Creating Languages

Every so often, it strikes again - that quiet, persistent urge to exercise what Tolkien called the "Secret Vice". It started, as so many such things do, in the days of my no-social-life-outside-of-school adolescence. I would lock myself in my room and go through page after page of titillating material. I was creating my own language.

Inspired by the example of J.R.R. Tolkien, whose Lord of the Rings trilogy had by then become my favorite novel, and by that exotic, tempting leather-bound copy of Latin Grammar I had found and perused at my great-aunt's, I entered innocently into the world of toying with powerful forces I had yet to understand. But they had begun their work of slow seduction, and it wouldn't be long before I became more machine than man, bent on galactic domination...well, perhaps that's an exaggeration. Nonetheless, I had found my calling.

What impressed me about my first introduction to Latin, from that battered book on my great-aunt's shelf, was that here was a language which expressed perfectly well with suffixes what we had to use often clunky permutations of word order to say. I wondered, could there be still another way to express the relationships between words in a sentence? And while we were at it, what about the sounds of a language? These were the two revelations that provided the basic structure of my language, which I originally called Kirkian, from my middle name, eventually settling on a name from within the language, Paijodd, the "high speech".

I wondered if it were possible to use a completely new and different way of defining the relationships between different words. I made it so by deciding that nouns would have a different form to show whether they were related to other nouns or to verbs. There would be suffixes that could be added to these basic forms to specify the relationships further. In this way, a noun inflected to show relationship to the verb could cover all the basic functions (subject, object, indirect object, etc.), and even take on some adverbial meanings. On the other hand, a noun inflected to show relationship to other nouns could show adjectival meanings, possession, or simply form compound words.

The different forms for these nouns are based on the other part that fascinated me: sounds. I thought it would be neat if consonants with the same place of articulation (like b, p, v, and f, for example) alternated their manners of articulation (that is, b means something different than p) to indicate different meanings or grammatical functions. So that's how it works in Paijodd. Final consonants change to indicate different meanings or relationships.

Fricatives (like v and f), for example, indicate plurals. A voiced consonant (such as b, singular, and v, plural) indicates that the noun is related to the verb, while the remaining two (unvoiced - p and f) consonants indicate that the noun is related to other nouns.

There's one more aspect of sound that fascinated me, though: vowels. I always liked English irregular verbs like run, which changes its vowel in the past tense, to ran, so I wanted something of that in Paijodd. To that end, it is not only final consonants that indicate the noun's relationship to its verb, but the vowels in the final syllable of the word as well. To create rules for this, I arranged the possible vowels in Paijodd into a hierarchy. In noun base forms, the vowel moves down in the hierarchy to indicate relationship to a verb, or stays the same as the base form to indicate relationship to another noun.

To make this all a little bit clearer, let's look at an example. Take the word sabb, which means "war". The two forms would be:

seb- = related to a verb, and
sap- = related to a noun.

seb- shows the vowel e, which is below a in the hierarchy I devised, and the voiced final consonant b. Together these sounds show that this word is related to the verb.

sap- on the other hand, shows the original vowel, a, unchanged from the base form, sabb, and the unvoiced consonant p, which IS changed from the base form, together indicating this word's relationship to other nouns.

To these would be added suffixes making the precise relationship with the other part of speech a little clearer. To round out our example, let's just take the suffix -ía, which has a meaning like with or of. Thus, it can express how someone did something in the verb-related form: Sebía sem eós, "He came with war" (in order to make war or by making war). Further, in the noun-related form, it can show possession: Sapía égg, "the war's end".

I could outline the entire grammar, of course, but this is just a taste of it, and only meant to explain which aspects fascinated me about the prospect of creating a language and why. For me, it was primarily the notion of creating an entirely new and unique way to express the relationships between words in a phrase or sentence, as well as the use of different but related sounds to change the meaning or function of a word. It was these titillating bits of the language-that-could-be that knocked me off of my feet, and kept me locked in my room for hours, afraid that someone might walk in on me any minute!