Side Project:
Fictional Language Construction
Posted on July 16, 2014 by thegermaniclanguages
Although not directly related to GMC linguistics, I wanted to share a linguistics-related side project I’ve been working on in addition to this blog.
I have been playing Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) for some time as an additional hobby of mine, and I have always been interested in the fictional languages that authors or developers fabricate to supplement their fantasy worlds. This is something I have always wanted to work on myself. D&D is curiously absent of any details of the languages used by characters in the D&D world, although references to languages with the same recurring names are constant (e.g. “Common Speech,” “Dwarven,” “Elven,” etc.). I had never seen any truly detailed description of the grammar or phonology of such fictional languages, and not even so much as small sample texts or even traces of single words in D&D. Even Tolkien’s impressive output of such languages did not include any detailed, technical grammar.
So, I wrote a number of short linguistic overviews of the languages that I have encountered with my group in our recent adventures.
The goal was to take an approach that I have never seen taken with regard to fictional languages by treating their analyses in a highly scholarly and academic manner, so as to bring the languages to life in a new way: by treating them in the same scientific manner in which modern languages are treated by linguists...
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Squatch