What can I say? Making languages is a hobby of mine.
It has been for some years, before I ever wrote a workable fantasy world. I made up languages starting from the time I was nine years old. One, which unfortunately I don't remember anything more about, was supposed to be for a group of intelligent wolves that had learned to go into outer space. That got up to about 120 words. Another one lasted longer and reached about 500 words; that one, I was only making up so that my brother and sister wouldn't know what I was saying. That, too, vanished without trace.
(When my brother and sister learned what I was doing, they made up a language of their own--or started to. The furthest they got was the word oaka, which meant "stupid"--which was all they really wanted, anyway).
But all these early "languages" were were word-lists. I wasn't thinking at all about grammar, about putting things together in sentences, even about pluralization. If I had had to have two of one of my invented words, I would probably just have added on -s as in English. All I wanted to do was give things names.
When I encountered high school Spanish, I grew interested again. I started learning about grammar, about other means of conjugating verbs than the English means of just tacking on a pronoun. Early in my sophomore year of high school, I decided to take some of the scattered words that had been drifting around in my head as names for the characters in my books (by then I was writing my ninth novel) and try to organize them into some sort of system.
One thing that annoyed me about Spanish was that it seemed to have no consistent means of forming nouns from verbs. (I know now that that isn't necessarily true, and that there are other sources of nouns than just verbs; but I didn't then). I had learned plenty of verbs, such as cocinar (to cook), bailar (to dance), and cantar (to sing), but relatively few nouns. Most of the time I wanted to say such things as, "There are two songs I like to sing," (Hay dos canciones que me gusta cantar), not just "I sing" (canto).
Primal was therefore born from an annoyance with Spanish, just as one of my earlier languages had been born from an annoyance with my brother and sister. Primal became a VBL ('verb-based language') for which there is probably some technical term, though I haven't seen it. I am mostly a self-taught linguist, in the sense that I'm a linguist at all.
Primal has seven classes of verbs, all of which end with vowels (or combinations of vowels) and all of them have particular formations for building nouns, adjectives, participles, and adverbs. There are irregularities in that system as there are not in the inflection of verbs. I didn't make my inflections that exciting, and they are all perfectly regular, which wouldn't happen in a natural-born language.
I excused that--as I would most faults at that stage--by claiming that, as Primal would mostly be spoken by non-humans, it could have non-human traits. This is probably just an excuse.
Primal is fairly large now, with a vocabulary of about 3500 words ('pure words,' not counting declined nouns or inflected verbs), and has a fairly complete grammar. But it is clunky. Its phonology, and especially the employment of holdover traits from English which it doesn't really need, drag and hold it to earth.
With Aril I'm trying again to make a language that will fly. I like the sound of it better, and since it's in the young stages, words are coming in like hell. I've been making a dictionary for it, but the grammar is nowhere near complete. From what I can see of it (it insists on having different declensions, five so far), it's going to be an uphill climb.
But I've been playing with this Elwen language for five years now. I want to get something right.
I've done other languages, as well, mostly bits and pieces as other races from my fantasy worlds briefly caught my attention. None of them has as solid a base as Primal, though; when I made most of my characters' names Primal, I limited that as a source for other languages. I may put them up as I manage to collect the information.
If you've gotten this far, I hope you don't think I'm crazy. And if you've gotten this far, and want to make your own language...
Dace tituso! Good luck to you!
