# LANGUAGES

###### tags: `DEADLY MARCHES`

## Человеческие региональные

## Стандартные

## Экзотические

Language lessons: I
Even Orcish is logical
Make the system fit the speakers
by Clyde Heaton
Players of fantasy role-playing games are spectators and critics of a complex, varied art form. This medium covers a range of experience equal to that of music and poetry, which soars from simple rhyme and melody to the rarefied heights of symphony and epic opera. So, too, does game design range from simple to complex.
The simplest form is that of the free¬standing dungeon, where the players enter the demesne of a mad wizard, who has supposedly created the dungeon for his own amusement. The characters come from nowhere. There is never a reference to the wider world outside the maze of tunnels, no reason for the strange mena¬gerie of monsters and men found in the rambling warren, and the players find no hints of anything more.
Eventually, usually under the goading of players' inquiring minds and free imaginations, the referee either loses interest in an increasingly complex hobby or gets lost himself in what has become an art form: the design of a fantasy world. If the players don't ask questions about the world, the designer's own mind will ask them — and there are always answers to be had:
"You said a wizard built this place because he was mad. What made him insane?”
"The madness was a curse from the gods.”
"What did he do to get the gods down on him?”
"Uh . . . he helped overthrow a king that had the support of the local religion.”
"What kingdom is this? Can we go there?”
And so it goes, until you find yourself as the creator of your very own world, dropping hints of great treasures and glory to be won.
Imagine a scenario wherein the players find an inscription on a tomb wall in an unknown language. They copy it down and go looking for someone to translate it for them. A magician can make sense out of some of it, enough to figure out what language it is. Since a player character has been told in a dream that this inscrip¬tion may mean life or death to a member of the party, off the party goes in search of a needed sage, having many adventures on the way.
In most cases, the life-or-death inscrip¬tion is never described except as a set of probabilities on dice, or it is given in a sort of doubletalk, as "razzamatazz da gooblegoop,” which the players instantly recognize as a simple symbol for a real phrase, with no meaning of its own. Too much of this sort of thing, and the game becomes dry.
The masters of literature have often found solutions to the puzzle by actually designing a language. J. R. R. Tolkien's Elvish is famous, spiced with a bit of Dwarvish; Frank Herbert's Dune series is full of fragments of language, from the battle language of the Atreides to bits of Fremen and Tleilaxu tongues. Each of these fragments strikes a note of realism beause it reflects a real vocabulary and syntax, however incomplete it is. These languages are not simple substitutions of nonsense words in English grammar, like a ten-year-old's "secret language” he shares with his friends; they represent real thought about the characters speaking the lines, and real rules about how languages work. It's not hard to learn: This article will show you how, and we'll design a language for orcs along the way.
Languages have logic
Every language has its internal logic, although folk wisdom holds otherwise. Some people are fond of saying that Eng¬lish (or whatever language they are being forced to study) is illogical, unpredicta¬ble, and ridiculous. Deep down, they know this is not true, for they learned the basic logic of their native tongue as they learned to talk, without any formal les¬sons. They can hear a sentence made up entirely of unknown words, but if these words conform to the patterns of English they will instantly recognize certain facts.
The commonly quoted example of this is the meaningless phrase, "The gostak distims the doshes.” Without knowing exactly what one is, you automatically know that a gostak is a being or an object capable of performing some kind of action. This gostak distims; that is, per¬forms an unknown action (defined as an action by the internal logic of the lan¬guage), and it distims doshes (whatever they are), the object of the action of "dis- timming.” The only time this internal logic is upset is when two languages come into conflict by being used at the same time and place, and therefore are often combined. Eventually the two tongues will become the same language, having its own slightly different logic within a slightly different framework.
Before a language can be designed, you have to decide a few things about the people or creatures who will speak it. First, what kind of vocal apparatus do these creatures have to work with? Obviously, a creature with no teeth, only a horny bill, will not use the same sounds that a beast with fangs will, and neither will use the phonemes of human language.
Second, what kind of culture and world view do these people live in and with? In his science-fiction novel The Languages of Pao, Jack Vance suggests that lan¬guages shape cultures. In his fictional example, he uses language changes to shape changes in a society. This may be so, but if a language grows up within a culture, the reverse will probably be more often true. The sound and grammar of a language will almost certainly reflect the cultural environment in which is is used.
For example, it may be no coincidence that ancient Rome, an aggressive, expan¬sionist society, spoke Latin by putting the verb first. The position of the word de¬noting and describing action shows clear¬ly the importance the Romans placed on action. The English-speaking world puts the subject of a sentence, a noun, in the leadoff position in the simplest sentences. This may reflect, as it seems to do, an acquisitive, possession-oriented culture. To design a language for part of an AD&D™ world, you don't need a complete analysis; knowing the general alignment and cultural habits of the society will cover the situation.
The third fundamental decision involves the question of use. What do these people do with this language? Is it spoken primarily by courtiers (such as High German) or by peasants and mer¬chants (such as Low German)? To you, as the game-world designer, this decision is important because it will limit the kind of vocabulary you will develop. The Atreides' battle language in Dune didn't need words for flowers or birds, for philo¬sophy or religion, but it had a driving need for military intelligence and combat terms. In the same manner, you will design only the part of a greater language that you require, adding the rest only if you find some part of it useful.
Common Orcish
The language we are going to develop is Common Orcish, so named because it is common to all the orc tribes in a given area. Common Orcish is a well-developed military language, having evolved to meet the needs of intertribal cooperation. Generally, the only reason tribes will work together is for warlike purposes, such as civil war or a major raid into civ¬ilized territory. The orcs of Stony Ledge don't want to discuss the fine points of metal work with the Black Dog orcs, but they do need to know how, why, and when they are all going to launch a joint charge against the kobolds. Hence, the language is full of concepts relating to warfare and military construction.
Orcs are always shown with protruding fangs, a physical feature which definitely limits the sounds they can make. Many subtle sounds that require a completely closed mouth to produce will be unknown to orcs, because their fangs literally get in the way. Their harsh, sav¬age nature will further lead orcs to use mostly harsh, guttural sounds. Therefore, the only consonant sounds in the lan¬guage are D, G, J, K, N, R, T, and Z. The vowel sounds are A (as in at), E (as in egg), and O (as in off).
