Thoughts from Author / Illustrator Stephanie Bibb
One of the topics I’ve been thinking about recently is creating fantasy languages. Reason being, I’m creating a language for use in my YA fantasy manuscript, The Wishing Blade. Now, in the original draft (and even across several drafts for different books in that world), I only had a handful of made-up words sprinkled into the story to give it flavor. This time, however, the use of the language system suddenly had a reason to shine– I actually intended to show ‘word magic,’ one of the magic systems in my Cirena stories coming from the Cantingen Islands. Suffice it to say, creating a language has been fun, if not a bit difficult.
When I attended ConQuest, one of the panels I attended was about creating alien languages. Some of the topics in the panel included: deciding how in-depth you wanted the language to be– do you want to have a…
View original post 800 more words
Chris The Story Reading Ape's Blog 
I created a language for the tribe of people in my novel. Had great fun with it. Shared this 🙂
LikeLiked by 1 person
I have edited a fantasy language and I found it fascinating! You need to have established rules for plurals and tenses, especially. Sometimes gender is important, but sometimes not. I ended up doing a lot of work for the author in making her plurals and tenses consistent, because they weren’t.
Yes, pronunciation can be important, but since it’s a read language (to the reader) and only a spoken language to the characters, the “physical compiling” of the letters (for lack of a better term) is more important—in my humble opinion.
Excel is a good resource for your ongoing “dictionary.” The writer I worked with used Word tables, and I don’t like them as well as Excel. 🙂
LikeLiked by 2 people
Thanks for that Susan – I was hoping you’d give the Editors viewpoint – and the useful tips that authors don’t consider (like consistent plurals and tenses) 😀
LikeLiked by 2 people
I’ve got 2 running dictionaries, though I don’t use much out of them. Makes a good reference when assembling place names when moving around my worlds. Also makes a handy reference for curses for when things get a bit tense.
Thanks Chris for posting, and Stephanie for writing.
LikeLiked by 3 people