. I have a bit more idea here. The common language spoken by the three groups is soft and liquid. I already have a syllabury worked out and I know the name for the 3 groupings and their collective name for their race.

Mountain People - Walashe (pronounced Wa-La-Shay), Coast People - Ilashe (Ee-La-Shay), Desert Nomads - Saneshe (Sa-Nay-Shay). The racial name is Yalnashe (Yal-Na-She). If you think you're seeing a pattern here you aren't wrong. The language is called Yalnade (and yes it comes in three major dialects that also have names ending in the -de suffix). I only have one character name to date Ashala (which is female - you can tell because it ends with a vowel).

I haven't done my work on the non-human languages yet. That'll come later when I define them more as a group.