One who is stuffed with languages. Well, I have one more for you. Guacuno. Guacuno is a conlang. A conlang is a constructed language, designed to look like a natural language but designed to a purpose, usually as a component of a constructed world. Everything I know about conlangs, I learned from watching the eight-part youtube series by Biblaridion called “How to Make a Language.” Even if you don’t write a conlang, you will learn a lot of interesting things about different natural languages used around the world.
The most important point I gleaned from the viewing is to set the goals for your language. I think I am doing pretty well on this point, but the world will someday judge for itself. Since the story is set in pre-Columbian America, the language has a historical time and setting. I borrowed as much as I could from Tainos, the language described by the scribes of Columbus’s journey. The dictionaries are inconsistent. The one I like best because it has little hidden word construction hints and cultural insights is http://www.alfredcarrada.org/dictionary.html. Knowledge of Tainos, particularly the grammar, as far as I can tell, is not well known, or at least not well documented.
Aside from the historical setting, I wanted three other characteristics inherent in the conlang that are probably a little less than natural and definitely not featured in Tainos:
a. explicit constructs to reflect the openness of the society.
b. capture the dynamics of a gift economy in the language.
c. make the morality of the society inherent in the grammar and lexicon.
To develop the language, I am using a tool called Polyglot by Draquet Thompson, which at the time of this writing is found at https://draquet.github.io/PolyGlot/. Polyglot organizes the lexicon and grammar and has a host of other capabilities that I’ve barely touched on.
The “Lexicon” tab helps you organize your vocabulary. The pdf document generator includes a bi-directional dictionary of the words. Your language entries include the part of speech, the pronunciation based on your phonology, spelling based on your orthography, the definition, and related words.
Sample entry for aji:
aji – n. – /achi/ –
Roman: aji
a habanero pepper used for seasoning
Synonym(s): seasoning
The “Parts of Speech” tab allows you to define the parts of speech relevant to your grammar. In your lexicon, you assign each word a part of speech. You can have multiple entries in the lexicon for words defined with multiple parts of speech.
The “Lexical Classes” tab allows you to define classes of words. I saw numbers defined in an example but I didn’t find much use for that as a classification. A typical use would be gender. In Guacuno, gender is not declined. I thought it would be interesting to define a classification, which I refer to as color. Color represents the objective of an action, either status, security, or sex which are associated with power, wisdom, and creativity respectively. Guacuno verbs can be modified by color if the intent of the action is specific to one of the goals. I want this feature to reinforce the openness of intent in the society.
The “Grammar” tab allows you to specify the grammar. It is basically a place to organize your write-up for all the rules and anything else you want to write about your language. For example, I’ve created a chapter called “Sentence Structure” that defines the rules for forming basic and complex sentences. Subsequent chapters discuss parts of speech and how they are used in the language.
The “Phonology and Text” section allows you to associate sounds with your characters. It also allows you to map your character set to its romanized version, should you choose to do so. I don’t take advantage of the logographs, since Guacuno, as most pre-Columbian languages wasn’t a written language. So, I’ve basically adapted the roman characters for the character set. It would be interesting to develop a font for the language, maybe something out of palm fronds. It would be helpful if the tool mapped the character set to the symbols in the IPA charts.
The “Lang Properties” tab allows you to specify meta-data for tracking and document generation.
There are more features to explore and documentation can be found at http://draquet.github.io/PolyGlot/. Screenshots shown are from version PolyGlot ver. 3.2.
The three advantages of the tool are the organization, publication to pdf so you have a self-contained document, and export to an excel spreadsheet. The export is important to me so I can convert the lexicon into dictionary entries suitable for .mobi dictionary generation. The process requires a little manual organization but a simple script ought to automate the conversion for consumption by the Mobi dictionary generation tools.