I'm working on a project and I need a fancy sounding language that I can tack on to one of my races. I've been looking for a suitable one but I can't seem to find it. The idea is that its really beautiful-sounding and dream-like but also kind of vaguely menacing. Think french but with more z in it. Does anyone know of anything like that? Preferably a place where one could find a lot of text in that language?
Also because I want to keep the thread bumped, how do you come up with languages for your own races? Do you bother to do that at all, or do you do it so much you approach Tolkien levels of depth?
If I have to use a language in such a manner, I just use Hebrew, because I know it and most people in America don't, so it sounds suitably foreign and babble-y.
Gavin Cook
I would suggest a mix of Greco-Hungarian and North Korean car dealer slang
Jacob Jackson
I'd use Hebrew. Culturally, a lot of names heavy with portent and meaning come from Hebrew so if you use that as a the fantasy language most people will be familiar with the phonomemes.
Samuel Lopez
I already have greek and hebrew language races unfortunately, but thanks for the suggestions.
Gavin Bell
>he took it seriously But seriously, try, like, Uralic languages, like Hungarian or Finnish. Finnish in particular sounds quite delicate and dreamy, at least to my ear.
Cameron Allen
Take English words, replace letters like this: q > c wh > hv wr > vr w after a vowel > u w otherwise > v y > i j > i k > c x > cs z > s ch > c sh > sc rd > rr ld > ll nd > nn oo > o ee > eo mb > mm voiceless th -> t voiced th -> d the preposition ‘of’ > o gh > h Remove all mid-sentence capitals, all apostrophes. Replace non-Germanic words with closest Germanic synonyms. Try to ignore context and be quite literal with this.
Your >I'm working on a project and I need a fancy sounding language that I can tack on to one of my races. I've been looking for a suitable one but I can't seem to find it. The idea is that its really beautiful-sounding and dream-like but also kind of vaguely menacing. Think french but with more z in it. Does anyone know of anything like that? Preferably a place where one could find a lot of text in that language?
becomes:
Im vorcing on a vorc ann i neod a fanci dinning tongue dat i can tacc on to one o mi folks. Ive beon locing for a vorti one but i cant seom to finn it. De touht is dat its truli loveli-dinning ann dream-lice but also cinn o rouhli fearsome. Tinc frenc but vid more s in it. Does anione cnou o aniting lice dat? Muc rader a setting hvere one coull finn a lot o vriting in dat tongue?
A bit of random finalising work: the pronoun ‘I’ > ic -ly, -y > -lig, -ig the gerund -ing > -inge the preposition in > i intervocalic ‘v’ removed the plural -s is now invariably -es but > beut not > noht it > hit non-gerund -ing > -ning 3rd person singular -s, -es > -t, -et a, one > an
Ic am vorcinge on an vorc ann ic neod an fansig dinninge tonge dat ic can tacc on to an o mi folces. Ic hae beon locinge for an vortig an beut ic can noht soem to finn hit. De touht is dat hits trulig loelig dinninge ann dream lice beut also cinn o rouhlig fearsome. Tinc frenc beut vid more s i hit. Doet anian cnou o aniting lice dat? Muc rader an setning hvere an coull finn an lot o vritning i dat tonge?
Jose Peterson
One more example: >I'm happiest when most away >I can bear my soul from its home of clay >On a windy night when the moon is bright >And the eye can wander through worlds of light. >When I am not and none beside - >Nor earth nor sea nor cloudless sky >But only spirit wandering wide >Through infinite immensity. >The world was made of nothing then >'Tis made by nothing now again >Mighty Nothing! unto thee, >Nothing we owe all things that be.
Ic am happiest hven most aei Ic can bear mi soul from hits home o clei On an vinnig niht hven de mon is briht Ann de eie can vanner trouh vordes o liht. Hven ic am noht ann noan beside - Nor eart nor sea nor cloudless scy Beut anlig spirit vanneringe vide Trouh infinite immensite. De vord vas made o noting den Tis made bi noting nou aien Mihtig Noting! unto de, Noting ve oe all tinges dat be.
