#fantasy languages

[novella-november]

Are you creating a con-lang for your book? Or maybe just creating a new alphabet?

This website will be your new best friend to make custom fonts!

Calligraphr - Create your own fonts.

If you have a printer, you can print out the templates, then scan them back into your computer to upload them, or if you have a tablet or a good phone, you can use digital drawing on the template to make your letters!

[tarbuchyloewenthal]

my new obsession is trying to (roughly) translate yezuhan so i can understand everything rekke says. and also read the whole of the strange tablet, because rekke didn't translate the whole of it, the scamp.

plus for ekida reasons.

[devoutjunk]

"I guess what I’m really getting at is that language is never—or never purely—a decoration. An imagined language cannot be tacked on as set dressing in fiction and fully succeed. It has to grow from the principles of the world, as the novel’s prose itself does—messily maybe, sometimes inconsistently, embellished through sleight of hand and a thousand small gestures. As Le Guin writes in “Inventing Languages”: “A few mysterious words can give the impression of a language, the flavor of it, which is all most novels need to do; all the inventor has to do is make the words linguistically plausible.” In The Goblin Emperor, we never hear Maia speak his language, but for almost five hundred pages, we don’t doubt that it’s real, that it has social, political, and concrete implications when spoken.

The late John M. Ford told his editors: “I have a horror of being obvious.” As a reader, I have a horror of being force-fed the obvious. I like a little confusion. I don’t mind dropping into a world and being forced to wander it before I can figure it out; In fact, if I’m honest, I prefer that. I wonder, sometimes, if authors are done a disservice when we are so often pushed to revise toward “clarity.” Of course unintentional confusion or inconsistency can sink a story just as surely as over-exposition can, and often it’s easier for a third-party to see those gaps in internal logic where a story has gone astray or gotten tangled in its own machinery. That kind of clarity can be helpful, even essential. But too often I think the scale tips toward encouraging a kind of exposition that begins to tell the reader how they should read a piece. An attempt at a shortcut, a trapdoor in the prose rather than a carefully built maze, winding turn by turn toward its end."

--Caroline Shea, (April Newsletter: New Fiction, Imagined Languages, and Who's Afraid of Genre? (pt. 1000))

[madametamma]

Instead of creating a whole new language for fantasy races in a fantasy world I like the idea of just taking a language from the real world and making THAT the language of the fantastical people.

The language of Mermaids is Italian. 

Talking animals all know Spanish as their first language.

The smallest pixies have voices too small for humans to hear.  No one outside of their own kind can hear them it so in order to communicate with other races, the pixie folk created ASL.

[signourneybooks]

The Language of Ghosts | Book Review

The Language of Ghosts | Book Review

Book: The Language of Ghosts by Heather FawcettRelease Date: September 8th 2022Tags: Middle Grade | Fantasy | Fantasy Languages | Magical Powers | Oppression Trigger/Content Warnings: War | Murder | Loss of a Parent | Grief | Mentions of Human Experimentation | Talk of Murdering a Child Forced into exile on an enchanted, moving island, ex-princess Noa Marchena has two missions: reclaim her…

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[tapiestre-fanart]

Ah, world building sweet world building. When you can spend 5 hours building an alien language you're probably never going to use.

This is Wiresh. It's the alphabet for the Enrids I posted yesterday.

[codex-dominion]

I’m kind of making a language for the Canim. I know that Butcher already has some stuff down, but I think I want to expand on that. (I also think that maybe canim would not differentiate between consonants as much maybe. You can call Spot “Zbod” or “Stock” & he wouldn’t know the difference, but if you call Spot “Spit”? No that won’t slide.)

I have been doing a ton of research on phonetics, anatomy, linguistics, anthropology, hierarchy, & canine communication but anything helps!

[daily-fantasy-ideas]

I think you should have some confusion around certain words/concepts due to differences in languages.

As an example demons:

In elvish languages, the word demon could just refer to any entity or creature that originates from hell or the underworld.

Perhaps Dwarves having dug deep into the earth near hell could have more specific and scientific definitions of demons, referring exclusively to semi-ethereal malevolent entities with magical powers who come from hell.

Maybe in some human languages, it could just be any sort of evil spirit.

Some languages may not even have a word for them instead just using different terminology that gets across a similar idea, or maybe they just understand them differently and the words they use mean a different idea for the same thing