(Remember, the process of gaming lan¬guage design is arbitrary. You are the designer and authority. It is only neces¬sary that the component parts not be inconsistent. If, by chance, a slight incon¬sistency does creep in, blame it on inter¬language contamination, which happens in all but completely closed societies.)
If we were designing a tongue for a less hostile race, such as elves, we might dis¬card this series of consonants completely in favor of softer sounds such as F, H, TH, L and S.
Setting up syllables
Once the basic sounds of the language are chosen, set up a table to help pick syl¬lables, using a matrix something like the
one given here, or a similar design of your own creation:
1st 2nd
Consonant Vowel Consonant
(null) a (null)
d e d
g o g J
k k
n n
r r
t t
Z Z
Now, by picking "one from column A, one from column B, and one from column C," Chinese restaurant style, you can build dozens of suitably harsh sylla¬bles (243, to be precise), each one similar in form and sound to the others, such as dug, jeg, zor, ot, and tet.
These syllables may be used as com¬plete words, by themselves, or may be put together into longer words. In doing this, take into account the intelligence of the speakers. In most cases, only races of rela¬tively high intelligence would use a lot of polysyllabic words. I doubt seriously if orcs would use more than two syllables to a word, especially in their common, inter¬tribal language. Even so, the consonants and vowels from the above list can be combined into more than 40,000 two- syllable words. Common Orcish need not be a limited tongue.
When building a vocabulary, if you choose you may have similarities between some words, to show a common root; for example, in Old Dwarvish (described in DRAGON™ issue #66) the verb ak (to cut) was reflected in the nouns bak (cutter) and zak (axe). Such relationships and roots are very easy to develop when designing a language, since one word will suggest another, such as with sleep, bed and blanket.

However, root-word organization would not be very prevalent in Common Orcish. Orcs are not very creative, are lawful, and may have evolved from a pack-running, hunting carnivore. I stipu¬late that their words may have developed originally from hunting calls and are therefore arbitrary in nature, at least in the common language. New words are either borrowed from other languages or imposed by a leader strong enough to have his way. Once used by enough orcs, a word gains the weight of custom and is accepted by the lawful-minded populace.
Another thing to consider is whether certain parts of speech have a different word form, making them immediately recognizable for what they are. This may be done by reserving certain syllables for special uses, or by the use of suffixes and prefixes. In Common Orcish, we will record a tendency for verbs to be of one three-letter syllable, and for connectors such as and, or, but, from, etc., to be of one two-letter syllable. Plurals will be denoted by adding the suffix -a to a word, and a female version of a noun will be given an -o suffix. All other words, whether nouns or adverbs and adjectives, will be of similar structure, probably of two syllables.
In any language, there must be a way to denote possession and tense. In High Elvish (see the article on that topic else¬where in this section), a relatively more sophisticated language, possession and tense are both shown by using an entirely different word to denote the difference between my possession and yours, as well as a difference between an object of today and the same object tomorrow. In Old Dwarvish, the same requirement is met by a short modifying syllable preceding the word. In Orcish, we will use a simple modifier in the same manner as an adverb.
From syllables to sentences
Next, we must determine simple sen¬tence structure, taking into account the culture and attributes of the race and cul¬ture using the language. When Old Dwarvish was designed, I considered the reputation dwarves have of being mate¬rialists, always seeking to amass treasures of gold and finely worked materials. Apparently, physical objects are of most importance to them, and this must be reflected in their language, with the sub¬ject and object of a sentence taking the prominent position.
In the case of High Elvish, I tried to imagine what would be of paramount importance to a nearly immortal people. I decided that my personal view of elves was that of a race of artists, more con¬cerned with appearance and attitude than with actual objects and actions. Hence, the mood of a statement takes grammati¬cal precedence over the subject, verb, and object. Orcs are not as highly developed as either dwarves or elves, however, so we will use the simple egocentric grammar of subject, verb and object, in that order. Words modifying another word will fol¬low it.
For example, the English sentence The chief of the orcs attacked the big fort by the wide river would be organized in Common Orcish as Chief orcs/attack past/fort big by river wide.
The simple concept is Chief attack fort. The subject, chief, is modified by orcs; the verb, attack, is put into past tense by an adverb; and the object, fort, is modi¬fied by the adjective big and the preposi¬tional phrase by river wide.
We now have the bare skeletal structure of a language. If all you need for gaming purposes are a few fragments of speech or tomb inscriptions, you really don't need to develop a full vocabulary; just follow these rules of construction and the lan¬guage (or what there is of it) will sound and look consistent.
However, if you want to develop a vocabulary for orcs, let's continue. First, decide what concepts are required by the speakers of the tongue. As we decided ear¬lier, Common Orcish is basically a mil¬itary language to allow cooperation between tribes in time of war. The orcs will need to talk about combat (both individual and group), bivouac situa¬tions, sieges, construction, and possibly hunting. Incorporating these concepts will dictate the vocabulary of the language.
Start by making a list of the names of every object, person, direction, etc., that an orc may have to talk about when in any of these situations, and assign an Orcish word to each, according to word structure as decided earlier; go back to the three-column syllable table. Remember, nouns are usually of two syllables.
As you begin this list, keep it in alpha¬betical order. I find that 3"*5" index cards are the easiest method; by keeping files for both English and the language I'm working on, I avoid any repetition.
When the noun list is as complete as you want it to be, look it over and add . any adjectives that an orc might need to apply to any of these. For instance, river might require wide and fast; sword might need the modifier sharp. In the case of Common Orcish, the adjectives have the same syllabic form as nouns.
Now, decide what verbs an orc would need, such as cut to go with sword and swim with river. These verbs are usually of one three-letter syllable, in the case of Orcish. File these verbs in order with the nouns and adjectives, then select adverbs to modify the verbs, such as hard to mod¬ify cut. Adverbs have the same form as nouns and adjectives.