Ayden Parker
I'll try this out thanks.
will look into this
Charles Foster
Sounns lice Dracul talcing vit a moud full of marbles
Alexander Sanders
You also should read as if it were some shallow orthography, not like Modern English.
For any Old English specialists out there: it has nothing to do with Old English proper, it's just a cheap way to generate vaguely Germanic-sounding text using a cherry-picked set of modifications.
John Allen
*Sounnet lice Dracula talcinge vid an mout full o marbles.
Brody Richardson
all right, cool. To elaborate on what I mean by a project, I am making a Dwarf Fortress mod that adds new races to the world. I found a program that can read paragraphs of languages and convert them into a language file for the game, so I like to give custom languages to all my races. This is the lore for the race I am currently working on:
As you can probably see, its difficult to imagine what sort of language would fit, so I figured if anyone would know an obscure and buzzy language that would suit the species, it'd be someone in Veeky Forums.
Nathan Campbell
Esperanto.
Parker Green
And what exactly do you want to write down in the language? Just some names and stuff? The thing is, aesthetics considerations work a bit differently for names and sizeable stretches of text.
Kevin Rodriguez
Also if we are talking fantasy races it may be better to keep names/whatever vaguely recognisable (as you probably can with what I've posted) but still quite not like standard English.
Cooper Gonzalez
Anything really. Just as long as there is a lot of it. The program I mention will scan the syllables and stuff and reorganize it into made up words, which it will assign to various definitions in the game.
here's the program btw. It might come in handy for stuff besides DF.
Xavier Peterson
Oh but ideally there'd be no punctuation, numbers, weird accented letters, or capital letters. I can fix that myself though so if its a problem don't worry about it.
Xavier Moore
I see. You might be better off finding a language you find likeable and then google translating stuff into it. These kinda generators are usually very bad at keeping the feel of the source language, for me at least (I've dabbled into linguistics quite some). I can see that it generates impossible syllables for Chinese ending in 'L'. Imagine it gives you 'rtutna' or 'fheestl' saying it's 'English'.
Isaac Campbell
I would, but I already have 16 races implemented counting the ones I'm working on now, so I'd have to manually come up with a word for every word listed in the game using whatever language I wanted to use, and then do it 16 times over.
Jason James
Look up Basque.
Kevin Richardson
Consider downloading Swadesh lists/lists of N most frequent words for obscure languages and then writing a script that will take a list of English (supposedly) words and generate a nicely packed 'language pack'. You'd probably want to keep vocabularies of your racial languages around 100 or so words.
Grayson Russell
>and then writing a script This is where you overestimate my skills unfortunately. I've never coded in my life.
Jonathan Rodriguez
if you are willing to put in a bit of work to customize things, there's a website called Vulgar that will generate custom languages with syntax, grammar, pronunciation, and a host of other options that can be controlled to a great degree (i think the full version is like $10). it's worth visiting just to noodle around with the options, but if you're interested in making your own stuff rather than use an existing language, it's worth looking into.
vulgarlang.com/index.html is the website!
Grayson Diaz
This isn't exactly what I'm looking for but I will definitely be bookmarking this for possible later use and to recommend to people.
Joshua Barnes
Some nice sounding languages. Manchu: stranger Japanese, but still very pleasant-sounding. Occitan: (French + Spanish)/2, a lot of z's also. Maori/Tahitian: for your elves. Faroese: for your dwarves. Greek, if you can find a romaniser, is bonkers. Rumantsch looks very cool. Lesser Uralic languages might be cool, but they all use Cyrillic. (Written) Tibetan does what Klingon is supposed to do, but better. Mongolian is Welsh of Asia. Khmer might look vaguely Chinese, but not quite. Good look finding a romaniser though. Circassian is total bonkers. Circassians in Turkey use Latin script afaik. Miyako is very weird, it has syllabic fricatives, it's like (Japanese + Parseltongue)/2. I doubt you can find a lot of text though. Old High German has a bunch of weird spellings. Slovak is like Polish but with less rzczsz.
