My site motto is “Science, Poetry, Conlang,” and creating constructed languages (conlangs) is a hobby I stumbled into after watching the episode “Darmok” from season five of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Despite the logistical nightmare of incorporating a constructed language for every single sapient alien species would’ve been in-series, I still couldn’t put aside my disappointment that language wasn’t the center of many episodes. It would’ve been funny to hear the universal translators struggle to translate highly contextual Klingon words into English.
In my own writing, I try to incorporate constructed languages into my world building, and through the course of creating my own conlangs, I’ve started to break down a lot of the things we assume when we create new cultures. Things like gender roles, family structures, and name meanings are thrown back in your face as soon as you have to decide how pronouns are going to work in your new language.
Seriously, this is space, we’re writing alien life, do you think everything is going to include a gender binary and a nuclear family?
I still catch these things every time I add on to my languages, but that’s why I’ll never claim that any of my conlangs are finished. I wouldn’t even consider them usable for everyday conversations, but I feel as though they’re a good example of conlanging with world building in mind.
Lacerti
Lacerti was my first conlang, and today, it’s still my golden child. I’m still working on the finer grammatical details.
Among the its features is a base eight counting system, Verb-Subject-Object word order in the present and future tense and Verb-Object-Subject word order in the past tense, a written language borrowed from my other conlang, and the alveolar lateral fricative.
- Phonology
- Grammar
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- Vocab
- Phrases
Shiv’Jan
Shiv’Jan initially functioned as a test conlang for me to play around with more complex grammatical structures. Where Lacerti takes on a loosey-goosey approach to things like verb conjugation, Shiv’Jan uses verb conjugation to convey social structures.
Shiv’Jan was also my excuse to use a glottal stop and an excessive amount of grammatical genders.
- Phonology
- Grammar
- Numbers
- Vocab
- Phrases