Now, we need one more type of word to give the language the flexibility it needs: connectors, such as conjunctions (and, or, if, etc.) and prepositions (from, for, and to). These we have already decided will be of one syllable of two letters only, so assign Orcish translations to these words and file them.
Using this process, I worked out the following English-to-Orcish vocabulary list:
And (conj.)
Animal (n.)
Armor (n.)
Army/warband (n.) At (prep.)
Attack (v.)
Attack (n.)
Axe (n.)
Bed (n.)
Big/great (adj.) .. Blanket (n.)
Break (v.)
Brick (n.)
Bright (adj.)
Burn (v.)
But (conj .)
Carry (v.)
Charge (v.)
Chest (n.)
City/town (n.) . . . Climb (v.)
Cloak(n.)
Close/shut (v.) . . . Cold (adj.)
Come (v.)
Coming (n.)
Company (n.). .. . Cut (v.)
Dagger/knife (n.) Danger (n.)
Dark (adj.)
Day (n.)
Deer (n.)
Defend (v.)
Die (n.)
Dig (v-)
Dog (n.)
Down (adj./adv.) . Drink (v.)
Drink (n.)
Dwarf (n.)
East (n.)
Eat (v.)
Elf (n.)
Enemy (n.)
Far (adj./adv.) . . . Fast (adj./adv.). . . Fight (v-)
Fire (n.)
Flank (n.)
Food (n.)
For (prep.)
Formation (n.) . . . Front (n.)
Future (adv.)
Gate (n.)
ak .. ragdar gandan
. . joktar ag . . .. dak . dakzok ... ekdod
. derdar .. iaigak .derdak
.... dod . kettak
..gatad
det ek .... dog kot
..zekar .. ejtag teg . ..durad
... gen . . . etar
.. ..zen
..zenak
. roktor jtak
. nartag ..gerdak zandag ..rorad
.... gag ot
...... gar gojak
. . . zegor
... az
aztar kez . gokzek
.... gad
... rekar .. rargad
. . gotrak .. tortan
.... dek
.. detad .. togtad . gadduj oj ... kejar .. regton . gakdar ..netdag
Get/fetch (v.) doj
Go (v.) zor
Going (n.) zorak
Guard (v.) dej
Guard (n.) dejad
Hammer (n.) gettok
Hard (adj./adv.) gegor
He (n.) darag
Helmet (n.) ozrad
Horse (n.) gozak
Hot (adj.) dendad
How (adv./conj.) or
Hunt (v.) jar
. jarag rannor jardak dagad
.... eg
Hunt (n.)
Human (n.)
Hunter (n.)
I, me (n.)
If (conj.)
In/aWbefv.)./. Kill (v.)
Lead (v.)
Leader/officer (n.) Left (n.)
Like/as (prep.). .. Listen/hear (v.) .. Loose (adj.)
.... dez .... jed . jeddar . rakan .... ad ... dun (konad)
Make/build/erect (v.) tek
Many (adj.) zejdad
March (v.) dok
Move (v.) tor
Near (adj.) gotrag
Night (n.) zakdag
No/negative (adv.) zozgat
North (n.) todreg
Obey (v.) jeg
Of/from (prep.) og
Open (v.) nez
Or (conj.) ok
Orc (n.) darak
Order (v.)
Order (n.)
Parry (v.) . Past (adv.) Rear (n.) . Retreat (v.) Ride (v.) .
Right (n.)

rontak
.. .noj . . . rej tokan
Run (v.)
raz
Saddle (n.)
Safe/safety (adj./n.) scout (v.)
Scout (n.)
Sergeant (n.)
Shield (n.)
Shoot (v.)
Shut/close (v.) .... Sleep (v.)
Slow (adv.)
Soft (adj.)
South (n.)
Squad (n.)
Stand (v.)
Steal (v.)
Stone (n.)
Stop/halt (v.)
Sword (n.)
Take (v.)
Thief (n.)
Threaten (v.)
Thrust (v.)
Tight (adj.)
.... orgad . . . . noztan
.. gon gontad jegdan

jez
rot
der
tontag ..gezan
takren
. ..jok .. nak ... dez kordad . ..gej .dotak
.. don .deztej
. ..na r ...zok
kozad
To (prep.) od
Treasure/wealth (n.) doztat
Tree (n.) tadnen
Up (adv./prep.) tegat
Wall (n.) kokad
Water (n.) dozar
West (n.) gogker
What (n./adj.) ar
When (adv./conj.) an
Where (adv./conj.) er
Who/whom (n.) on
Why (adv./conj.) en
Wine (n.) tagrat
With (prep.) ed
Wood (n.) dortod
Yes/affirmative (adv.) tojat
You (n.) dakar
The parts of speech abbreviated after each English entry are expressed gener¬ally in terms of how the Orcish language uses these words and concepts. For sim¬plicity (because that's the way orcs would instinctively do it), there is no distinction drawn between nouns and pronouns. Although a given word may be character¬ized either as an adjective or an adverb because of its principal usage in English, it can be both parts of speech in the Orcish sentence structure, where the same words are used to modify both nouns and verbs.
Words can be easily added to this list as they are required by the game situation. Words on the list can influence the crea¬tion of other related words (as with the Orcish words for "hunt" and "hunter"). But don't overdo this; as mentioned ear¬lier, Common Orcish wouldn't be terribly sophisticated in this respect. Reserve the "related word" privilege for concepts and objects that are near and dear to orcish mentality, such as az/aztar, dej/dejad, jar/jardak, and gon/gontad, to name a few from the list above. As long as you follow the language's construction and grammatical rules — and avoid outright duplication of words by keeping organ¬ized lists — the language can be dealt with and used by players. It can become a major factor in the events of your cam¬paign; for instance, being able to recog¬nize Common Orcish from previous con¬tacts with the language may provide an important clue to player characters in a perilous situation.
Translation, direct and indirect
To translate an English sentence into Common Orcish vocabulary and gram¬mar, reorganize the sentence in English first. The sentence The officer ordered us to climb the wall has officer as its subject, ordered as the verb, and us as the object of the verb. The basic Orcish sentence would be officer order me. The subject is not modified, but the verb is modified by the phrase (to) climb the wall and by being placed in past tense by the modifier dotad. The object is modified by adding the plural suffix, -a.
