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...
So have you ever watched an animation, and their lips match exactly what they're saying? ...or the animation has been translated terribly and it doesn't?
This is because of the insanely cool thing known as phonemes, or the language phonetics. Below is a basic guide for animators on lip shapes, with their corresponding sound underneath.
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Now I want you to go grab a mirror and give it a go. Try saying a sentence to yourself... what shapes do you make as you say words?
Whah-tut sow-nds do ewe-uh may-kuh/what sounds do you make?
Notice how you break the words up and move your mouth to make them? This is you, making phonemes.
This is very important as every language has different phonemes, for example the r & l sound is almost the same mouth shape.
Zh, Ch, Sh, R are almost identical. So whilst these are quite native to an english speaker, they are horrific for a Chinese native speaker when learning. Combine this with and r & l and it becomes very tricky indeed.
So why is this important to know?
No matter what language you speak as a first or second, each one has different phonemes.
Understanding how to put together phonetics is how you are going to create the sound for your language.
Go to the next chapter and find out how we're going to conquer phonemes - hint - this is where you're spreadsheet is going to start coming in handy.
