Create a Language Project

For those of you who don't know there are two major parts of my life. Firstly I am doing linguistics at Uni (or at least I will if my final marks ever come in so I can enroll!) and secondly I am into story writing. Now before you get excited I should say I've never let anyone ever read my stories, even though I have dozens. However it got me thinking recently.

A few weeks ago I saw Avatar the movie. It was incredible! The graphics, the originality, the story, the people, the creatures, the plants. Just amazing. I'm against spoilers however I will say that I spent a lot of the movie either holding my breath, in tears or both and I would give almost anything to spend a hour alone with the person who dreamt up those creatures, James Cameron, and the person who created the language, Paul Frommer.

Anyway I've been writing for several years, just for myself and part of what I've always wanted to do is create my own language. And I don't mean something like Pig-Latin or a variation on an existing language but my own unique language with its own alphabet, grammar, structure, sounds and pronunciation. So I'm going to. And in the spirit of another movie I (annoyingly) missed, Julie and Julia, I'm going to document my progress in this blog.

I love language. I find it fascinating that deaf children learn sign language much the same way other children learn spoken languages. We have dozens of languages, all with different styles of script...why? Why are some scripts, like Chinese, really detailed? Why are some curly, like Arabic? Does the type of language that a culture has reflect it's attitude toward life?

I want to find out these answers and I believe there is a lot one could learn about language and it's role in society when one creates their own. So that's what I'm going to do. I have begun. I have begun to work out an alphabet and in the spirit with the story and culture this language goes with my language will be for a slower, more deliberate society. The script will not be as artistic as Chinese or Japanese, nor as flowing as Arabic, but it will have detail and flow more than English/Roman characters.

As for the Grammar. There will not be any gender differences and unlike English, which apparently has 12 tenses (although I am still confused by this) this will only have 3. This project will take me a while. I have only just discovered the Conlang community online and hope they will help me undertake this.

I have no idea why I want to do this, I only know that I do. And at the moment I have no desire for my language, which does not yet have a name, to become "the next Klingon" however if people like it and wish to learn it I have no intention of stopping them. I will be putting up more information as I go and at any rate this will be my own diary of this process.