The complete rearranged sentence reads: Officer order (past) to climb wall us. A direct translation of this sentence into Common Orcish yields: Jeddar jen dotad teg kokad dagada.
If players ever get too familiar with the language, it may be time to sprinkle your Common Orcish vocabulary with some "indirect translations," otherwise known as dialects. As the use of a language spreads (and any language worthy of the name "common" would certainly be widespread), differences arise in the way various tribes pronounce various words. For example, one tribe may pronounce the harsh T more softly, so that it would be written TH; the K could become a breathy KH at the end of a word only.
Much of the Portuguese language is similar to Spanish, with the words short¬ened, some of the vowels left out. Perhaps one tribe of orcs speaks this way, so that gogker (west) becomes go'k'r, and tagrat (wine) is t'grat; in an adventure, this could be a source of friction between tribes that adventurers could exploit.
How will you make the most and the best use of the languages you design? That's impossible to predict; there are at least as many ways to use a language as there are words in the language itself. And no matter how much and how well you use authentic languages, one thing is for sure: Player characters in your world will use the languages you designed in ways that you didn't even dream of. SZo
Language lessons: II
All games need names
But don’t make a game out of naming!
by Katharine Kerr
©1983 Katharine Kerr
“You're in the Temple of Florwaks in Shinebright City,” says the gamemaster. “You see the Priestess Oolala and her barbarian bodyguard, Upchuk, who serves the mighty god, uh, the god . . . how do you say Smkznrf, anyway?”
Does any of that sound familiar? All too often, role-playing games, to say nothing of the lower reaches of fantasy and science-fiction writing, are marred by the use of personal and place names rang¬ing from the merely silly to the utterly incomprehensible. Even some popular published gaming campaigns are filled with banal random names.
Al though most fantasy role-playing systems have elaborate rules for determin¬ing which game-world languages a player may know, when we come right down to it, all their manifold tongues sound alike
— a species of that truly common lan¬guage, Gamer's Exotica. It's a pity, because the proper use of strange¬sounding names adds the feeling of a dif¬ferent reality that's part of the pleasure of role-playing, whether your game-world lies on a futuristic planet or in a past that never was.
The problem seems to be that many gamers forget that names are part of a language, and that each language has a consistent character that sets it apart from other languages. By and large, most role¬playing games are created and played by speakers of English, and American Eng-lish at that. For centuries, English has been a linguistic melting pot, drawing roots and words from many other tongues and in the process losing any recogniza¬ble purity of tone and sound, such as one finds in, for example, Chinese or German.
In America, our cross-cultural society produces names drawn from all over the world. I've known a Kevin Woo and a Heidi Sanchez, for instance — ethnic combinations of names that would be unthinkable elsewhere, especially in a primitive, isolated society such as those in most FRP games. As a result, when gamers create names, they start with the assumption that anything goes, just as it does in American English. Sometimes, in a desperate attempt to sound exotic, they fall back on handfuls of consonants; more often, they mix and match from widely different languages, with a healthy dose of just plain English thrown in.
It is possible, however, to have a system that will produce personal and place names in fantastic languages with a min¬imum of effort and brain-wracking. What the gamemaster needs to do is create the language from which these names will be drawn. Making an entire language would be too time-consuming and not necessary, but you can use a few basic linguistic principles to create a small part of a lan¬guage in a surprisingly short time. This article explains those basic principles and gives specific pointers on language crea¬tion so that it can serve as a starter-kit for those who want to create partial lan¬guages for their campaigns. You should bear in mind that the article oversimpli¬fies many a tangled concept, but on the whole, it sticks close to modern linguistic theory. It also uses two standard linguis¬tic conventions by setting off example sounds in slashes (/ g/) and example words in italic type.
What is a language?
Before we can get down to the step-by- step process of making up a language, it's necessary to define exactly what a lan¬guage is: a system of sounds, all given arbitrary meanings and organized into patterns that carry meaning and show the relationships between the basic sounds.
The one primary reason that languages exist is to communicate information between individuals. Every existing lan¬guage fulfills this need in a very precise way, no matter what speakers of other languages may think of it. You must understand that a truly “primitive” lan¬guage — that is, a system of grunts, short words, and grammarless sentences, like those often attributed to primitive peo¬ples in fantasy fiction — simply never has been discovered and probably never existed among anyone recognizably human. It's likely that as soon as proto¬humans were using tools, they were inventing real languages; the same will hold true for any sentient human or humanoid beings in a fantasy or science¬fiction campaign.
Pick the right phonemes
The two basic parts of any language are its sound (what linguists call its pho¬netics or its phonological inventory) and its structure (grammar and syntax). To invent a language, you must first deter¬mine what kind of sounds your new lan¬guage will have, then decide what kind of grammar it uses. Once these decisions are made, you can generate lists of personal names and words that can be used to build place names. Let us begin then with what most people call sounds but linguists call phonemes (for a reason that will become clear later).
The human mouth and throat, to say nothing of the speech-making parts of an alien anatomy, can produce an enormous variety of sounds, ranging from a Bronx cheer to a soft hiss. Any language that used all or even most of the sounds a crea¬ture is capable of making would be too complex to use for general communica¬tion. So, every language selects a rela¬tively small number of sounds to use in building words. This selection is what gives a real-world language its basic “music” or character, because out of a simple human liking for what's familiar and orderly, languages tend toward con¬sistency in their choice of phonemes.
Thus, the German Ianguage sounds throaty and harsh to many people because of its selection of phonemes pro¬nounced farther back in the mouth than those of English, while Spanish uses the open, soft phonemes that give it its nick¬name of “the loving tongue.” These judgements, of course, are culturally con¬ditioned and emotionally subjective — but as a gamemaster, subjective emo¬tional color is exactly what you want in your invented languages.
Your first job, then, is to select basic sounds in an orderly, patterned way to give your new language character. Since the word "sound" is vague, let's define our special term, phoneme: A phoneme is a speech-sound that must be precisely pronounced to communicate meaning, but this precision is a relative thing.
