The Languages of the Stars:  

Constructed Languages in Fact, and Science Fiction

What Constructed Languages are There?

Last week we talked about WHY people might make up their own languages.  This week we've got some WHAT questions

1. What languages are there?
2. What good are they?
3. What do you do to make up your own?

What languages are there?

Nobody can really catalog all of the constructed languages - because there are more every day.  Here is a sampler from a guide that some of the language creators on the Internet have produced:The Traveler's Phrasebook .  Here's how to say hello from that guide, as well as a few other constructed languages:

What good are they?

I can't say - that is, I can't say FOR YOU, what good a constructed language might be.  Maybe you have a story you'd like to tell.  Maybe you're trying to see how easy it is to make  a language.  Maybe you have some secrets to keep!

 From last week we saw that people have found practical and fun reasons to make their own language.  Here's one thing you could use Klingon for - A game!

wa' cha' wa'maH - suvwI' mI' Quj

From ancient times, Klingon warriors have amused themselves in idle moments on patrol, by mock number battles playing the game wa' cha' wa'maH . A simple game, wa' cha' wa'maH consists of two players adding one (wa') or two (cha') to a total until it equals ten (wa'maH).

An alternative version is to attempt to AVOID the total of 10 - forcing the opponent to reach 10 instead.

In BOTH versions the winner cries "Qapla'".  ( the loser might snarl "Qu'vatlh" - darn it!).

The game is easy enough that for two experienced players, the outcome is certain at the start , so usually a coin or similar object is tossed to determine who starts. This is in accordance with the Klingon proverb "reH 'eb tu'lu'" (there is ALWAYS a chance!) - the coin insures you have a chance to win!

The starting player cries wa' or cha', then the opponent calls his or her move (wa' or cha') then the new total.

Pair off with a friend to play a few rounds - if nobody is around, click here to play  wa' cha' wa'maH against the computer.

Perhaps you're looking for another challenge - click here to learn about tIqtaH to'  the ancient tlhIngan game of strategy.

What do you do to make up your own?

You can make it as complicated as you want, but mainly you have three basic steps

1. Decide on the sounds of the language
2. Create the dictionary
3. Create the grammar

Decide on the sounds of the language

Is your  language  like English? Or does it have fewer or more sounds?  English has 5 vowels and 21 consonants, but more sounds (that is we have more than 26 sounds, because we combine them (like "th").  What sounds are correct in your language?  For example, in English we might put "F" and "R" at the beginning of a word (frank, friend, from), but never "S" and "R" (well, can you think of any words that start "sr...."?).

Lets say these are the rules for our language:

• Two Vowels A and O
• Six Consonants S,D,H,J,R, and K
• Words can be as long as you want but have to be of the form CVV+(VCV)+C

So in this language DAOK could be a word, but DAK couldn't  (only one vowel at the start).  (hint - if you wanted to use these word-making rules in your language you could flip a coin to choose vowels (heads is A, tails is O) and roll a die to pick consonants S=1, D=2, H=3, J=4, R=5, and K=6.)

Create the  dictionary

In some ways this is the easiest part - once you have a good  idea what words sound like  in your language, you can start listing the words you want to include - I take something I want to say in my language and make a list of all the words.   Say you wanted to translate "Little Miss Muffet, sat on a tuffet"  You could pick words from the rules above like so

Little Miss Muffet Language

little	DOAK
miss	HAAOROS
muffet	ROAK
sat	KAAR
on	RAAK
a	HAOOROOROD
tuffet	TOAK

With this language "Little Miss Muffet sat on a tuffet" turns into "Doak Haaoros Roak kaar raak haooroorod toak".

Create the grammar

This can be the easiest - or the hardest part.  Does your language work EXACTLY like English? Then it turns into a simple code, what people call a "relexification".  This means you really replace the English dictionary with a new set of words, but the rules about how you make sentences stays the same.  That is what we did above with "little Miss Muffet."

Most people making up languages don't like doing things that way, because even though it makes things easy, it doesn't seem like a real language.  They find it more fun to make new rules and see how they would work. For languages like Esperanto,this is done to make the language  easier, and faster to learn than a complicated language like English.

Next week we'll start learning Klingon - a language where we'll see the rules are  very different from English.

Right here, online are some tools to use languages constructed for Star Trek:

• Klingon UTA LITE
• Telegraphic Klingon UTA LITE (a modest attempt at being grammatical)
• Vulcan UTA LITE
• Romulan UTA LITE - extended vocabulary based on the work of Diane Duane.  

  • This JavaScript version of UTA uses an extended Romulan vocabulary. I coded it using the work of Diane Duane - using her Basic Program for generating Rihansu (Romulan) words, then generated a set of English vocabulary from the WEB translation of Judges 1 and paired them together.

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