How To ConGram and Vocabulate

Worldbuilding With Language

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

Once you’ve put some parameters around your sounds, defined which combinations of sounds make words, then now you need parameters for which combinations of words make sentences.

We’re building a Grammar!

Which Grammar?

There’s lots of different ways to construct a grammar, but largely it depends on what language family you are using. Indo-European is probably going to have a root-stem system with noun cases and inflections and verb conjugations. Austronesian (from which Tagalog hails) will probably include a lot of linguistic markers that I don’t fully grasp yet. English notes plural by adding an S at the end, Tagalog uses the word “mga” (pronounced ‘munga’ but try to skip the ‘u’ and don’t pronounce the g) before the plural noun. English has gendered pronouns, Tagalog does not. English has subject-verb agreement, Tagalog has verb-noun agreement or something like that.

Because Atlantis is vaguely Indo-European, I know there is going to be a root-stem system. There’s going to be case, there’s going to be gender. But I want to add some exotic elements to make it feel like it’s not just a copy-paste of Latin.

Nouns will have case, inflection, and gender, like the spanish “hermano” (brother) or “hija” (daughter). I want there to be an honorific system, like the spanish usted form, or the Japanese which I know has an honor/politeness form but which I haven’t studied.

Verbs will have conjugations but I want to add some weird things to verbs. Nouns are going to have a lot of meaning packed in to tell us about the nouns. What can verbs tell us?

Verbs can tell us who is doing the verb, or to whom the verb is being done. This is typically done with subject-verb agreement, which would be very indo-european of me. In spanish the verb escribo means “I write,” but what if we included a marker to say how much we write? “Mga Escribo” could mean “I write a lot” or “ng Escribo” could mean “I wrote one thing”. So Verb will include a quantity or magnitude. “I run”—a lot, a little.

Pronouns will be included into the verb as well, while conjugating. I think other oddities will present themselves while we go.

Adjectives will agree to the nouns and perhaps there’s something clever we can do there.

This isn’t my strong suit so I’ve got a vague idea and at this point it’s time to jump in and start making words.

Word Factory

What are the most important words to make? We need to be able to speak and describe the things around us. I like starting with simple sentences like “I am from Atlantis” or the Lord’s Prayer.

Let’s break the first sentence down: “I am from Atlantis”.

We have a verb, with a pronoun: I AM.

We have a proposition, which I haven’t discussed: from

We have a proper noun: Atlantis.

Let’s start with the Verb: I AM.

We need present tense conjugations. We need irregular verbs.

A classic indo-european “to be” verb tends to start with s. Celtic has some complicated things I’m not very familiar with, but the celtic version starts with e and so does the french. Let’s make the root es which follows the VC syllable structure and uses approved sounds. What is the infinitive verb ending? -rel. So our verb “to be” has as it’s infinitive form the word esrel.

Conjugating from this root:

I am→ sel
You are→ sol
He/she/it is→ s[ih]l
We are→ eser
You all are→ esor
They are→ es[ih]l

Just kind of riffing, there’s no rhyme or reason to this but when we make more discrete verbs, we can use the patterns that showed up here (which vowels were used, etc).

Now the question of how to handle the preposition, “from”. To my mind, we can attach it to the verb or to the noun. I like the thought of piling it into the verb.

Let’s do something that sounds like other indo-european languages and use the word “da”—but this violates our syllable structure, so let’s make it [ah]d and then we’re fine.

So “I am from” is written sel[ah]d. Important to note, I’ve arbitrarily decided stress should be on the first syllable always, so it’s pronounced SEL-ahd

Let’s dig into nouns!

Atlantis. This name should stay. But we have to contrive a reason for it to stay. It is derived from Greek, and means “daughter of Atlas”. We can even suppose that Atlantis is a romanization or anglicization of the name they use for themselves, so that way we don’t have to keep the word itself, as is, but we can make it an Atlantean word that translates into the word we know and love.

Because the true etymology of the word is derived from greek, we need to contrive a reason to keep it. Most people’s words for themselves is just the phrase “The people” in their own language. If we do that, I think a neat way to do this for Atlantis is to make the root tals mean people.

Let’s suppose also that collective nouns— like saying “we are the people”, rather than having an ending actually has a prefix—the prefix A-. And the word for sea can be something like Nautilus or Nautical, we have the letter N and the sound “Aw” so it can be n[aw]tis. So “The people of the sea” would be, using this caveman construct, Atals[ah]dn[aw]tis which over time would simplify: Atalsantis. Let’s bracket syllables to make sure we are following our own rules: [A][tals][ant][is]. Great, we are doing ok. But that is still a bit of a mouthful. Atalantis sounds like our romanization AND now has meaning and simplified several words. Atal meaning “the people”, antis being an abbreviated form of n[aw]tis which means “sea”.

So we have our first sentence in Atlantean:

“I am from atlantis” → Selad Atalantis

In addition to this, our lexicon has some other words:

tal - people
natis- sea
ad - from
esrel - to be

Do you see also how that phrase Selad Atalantis is very liquid, sounds like something you might find from a seafaring peoples?

In the next episode, I’ll do some more word building. Can you suggest any simple sentences that I should translate next?

Thanks again for reading!

AJPM