If a person with a high-pitched voice and one with a baritone voice both say the word can, for instance, the pitch of the two words is different, but they would both be understood. Similarly, a British and an American speaker would each pronounce the vowel /a/ in can slightly differently — but again, they would be understood. On the other hand, if some¬one pronounced the word as con, the word would not be understood for what it is. Thus, the British and the American /a/ sounds are variants of a single pho¬neme, while /o/ is a different phoneme.
When inventing your new language, then, remember to define the phonemes closely rather than broadly. For example, just how will the vowel /a/ be pro¬nounced in your language? Don't assume that it represents all the phonemes that the English letter a represents, such as the phonemes in can, cane, and aha, but decide which of these phonemes you want. (The spelling in your new lan¬guage will be a breeze, unlike English, if you play your cards right.)
The number of phonemes used in human speech is vast, and far from bounded by our English alphabet. Some African languages, for instance, use the phoneme /!/ (no, that exclamation mark is not a mistake), which is pronounced roughly like a bottle-top being popped by an old-fashioned opener. Welsh has the phoneme /ll/, produced by putting the tip of the tongue on the hard palate and hissing. Many languages use the throaty /ch/, as in the Scottish word loch. Closer to home, consider all the ways that /r/ may be pronounced: open as in American English, rolled or trilled as in Celtic tongues, swallowed like in British, nasal¬ized as in New England dialect, or even aspirated like the /rh/ in Welsh, Each language selects one method as the "right" way to pronounce /r/, and so can your new language.
Vowels and consonants
Varied as they are, however, all pho¬nemes fall into one of two groups: vowels and consonants. A vowel is a phoneme produced by vibrating the vocal cords and allowing the air to pass out of the mouth or nose or both without obstruction. It's the vowels, in other words, that actually allow a word to be pronounced by a human or humanoid mouth.
A consonant may be simply defined as anything that isn't a vowel. Certain con¬sonants, such as /s/ at the beginning of a word, do carry air with them, but this air is insufficient to allow the word to be heard from any distance away without the following vowel. Say the word stop aloud and pay attention to the way that your voice becomes automatically louder when you hit the /o/. Thus we see that a word without vowels, such as the god Smkznrf of our example, is unpronounceable and thus unusable, no matter how dandy it looks on the printed page.
Both vowels and consonants are classi¬fied into categories on the basis of certain technicalities. Although you don't need to learn all these categories to create a partial fantasy language, included below is a table for those who like this sort of thing. The table shows most of the basic
TABLE OF CONSONANTS
Nasals stops Spirants voiced voiceless
voiced voiceless
Labial m b p w wh
Dental th th
Labio-dental v f
Alveolar n d t zh, z, 1 sh, s, I
Cacuminal r r
Palatal n (as in onion) y y
Velar ng g k
Uvular (not used in English; ch in German, as in achtung, is one example)
Definitions of terms in table:
Nasals are sounds produced with the nasal passage open.
Stops are produced by first closing the lips, then opening them with a puff of breath.
Spirants narrow the lips, but allow air to escape with a feeling of friction.
Voiced consonants are those where the vocal cords continue to vibrate as they are pronounced. (Put your fingers on your throat and say first /s/, then /z/ to feel the difference.) Many consonants have both voiced and voiceless pronunciations.
The technical terms reading down the left column show how the consonant is
Taking the table further
To go beyond the table of consonants given here, write out the English alphabet and make notes of the variety of phonemes each letter represents in actual speech. If you know other languages, think of how those languages would pro¬nounce the various phonemes. Pay atten¬tion to any foreign languages spoken in your community and try to distinguish different phonemes. (If you're unfortu¬nate enough to live in an English-only community, you can ask at the public library for language-learning records.) You may want to incorporate distinctive foreign phonemes into your new lan¬guage. A little bit of thought will give you a long list of possible phonemes — more than can be incorporated into a sin¬gle language. Remember, however, that any unusual sounds must be easily ways of producing consonants, defines those terms, and shows how the English consonants are classified. Notice how few different consonant sounds English uses, in comparison to the number of different sounds the human vocal apparatus can make. For a new language, it would cer¬tainly be possible to introduce new con¬sonant sounds — but make sure you and your players can actually pronounce a nasalized dental, for example, if you choose to include one. (Perhaps written as /nt'/, it would be sounded with the tongue pressed against the upper teeth as the air went out your nose.) produced by the vocal apparatus. Labials are produced with the lips. The other types are produced by contact between the tongue and another part of the mouth: dentals with the tongue touching the teeth; labio-dentals with the tongue and the lower lip; alveolars with the tongue touching the gum above the upper teeth; cacuminals with the tongue toward the hard palate; palatals with the tongue close to the hard palate; velars with the tongue on the soft palate; and uvulars with the tongue back in the throat. (Say some English consonants, noting how your tongue is positioned, to get a better understanding of these terms.) learned and easily spoken during the heat of play.
To make your new language sound properly exotic, it's not even necessary to have a large number of non-English phonemes. Languages also take on char¬acter by the way in which they combine their phonemes and the frequency with which they use certain combinations. English, for example, readily uses con¬sonants in pairs or clusters, such as in the words strong track star. Other languages, such as the Polynesian group, rarely use more than a single consonant per vowel, and many syllables consist of a single vowel, as in Hawai'i or Nu'kalofa. The Welsh language strings together a variety of diphthongs, as in haearn, while Eng¬lish avoids such combinations.
What about frequency? Well, if you look over this paragraph you will see
many uses of /t/, /r/, /e/, /a/, and /n/, but hardly any appearances by /x/, /q/, and /v/, to name three relatively rare let¬ters in English. In other languages, /x/ (for instance) might be a common con¬sonant, even at the beginning of words, while /t/ may be exceptionally rare. When you select phonemes for your new language, give them a different frequency rate than in English; that is, use some of them more and some less than the corre¬sponding English phoneme. The choice of a phoneme pattern is just as important as the choice of the phonemes themselves.
