Making Your Own Fictional Language | Rainie Sun | TEDxWestern Canada HS
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15ERkfwovQs Video ID: 15ERkfwovQs ============================================================ no if you're as much of a degenerate nerd as I am you probably recognize no NE as being Kling on or cing on ho this is a fictional language that was created in Star Trek a couple of dozens of years ago I don't actually know the exact date but the reason why I bring this up is because it's a fictional language it's a language that doesn't actually exist and it's a language that was created by somebody else now with that information let me ask all of you if I told you to create a language how would you go about doing it for all of you that thought oh I have a dictionary at home let me go grab that don't pick up your dictionary don't don't do that don't do that if your plan was to flip through that dictionary and start systematically replacing all of those words in that dictionary one by one you are essentially doing the Linguistics version of plagiarism it's uncreative it's basically like using AI to make your school's essay for an assignment or whatever like I said it's uncreative and it's boring and it also takes away the humanity that makes a language a language of course then there's also the argument that animals can speak languages but this is not what this is about instead of using your dictionary creating languages has to come from entire ly from scratch now you might be wondering okay you told me to create it from scratch where do I start you start with Fanatics or mouth sounds these are sounds like ah e o English speakers will know Fanatics as vowels and consonants however it's a lot more complicated than just two subsect of sounds for example if you were to dig deeper into that rabbit hole you would find languages that incorporate clicking into them I'm talking about kosa some of you may recognize kosa as the language that was spoken primarily by the wakandans in the Black Panther movies Kaa has a lot of different clicking sounds however I will only be explaining three of them to you because these are the only three that I could actually manage to replicate without butchering clicking sounds if you're in the audience and you want to try these clicking sounds I highly encourage you to do so and if you're scared of getting weird looks don't worry I'm going to make these clicking sounds first so that all of the weird looks will be directed to me first and probably not to you the first one that I'm going to show you is called a dental click phonetically this is spelled Tu or TSK called tutting or tisking it sounds something like this you make this sound well actually some of you would already got it but I'll explain it anyways you make this sound by putting the the tip of your tongue to where the roots of your teeth are at the back of your mouth there's also the avola click which sounds like this honestly I'm impressed because some of you sound like you've already got it and this took me like 3 Days To actually sound not Western there's and last but not least there's the Pilato click which sounds like this this is a lot more louder than all of the other clicks especially the ones that I've shown you now clicking is fun obviously but there is always a bad side to everything and the bad side to making languages is grammar yes the hated grammar the hated congregation for those of you who were in French emersion since kindergarten or grade 1 you've probably been studying congregation since you were like 6 years old and I'm so sorry for your loss because that's a really long time to learn conjugation for one's singular language but unfortunately because you need to learn how to make a sentence using the language that you just made up you need grammar you also need word order every single sentence will have a subject a verb and an object cor obviously there's a lot more to this but that's just the basic rules for English we we speak in the order of subject verb object Sam ate oranges but if you reverse that order to object verb subject you get oranges ate Sam the thing with that sentence is that Sam still ate the oranges oranges did not eat Sam however it just sounds like that because of the way I formatted it for all of those who just had the sudden idea that they're going to get a nightmares about man eating oranges tonight um I'm so sorry but also I don't think those exist yet those are some demented sci-fi novel somewhere there is also the rarely spoken about subsect sort of of coning called conscripting or neography I will use neography because conscription is about war I am not talking about war but all of those slightly offensive jokes aside please don't flame me I am still in high school thank you um neography is just making writing systems for yourself you can go there basically and just make a 40 letter alphabet for some reason or you can be slightly more creative than that and make a logo graphic system for those of you who speak Chinese or literally every other East Asian language out there you will recognize the word logor graphic as it's basically I make a character and that character is an entire word again Chinese you can also make an abat or Alpha silary well actually those are the exact same thing it's basically I write a consonant I put the vowel on top and I changed the consonant to match the vowel those of you who speak Hindi or Sanskrit will recognize this format as it the same way Devon agari is written okay I just SP a bunch of whole new words and terms I use some of them you probably haven't heard until today let's look at some examples well one example in particular Kenya from The Lord of the Ring series by JRR tolken I bring this up because unlike most in instances where people will create the language in order to fit their story JRR tokens started writing Kenya before he started writing the first draft of the Lord of the Rings and in fact the only reason why we have this book series in the first place is because his friend looked at Kenya and thought hey your language is kind of cool you should put that in a book and Jr tolken was like you're right I should probably put this in a book I'm going to put this in a book that I made myself obviously you don't have to go down this route not all of us are writers it is entirely understandable now through through all of this and all of my innan rambling you're probably wondering why why would you create your own fictional language when it sounds so so hard well the first thing is that even though it it is really hard it's fun it's like what math people say when they do differential calculus or whatever that's called and they say that differential calculus is fun I think you are still lying when you say that calculus is fun but it it it is fun it is fun it's just very hard there's also real life applications to making your own language for example if you've spent too long on Google translate you'll realize that there is a language on there that doesn't actually exist and it's called Esperanto Esperanto doesn't actually exist because it's not a natural language it's a language that was made up in order to facilitate human conversation a lot easier we call this an auxilary language or Ox langang for short out of the 800 people who can speak espiranto today fluently a good portion of them grew up speaking Esperanto as their first language honestly that's pretty cool if you ask me okay enough of me talking I've probably gone over time anyways I'll leave you with two words gapa and Mawa or just because I spoke two different languages GES at you goodbye and thank you [Applause]