How to create a (fictional) language in one day

Perhaps I'm missing something, but rather than actually being a new language, this seems to be a simple and direct transliteration of English into a different encoding.<p>Am I missing something?<p>PS: I should add that I've up-voted this because it is interesting, just not really a new language.

If this interests you, there is an entire hobby that consists of inventing constructed languages. For example, check out this guy's web page, featuring a lot of languages he personally constructed, each with really creative grammar, phonology, and writing systems: <a href="http://dedalvs.conlang.org/" rel="nofollow">http://dedalvs.conlang.org/</a> That guy is so talented that the makers of the HBO series "Game of Thrones" hired him to create the "Dothraki" language used in that show. (I think James Cameron also hired a linguist to create the alien language in Avatar).<p>I will avoid getting into a debate about whether replacing phonemes with other phonemes really makes a new language. But I will say that taking English and coming up with replacements for English words means that you are locked into an English conceptualization of the world. In English, we have a word, "go," that stands for a huge set of concepts; other languages conceptualize the concept of movement completely differently. <a href="http://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/verbs_motion.php" rel="nofollow">http://www.russianlessons.net/grammar/verbs_motion.php</a> . If you treat creating a conlang as a creative endeavor, somewhere in the creative neighborhood of writing a sci-fi or fantasy novel, then a big part of the creativity comes from these types of decisions.

I find one of the disproportionately hardest things in fiction is coming up with names for things. Now I'm writing a thing where people cast magic spells and I find myself needing a boatload of original fictional words which read like they have a common syntax and origin. So this should be useful!

If you want to create a complete language (or just understand what would go into such a process), I cannot recommend this book highly enough:<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Language-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfelder/dp/098447000X" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Language-Construction-Kit-Mark-Rosenfe...</a><p>See also his website:<p><a href="http://zompist.com/kit.html" rel="nofollow">http://zompist.com/kit.html</a>

Quite cool write-up, thanks. It reminds me of CircleMUD's spell "garblelanguage" (<a href="http://www.circlemud.org/pub/CircleMUD/3.x/uncompressed/circle30bpl22/src/spell_parser.c" rel="nofollow">http://www.circlemud.org/pub/CircleMUD/3.x/uncompressed/circ...</a>, look for struct syllable syls[]. Of course, it is much more limited in scope.

Some people said this is what was done in Antichthon Universalis, but others say it's something more complicated.<p><a href="http://triptico.com/artwork/antichthon_universalis.html" rel="nofollow">http://triptico.com/artwork/antichthon_universalis.html</a>