Let's look at an example drawn from my own fantasy campaign, which has two prominent languages: Kazrak and Tribal. Kazrak predominantly selects the consonants represented by /j/, /k/, /z/, /w/, and /r/, with other phonemes added for variety, of course. It also clusters its consonants and isolates vowels from each other with consonants. Tribal, on the other hand, prefers smooth sounds such as /l/, /m/, /d/, and /p/, and rarely pairs, much less clusters, its consonants. If we have two chararters, for instance, named Jezro of Haz Strokej and Marador of Rinbabadelan, it's obvious that the first is a Kazrak and the second a man of the Tribes. Any place with a name like Melimbalaban will be in Tribal lands, while Dazjarko must be somewhere in Kazrak territory. More importantly, neither could be in California or Indiana.
Reading, writing, and morphemes
At this point, let's consider the ques¬tion of how to write down your new lan¬guage. While it's tempting to make up an exotic alphabet, remember that you have to read these words out in the middle of a game. Since learning how to read a new alphabet takes a lot of time and practice, it's best to start by writing your new lan¬guage in the alphabet you already know. For non-English phonemes, modify exist¬ing letters by such devices as putting a slash through or a dot over them. Make a key, and stick to it, to avoid confusion.
If you assign one and only one pho¬neme to each letter, spelling will be easy. The horror of English spelling arises from the fact that one letter can represent several phonemes, and some phonemes are represented by several letters. This situation arose because of the "linguistic melting pot” characteristic of English mentioned earlier — a characteristic you can avoid in your new language.
Before you begin making up word lists for your language, you have to decide some basic questions about its structure, because the grammatical structure of a language determines not only the length of its words but the details of the words' form. In spite of their amazing variety on an individual basis, all known human languages can be classified as one of two broad types: isolating and inflectional. (Modern European languages, including English, are a mixture of the two types, but most other languages are quite rec¬ognizably one or the other.) In the primi¬tive and culturally pure worlds of fantasy gaming, languages will also follow one or the other of these patterns. To define these two language types, we need a new term — morpheme — to replace the common term, word.
Just as a sound can be made up of sev¬eral phonemes, what are commonly called words can be made up of several morphemes. Consider, for example, the word unfortunate. It is made up of un, fortun, and ate, each a set of letters that contributes meaning to the total word: a negation, then the root meaning, and then a suffix showing that the word is an adjective. Although none of these pieces can stand alone as a word in a sentence, each has a definite meaning and thus is a morpheme — the smallest unit of a lan¬guage that can carry meaning. Some words are single morphemes: can, a, and is, for instance, cannot be subdivided in the manner that unfortunate can be.
Isolating-type languages
In an isolating language, each mor¬pheme is indivisible in the same way as can or is. In the purest type of such a tongue, one morpheme equals one word equals one syllable, always remaining distinct, never changing its form or sound, and revealing its grammatical function by its position the sentence alone.
Chinese is a good example of an isolat¬ing language. In a very rough transcrip¬tion, in Chinese jung means middle and gwo means country; thus the word for China (the Middle Country) is Junggwo. The morpheme hwa means either "speak” or "speech”; there is absolutely no difference in the form of the mor¬pheme to show whether it's a noun or a verb. The morpheme bu is used for nega¬tion. Thus, the sentence Do you speak Chinese? translates (very roughly) as Junggwo hwa, hwa bu hwa? or, more literally, China speak, you speak not speak? The listener understands that this sentence is a question from the pattern of the morphemes; that is, the repetition in hwa bu hwa is a vital part of the lan¬guage and carries the information that the sentence is a question.
If you choose an isolating type of struc¬ture for your new language, its words will be short — ideally all monosyllables, but even Vietnamese, the purest known iso¬lating language, does not attain that ideal. Such a language will have to have plenty of different phonemes in order to avoid words which sound alike but mean different things. Chinese neatly solves the problem by adding tones to its phonemic system; that is, a word like hwa means one thing when pronounced in a high, even tone of voice, but quite another when pronounced emphatically with a falling tone of voice. Unless you already speak Chinese or another tonal language, this system will be very confusing for your game-world language. Since you'll only need a small number of words, you can get by with simply including a lot of phonemes in the language and paying strict attention to make sure that you don't duplicate entire words.
Making up names in an isolating lan¬guage is a relatively simple matter. Per¬sonal names will consist of two or three words placed side by side, such as "Ling Mei” or "Trong Nhu Tang,” to give one Chinese and one Vietnamese example. One of these words will be the person's actual name, the other the name of the person's family, or perhaps the village where he or she was born or resides. An attribute can also be added to a personal name — as in "Thor Stormbringer,” to give a common-sounding example with the attribute plainly stated in English. It would be much more interesting to have the name be "Tor Mek Al,” for instance, and leave it up to the character bearing the name to reveal (if he chooses) how he earned the name Mek Al, or "Bring Storm.” Place names can be formed in a similar way. "Big Tree Place” or "Orc Death Rock,” suitably translated, could be names of places in a country speaking an isolating tongue.
Inflectional-type languages
Although the inflectional type of lan¬guage is more complex, you can invent one with a minimum of effort once you
understand the basic principles. Basically, an inflectional language changes the sound or form of its words to show changes in meaning. There are two ways of making these changes: (1) altering the sound, as in the English run and ran, give and gave, and so on, or (2) by adding morphemes, as in fortunate and unfortu¬nate. When morphemes are added, some of them remain distinct; others have their pronunciation "blurred' and become part of the word. (Always remember that speech is the primary form and writing the secondary form when thinking about these matters.) In the purest type of an inflectional language, every single word in a sentence will change its form to show its precise function and various shades of meaning — but even in Latin, a good example of an inflectional language, some words are invariable. Inflectional languages are further subdivided into two types: agglutinative and fusional. Since the differences between these two types is confusing at first, let us examine them in more detail.
Latin is a good example of a fusional language. Remember our example of unfortunate, a Latin word taken over almost whole into English. To form that word, un and fortun and ate are "fused” into one longer word which has a mean¬ing that goes beyond any one of its parts. In Latin itself, unfortunate undergoes another change when it's being used in a sentence. Consider the examples Marcus est infortunatus ("Mark is unfortunate”) and Anna est infortunata ("Ann is unfor¬tunate”). The end of the word undergoes a further sound-change because Ann is female and Mark is male.
