![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Fairy language issues
Jun. 11th, 2018 04:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fayanoraWorking on a fairy language for a story of mine, started to come at it from the culture on up. Taking into account the species is long lived, I'm giving the language two modes: fast mode for emergencies, and slow mode. Slow mode I estimate takes them twenty minutes to have what in English would be a five minute conversion, even before taking into account that very old people like that would probably go into incredible detail in their stories, just because their language is full of sounds held for seconds at a time, deliberate gaps, phonemes repeated multiple times in a single word, and the fact even simple words are long. I'm having trouble writing these sounds and gaps down because I'm not a linguist, but that'll have to wait until I can make a video post so you can hear what I mean.
( what I have so far, under the cut )
But the main reason for this post is I am trying to think of other possibilities for ways a language might be set up that are outside the usual norm for human languages, like the way Klingon uses phonemes that don't often appear in human languages. But specifically I need help with the grammar. (Read numbers three and beyond in the text above for part of the grammar I've already figured out.)
What I'm trying to do is a grammar that's just plain weird, but not too terribly complicated (since I'm not going full Tolkien on it, mid-air it'll just get used for a few sentences here and there, for like spells), and also meshes with number three above. Mostly I need ideas and a plain English overview of ways grammar can be constructed. Even if it's a link to a page that explains it, or maybe there's a "linguistics for dummies" book, I dunno. I just haven't had much luck with the dense and confusing jargon of linguistics so far. If I can be given the ideas in a form I can comprehend, and maybe some ideas, I can sort out the rest.
Sure, I could half ass it, but I want it to look like an actual language to someone who knows the patterns to look for, and I'd prefer if that hypothetical person could tell it wasn't just misled after English. I could probably do that with what I have now, but it wouldn't hurt to ask for ideas.
Also, this race is one of the major Ancient Races of fairies in the story, and this project is helping me figure out their culture, too.
( what I have so far, under the cut )
But the main reason for this post is I am trying to think of other possibilities for ways a language might be set up that are outside the usual norm for human languages, like the way Klingon uses phonemes that don't often appear in human languages. But specifically I need help with the grammar. (Read numbers three and beyond in the text above for part of the grammar I've already figured out.)
What I'm trying to do is a grammar that's just plain weird, but not too terribly complicated (since I'm not going full Tolkien on it, mid-air it'll just get used for a few sentences here and there, for like spells), and also meshes with number three above. Mostly I need ideas and a plain English overview of ways grammar can be constructed. Even if it's a link to a page that explains it, or maybe there's a "linguistics for dummies" book, I dunno. I just haven't had much luck with the dense and confusing jargon of linguistics so far. If I can be given the ideas in a form I can comprehend, and maybe some ideas, I can sort out the rest.
Sure, I could half ass it, but I want it to look like an actual language to someone who knows the patterns to look for, and I'd prefer if that hypothetical person could tell it wasn't just misled after English. I could probably do that with what I have now, but it wouldn't hurt to ask for ideas.
Also, this race is one of the major Ancient Races of fairies in the story, and this project is helping me figure out their culture, too.
