Teaching LH/CG Characters, OCs, and Others About Conlanging

Beginning the Course

To reiterate from earlier, whoever the students are for the course unless you looked at previous chapters to decide who you feel would attend such a class, do so if you didn't. Anyway, the course on conlanging begins. Now, I would teach the students the subject of this course, either alone or with help from one or more of my TTS characters, or one or more of them without me.

As we've seen throughout media, many fictional worlds include fictional languages and have done so for quite a while. There are the Elvish and other languages of Middle Earth(Lord of the Rings), Klingon(Star Trek), Atlantean(Disney's Atlantis: The Lost Empire), Na'vi(Avatar), Dothraki, High Valyrian, Mag Nuk, and other languages of Westeros and Essos(Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon), Chakobsa and the Fremen language(Dune), and countless other examples. 

Though they seem like they are, they aren't ways of making English understandable yet foreign to its native speakers, ciphers to make a foreign version of English, or even random sounds made to resemble languages. They are fully fleshed-out languages that can be spoken not only by fictional characters who are like real people like you and me but also by real people. A difference is that they weren't evolved by varying numbers of speakers over various lengths of time, but rather created perfectly enough to seem that way by the real creator actually spent a few months, more or less. These types of languages are one type of constructed languages a.k.a. conlangs.

There are multiple reasons for their existence, though other types of conlangs exist. There are auxiliary languages like the formerly popular Volapuk and Esperanto, meant to ease communication between different groups or all peoples. There are logic-based languages like Loglan, Lojban, and Toaq, which exist to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea that languages affect the thought patterns of the people speaking them. Also existent are languages meant to fit design philosophies like the intentionally-simple Toki Pona or the purposefully-complex Ithkuil. And, of course, naturalistic languages, which exist for worldbuilding and helping them feel more real.

The creators of conlangs are known often as "conlangers". J.R.R. Tolkien is the one who created the Elvish language family and others based on his liking for Welsh phonology and Finnish syntax. Marc Okrand was been commissioned by Paramount Pictures in 1983-1984 to help flesh out a language they started, known as Klingon, him being popular enough as a result for Disney to seek out to create the Atlantean language for "The Lost Empire". James Cameron laid down the foundations for Na'vi and spoke with Paul Frommer, who my mom decided to hook me up with to talk about Na'vi.

David J. Peterson, who created his first and worst conlang known as Megdevi, and some others, achieved popularity by creating Dothraki, High Valyrian, and other languages for Game of Thrones(based on foundations laid by George R.R. Martin), and has been involved with pretty much every single conlang in every single piece of modern media since then. This includes the Dark Elves language Shiväisith from Thor: The Dark World, Nelvayu from Doctor Strange(both being MCU films), several languages for Defiance, Trigedasleng for The 100, Chakobsa the Fremen language, and others for the recent Duen films, etc. He even taught people the ways languages can be created via a book of his known as The Art of Language Invention, and other means.

Conlangers are also active on YouTube, and include, but aren't limited to, Edgar Grunewald of the YouTube channel Artifexian, Robert Cole who goes by Agma Schwa or "nguh", Biblaridion, Dracheneks, SpaceDirt, Lichen the Fictioneer, etc. A few of them created videos talking about real-world languages and their features in terms of phonological inventories, grammar, etc., which is something done by Josh of NativLang and honorary conlanger Xidnaf. Those conlangers demonstrated language creation via tutorials and used their videos to inspire people to come up with ideas for conlangs and teach them their processes.

In the same way, I or one or more of my TTS cohorts(either instead of or alongside me) would be teaching the attending students the process, having created some ideas in advance, and with an interesting method worth fleshing out the next chapter, though the process might be a bit more ambitious. I'm hoping for none of us to pull an Icarus and fly too close to the sun.