Suppose we want to say that Ann and Mark are both unfortunate; this becomes Anna et Marcus sunt infortunati. Notice that the verb changes its form to the plu¬ral, just as the end of infortunatus/a is altered yet once again. Are these changes at the end of infortunat- sound-changes, or are they morphemes added to the root? Scholars argue the point, because in a fusional language it's very hard to say. Fortunately, the answer is irrelevant for our purposes, except as it bears on the distinction between a fusional and an agglutinative tongue.
In agglutinative languages, there is no question of sound changes. Each mor¬pheme has a distinct meaning and a dis¬tinct character, no matter how many of them are "glued together,” or aggluti¬nated. In Turkish, for example, the mor¬pheme for house is ev. To form a plural, one adds ler, for evler. This morpheme is always a sign of the plural. In Latin, that -i which pluralizes can also be added to different kinds of words to fulfill other functions: librum Marci does not mean a book and several Marcuses, but a book belonging to Marcus. In Turkish, such confusion would never arise.
Agglutinative languages can string together quite a number of morphemes. In Turkish, the morpheme den indicates movement away from the root it's at¬tached to, so that evlerden means out of the houses. In practice, most fusional languages have some agglutinative fea¬tures and vice versa, but all you need to worry about is the predominant character of your new language. Since an aggluti¬native language can pack a lot more mor¬phemes into a single word, names in this language will be longer but at the same time more distinctly pronounced.
Any inflectional language has a number of different kinds of morphemes. Some are what we think of as words, pure and simple, referring to events, things, qualities, and so on: horse, ride, fast, under. All morphemes of this class are complete, as it were, even in their most stripped-down form. If a Latin speaker, for instance, heard the incomplete word caball-, he would think vaguely of a horse, even though he would feel that something was missing without another morpheme on the end. Morphemes of this first type can be called, simply, "com¬plete” morphemes.
A second kind of morpheme can be said to carry meaning by itself, but its mean¬ing is so abstract that it can hardly stand alone. This second kind of morpheme is, for instance, a -us for caball- to make the word "horse” in the nominative case, or

the -i which would make it caballi, the plural. The Turkish morpheme ler is similar, in that a Turkish speaker would recognize it as meaning "more than one,” but would hardly consider it a word in the way that ev is a word. Morphemes in this second category are those that add something to the meaning or qualify the meaning of the root-morpheme to which they are attached; therefore, we may call them "qualifying” morphemes.
A third class of morpheme, which I'll term "relational" morphemes for our purposes here, is exemplified by the phrase a horse's back. The 's morpheme shows the relationship of horse to back, namely, that the horse possesses the back. All inflectional languages either add morphemes or use sound changes to show certain basic relationships such as possession.
Inflectional languages have an immense variety of morphemes in both the second and third categories for every part of speech, but you will be pleased to know that you need only a few mor¬phemes for a few kinds of qualifications and relationships to make up names in a created inflectional langauge. (Anyone who's obsessive enough to want to create an entire inflectional language should read Theoretical Linguistics by John Lyons, Oxford University Press, to find out about the months of work that lie ahead.)

If you're inventing an isolating lan¬guage, you'll need none of these secon¬dary morphemes at all. Isolating lan¬guages leave such questions as number, gender, and time totally to the context of the sentence. Thus, Two horses ran by yesterday would become Two horse run by yesterday if English were an isolating language.
Gender and number
To make up names in your new inflec¬tional language, you will need qualifying morphemes or sound changes for gender and number. Gender is important for per¬sonal names for characters. It refers to actual sex only when the noun refers to a living being, but inflectional languages assign genders to all nouns just for lingu¬istic consistency. Often, as in Latin, a language will use three genders (mascu¬line, feminine, and neuter), but at times, as in Welsh, there are only two (mascu¬line and feminine).
A game-world language might well have an unusual way of designating gender. An hermaphroditic race, for instance, might use the two "genders” of living (sexed) and dead (non-sexed); or, a precise language might split up the neuter gender into categories such as active, passive, and abstract. When it comes to number, most languages distin¬guish only between singular and plural, but others include a dual number for a
Let's look at some examples of number and gender changes. In Latin, a common class of personal names ended in -a for the feminine gender and -us for the mas¬culine. Thus, Claudius and Claudia are the same name, merely differentiated for a man and a woman. English has some names which follow a similar pattern, as in Robert and Roberta. An agglutinative language will have morphemes to show gender added onto the core of the name.
It's also possible to use internal sound changes to mark for gender, as in John and Jane. The plural of words will be shown in similar ways. Arbor is one tree in Latin; arbores means more than one tree. In English, we have one man, several men. For variety's sake, your new lan¬guage can have several different mor¬phemes or sound changes that mark for plural and gender. For example, you might decide that men's names always end in -onno, -el, or -on, while women's names end in -alla, -or, or -ne. If you are making up an agglutinative language, remember to make the morphemes con¬sistent with the general sound of the tongue; in a fusional language, the mor¬phemes should be short and colorless.
Possession and location
For place names, you will also need morphemes or sound changes to show possession and location. The possessive has an example in English: the 's added to nouns, as in the house's roof. Although English can also say the roof of the house, an inflectional language has no equivalent to of. The possessing noun will have to have a sound change or mor¬pheme added to it to show possession. For example, in my Kazrak language, haz means "fort," and stroko means "sun." The name "The Fort of the Sun" trans-lates as Haz Strokej, because -ej is the fused morpheme of possession.
The locative, or located-ness, quality is more foreign to English, which represents that idea solely with prepositions and makes no changes in the actual noun. Although most inflectional languages have prepositions, they also feel the need to add a morpheme or change the sound of a noun to show its subordinate status to the sentence. In Latin, for example, arbor means "tree," but "under the tree" is sub arbore. A word in this locative case can also stand alone; domus is "home" in Latin, and domi means "at home."
Prefix, suffix, or infix
By now you may have noticed that most of these examples so far have added their morphemes at the end of the basic word, but many languages make changes at the beginning and middle as well. A morpheme added at the end of a word is a suffix; at the beginning, a prefix; and in the middle, an infix.
