An easy guide to making your own translatable language, as featured in my series 'Magic Rising'. In this guide I'll be breaking down how I created my own, and how you can easily too for all your sci-fi and fantasy needs.
By breaking down sentence st...
To understand what makes a language is looking at what they do, and don't, have in common. It would be quite impractical to list every difference in all of the worlds languages, so instead I'm just going to brush over key points.
Firstly they all have 'borrowings'. Throughout history humans have migrated, taking their languages and inventions with them. For example, did you know in the english language;
Wardrobe, Allowance, Ballet and Menu (just to name a few) are actually all french?
Or Alias, Post Mortem and 'e.g' are all Latin?
This is true in reverse where english has bled into other languages, for example Korea not only borrows from countries such as China and Japan, but english is now having a huge impact day-to-day.
They too, use: 메뉴 (menu) pronounced exactly like english.... or should that be french? This leads to the next interesting fact, words don't always stay the same in other languages, they adapt. For example:
오렌지 (orange) pronounced o-ren-ji.
This is true for english. For example the suffix 's'. Before adopting the 's' from France, old english often featured 'n' to make words plural.
For example, in old english 'Eyen' instead of 'Eyes'. Housen/houses.
So, this gives you two main points to take away:
1) There is nothing wrong with adopting similar words to a known language if your worlds have interacted for a long time. In fact, it would make it more natural
2) Languages are fluid, they adapt. When you decide on suffixes, it's unlikely that a secluded village that have never met people would have many different ways to say the same thing. However, if it's a build up community/world/spaceport then they probably would!
So first things first, crack open that spreadsheet, and make a list of suffixes you know.
