How To Con Your Own Lang

Worldbuilding With Language

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

This Substack was originally about language, and the name “Gibberish” was supposed to be a clever, self deprecating riff on the languages I construct. I wrote one post about a Conlang, which was fine but I haven’t had to use it yet and I already had a lot developed.

I’ve constructed one language but I think I can do better. I have an ambitious idea for the language of the second race of aliens in Sandbox Earth but it’s hard to create a language when I am physically in capable of making the requisite noises.

So here, I am going to start from scratch. I’m going to build a language from zero and I’ll build it with you so you can see how I do it if you want to add some linguistic depth to your fiction.

Let’s Begin

Languages begin not with words or sounds but with setting. What language do I need for my fiction?

Actually—I don’t have a lot of languages missing from fiction. But since I just wrote “Blood or Flood” let’s make a language for Atlantis, shall we?

What do we know about Atlantis as revealed by this story? We should know about the culture, a little bit about the history, and some about how the society organizes itself.

The history is where I always like to start. The questions here present themselves naturally: How did people get to Atlantis? How did the King come to be the King? What’s going on with the Northern tribes referenced in the story?

In my head the story takes place in the Bronze Age. Let’s say Atlantis was populated by some migration out of Europe, like the Sea Peoples that invaded the Hittites and Egyptians, etc. They went west instead of south on a prayer and a hope and found the continent of Atlantis, and quickly populated it. Various tribes formed and fought and consolidated power and eventually a great civilization formed on the little continent.

The dominant Atlantis tribe became a Kingdom and eventually conquered the whole continent.

At some point, the Prophets appeared—perhaps they were discovered there on the island and that is why the dominant tribe of Atlantis became dominant.

The Culture of Atlantis has always been associated with the sea, so it makes sense that it would be a very liquid language, flowing like waves, their architecture would be smooth and include lots of circles, arches, and rounded columns.

The society resembles the celtic tribes of Gaul. There is a chief—King—and there is a patrilineal tradition. There’s sophisticated trades—fishermen, merchants, mining, quarrying. There’s a written tradition—they have books—and wealthy women can be educated.

Collecting Some Scraps

At this point we have a basic picture of Atlantis society, now we need to take an inventory of words we already have.

Atlantis - The popular name for the Island, and it’s other forms (atlantean, etc)
Atlas City - The capital city of Atlantis
Cliffs of Atreus - The name of the place where the oracle is
Barthemus - pronounced “bart-eh-muss”, the name of the king
Mathilde - pronounced “mat-hill-duh”, the name of the queen
Nauthilion - pronounced “not-thill-ee-yon”, the surname of the king and queen
Benethmond - pronounced “ben-eth-mond”, the name of the Judge
Roachiim - pronounced “rho-ah-keem”, the name of the general
Segaar - pronounced “seh-gar”, the name of the merchant
Meecher - Segaar’s assistant, and an easter egg from my other Atlantis story
Shurbin - Meecher’s counterpart from that other story.

Let’s look at our vowels first:

Aa as in ATlantis → I am going to use A to denote this sound
ih as in atlantIS → I am going to use IH to denote this sound
Ay as in Atreus → I am going to use AY to denote this sound
Ee as in AtrEus → I am going to use I to denote this sound
Uh as in AtreUS → I am going to use U to denote this sound
Ah as in BArthemus → I am going to use AH to denote this sound
Eh as in BarthEMus → I am going to use E to denote this sound
Aw as in NauthiliON → I am going to use AW to denote this sound
oh as in ROachiim → I am going to use O to denote this sound

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Next, we can look at our consonants but more importantly we want to look at sounds.

I’ve lifted this handy chart directly from Zompist

There’s a lot of sounds that fit into this grid that aren’t here, but lets use this grid as a starting point for Atlantis.

Here’s the chart based on the words we’ve already established above:

We’re going to have a lot of liquid consonants, we’re heavy in the Alveolar column, absolutely NO labiodentals so i’m going to keep those out. No F’s or V’s in Atlantis. I’ll add P in just because it’s the same kind of consonant as a B which we already have. I’ll leave the Alveolar-palatal column alone as it is, and likewise everything else. So really all I’ve added here is the letter P.

Arranging Some Sounds

Next up, what makes a word? We’ve got the sounds but what order do we put them in? What makes a valid word?

An easy structure is to take CCVC—which would make TSAR a valid atlantean word but SARK not. You notice though that the word ATLANTIS is VCCVCCVC, you see that pattern? VCC appears to be the core syllable structure. The names have a leading consonant so we’ll make the leading and last consonant optional, we’ll call it (C)VC(C).

This way (B)AR(TH) EM US is a valid word.

What about Roachiim? This name breaks some rules. There’s two ways we can accoomodate this—either we allow rules for dipthongs (two consecutive vowels) or we cheat and say Roachiim is from an Atlantean culture with a slightly different dialect. I think the different dialect expands the world a little bit, so I would say that is the more interesting choice. Let’s set that aside and call our primary language “High Atlantean” and this dialect “North Atlantean”. Which is cool because it connects Roachiim to the Northern Tribes which they fought battles against.

That’s all—for now

I’ve bitten off a lot here and you can see how the language is coming together. In the next episode I’ll expand on the grammar and start deriving some words!

I hope you enjoyed!

AJPM