All three of these forms can be used in the same language for a properly foreign feeling. In your fantasy language, "tree" might be hendir, and "trees" bahendir. In agglutinative languages, infixes become especially important. For example, in my campaign's Tribal language, the posses¬sive morpheme is bala, which comes before the possessing noun and after the object possessed to form names. Since rin means "mountain" and delan is "moon," the name Rinbaladelan means "Moun¬tain of the Moon." Simple sound changes can occur at the beginning or end of words as well as in the middle. In Welsh, for instance, "home" is cartref, and "at home" is gartref — a locative parallel to the Latin domus/domi. You thus have many ways of particularizing the different languages in your campaign.
Now, for the names
Now that you have determined the basic structure of your new language, made up a list of the phonemes for it, and invented the basic grammatical mor¬phemes if it needs any, you are finally ready to make up names and words. Per¬sonal names are the easiest, simply because they don't have to mean any par¬ticular thing. After all, do you know what Susan or Robert actually means? Do you care? All you need, then, are words that are the proper length and consistent with the sound of your new language, and a
-I Civile’ way of marking them for gender. You can prepare a list of such names and have it on hand for both NPCs and new player characters as the need arises. If a simple one-word personal name is unsatisfactory for some reason, you can add a place name, put into the locative case, to show the character's origins, or make up an attribute, such as "Stormbringer" or "Quicksword," using the principles detailed below for place names.
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If you look at maps of various coun¬tries, you'll find that many place names fall into one of a few broad groups. One group is a description of the place, such as Salt Lake City or Stratham, which means "the hamlet on the strata (Roman road)." Another group incorporates the name of a god or a saint, as in San Fran¬cisco or Lyon, which once was called Lugdenensis, "the land of the god Lugh." Other places have been given the names of secular heroes, like Washington.
Natural features sometimes take their names either from their appearance, like the Black Hills, or from legends about them, like all the places named Arthur's Chair, Arthur's Castle, Arthur's Seat, and so on in Britain.
To make up names, you can use these same groups, make up basic word lists, and draw combinations from them. If your new language is an isolating type, all you have to do is decide whether adjectives come before or after nouns, then place the chosen words in a row in the proper order. In an inflectional lan¬guage, you'll have to relate the chosen words with the possessive and locative morphemes if necessary.

How many words is too many?
Doubtless you're wondering how many words you'll need to develop meaningful names. In actual practice, you'll find the number to be surprisingly small; most real-world languages use a relatively small vocabulary for basic, everyday communication — and even fewer words than that for naming.
A good many names can be built with only a hundred words of the right kinds. One group of words necessary for place names are prepositions: on, by, on top of, below, and so on. For personal names, you'll need a morpheme for son of and daughter of. Otherwise, most of the words you need are nouns and adjectives suita¬ble for describing countryside. You can also use the names of the gods in your campaign, and secular heroes if there are any. In a science-fiction game, many places will be named after the person who first discovered or colonized them. In fan¬tasy worlds, the inhabitants are more likely to give their gods credit for a deed as stupendous as founding a town.
At the top of the next page are some examples, to get you started, of words with a high degree of name potential.
Natural features: hill, mountain, river, forest, meadow, ford, peak, canyon, plain, lake, desert.
Man-made features: town, city, village, fort, palace, battleground, crossroads, bridge.
Adjectives: big, great, small, high, low, marshy, dry, color words, north, south, east, west, dangerous, placid, famous, holy, cursed.
You can also add some animals and the names of certain trees: bear, horse, oak, dragon, pine, and so forth.
From even this short list, you can gen¬erate a tremendous number of names. Just for starters: Black Bear Mountain, Little Fort, Great Blue Mountain, Dragon City, North Peak, High Fort, Holy River, and so on. Translated into your new lan¬guage, these names will sound not only exotic, but consistent, as if they were thought up by real brains and spoken by real mouths, instead of having their names, and the history those names imply, come from an essentially random choice.
Watch out for weird words
When you're making up vocabulary, be careful to avoid inventing words with unwanted connotations, and stay away from downright puns. Once you're immersed in a brand-new language, it's easy to forget your English "roots" and produce some real howlers if you're not careful. To use one of the examples from the beginning of this article: Oolala might be a respectable name if pro¬nounced oo-LA-lah, but who's going to say anything other than oo-la-LAH? Upchuk, of course, is reminiscent of regurgitation no matter how you say it. To be reasonably sure of avoiding such mistakes, say each of your invented words and names aloud several times in several different ways, until you're sure it can't be twisted into something you didn't mean to say.
Another trap to avoid is words that sound like commercial products. If you watch television, all that advertising has soaked right into your subconscious mind, and it will reappear at the wrong moment. Take a name like Kolak, for instance, which sounds properly mascu¬line and exotic at first hearing. But think about it for a minute, and it also suggests cola, Kodak, koalas, and to the histori¬cally minded, kulaks — none of those being words that have really suitable connotations for a heroic figure.
Of course, it's far from necessary to invent a language for every area in your campaign, particularly if the players are going to pass through it quickly, but I heartily urge every gamemaster to work up the two or three primary languages in his or her world. Such a process adds more than atmosphere. If you refrain from translating place names in foreign countries, the rules about languages will have some point in the ongoing adven¬ture. Players will have to get translations from NPC's to learn that a place called Melimbalatanol, say, means "River of the Monster," rather than getting an easy clue the moment they enter an area.
As player characters gain added profi¬ciency in a language, you can offer more translations more easily, thus giving them the feeling that they are indeed learning something new. The cleverest of characters may even learn to pick apart names and decipher them for themselves. When faced with a string of border forts, all called Haz something-or-other, even a dolt can figure out what haz means.
The last ingredient: you
Following all of these rules and guide¬lines need not restrict your creation of a language in any way, because the one element that distinguishes each language from all others — its individuality — is something that only you can provide. The atmosphere and the conditions of your game-world remain the overriding considerations when inventing consistent and workable names for that world. When we consider what's in a name, we may conclude that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet — but if roses were called plontzes, it's unlikely that they'd figure as prominently as they do in poetry and song.