Creating My Own Language: Understanding the Journey
Recently I applied for a position at a company that involved language dissection and lingual understanding. I just qualified for most of the position and thus I attempted to do something outlandish to grab their attention (something that would possibly put me above other applicants): I created my own language for the cover letter. It would either catch their attention and have them contact me, or it would be skipped over as a foolhardy attempt at landing a job.
Irrelevant of the still ongoing outcome of the job search, I have always wanted to create my own language ever since I learned about conlangs (short for “constructed languages”) in the first place. Whether I learned of Elvish, Klingon, or even Esperanto, I still wanted to create a language.
In my earlier years during my Star Wars obsession, I attempted to do so with the Sith language. I attempted to create words out of randomness that would mean things. “Vaaraa-Soro” and “Vaaraa-Dono” have occupied my mind since (in my fake Sith language, they mean “hello” and “goodbye” respectively). They are all that I remember of that language.
In high school I got in trouble for writing things down in my school diary that the administration did not like. In response, I attempted to create my own writing system that mimicked the English language but had different letters. They were fairly simple, but I slowly copied all the handouts in high school into this writing, started writing notes to myself in it, and even occasionally copied writing assignments in this written language. For the most part, nobody could read it, and I still keep it to this day (although I haven’t used it recently).
Up to this point I had taken French during elementary school and in kindergarten in Canada, six years of Afrikaans, and a semester of Northern Sotho. For me, it was time to get serious about the languages I wanted to continue with. Not that those languages were unimportant. Rather my time taking those languages was during school, which I normally disliked.
I studied German in high school and became fairly decent with it. I got to the point where when I helped other people with their homework they got more superior grades than I did because my fellow classmates “had improved so drastically since the beginning of the year” (according to our teacher).
I soon gave up German for Mandarin Chinese. Studying it in university was difficult, but it helped that I embedded myself in Chinese cultures. I read books on Chinese Communism, I read books on Chinese social and business culture, I participated in cultural events, and even started searching for and listening to Chinese punk rock.
However, upon going into the Peace Corps Albanian took up the spot that Mandarin had once occupied and became the language I was most fluent in. I got to levels in Albanian that I had only dreamed about in Chinese.
Over the course of these language learning years, I took in what the languages had to offer. German cases, conjugations, and gendered words threw me for a loop. I hated them and wanted them out of my life. Luckily, Mandarin Chinese has no cases, no conjugations, and no gendered words. In fact, spoken Mandarin has the same word for both “he” and “she” (with no “it”). More so, Mandarin grammar is probably the easiest grammar I’ve ever known. Albanian brought back gender, cases, and conjugation, but it also brought suffixes that changed the meanings and articles of words. Most of them were easy to memorize (especially if you knew the pattern). Albanian, like English, has a lot of loanwords from other languages, making it easy to use as well.
Yet I still dreamed of creating a language.
So I attempted to take what I knew and move forward. I also knew what I wanted out of a language. So no genders at all involved in my language. The same word for he, she, and it were used: “Taj”. The singular of I, You, and He/She/It became respectively “Yaj”, “Maj”, and “Taj”. The plural of each simply added a suffix (as would all plural words). We became “Yajme”, you became “Majme”, and they became “Tajme”. Similarly, “Dod” is person, whereas “Dodme” is people. “Vistajlek” is university, whereas “Vistajlekme” are universities.
Further, there is a separation between two types of “we”; we as in “all of us together” and we as in “all of us minus the person who is being spoken to” (Tajme and Kajme respectively). This is shown easily in the sentence “We live together.” We don’t know if this means everyone in the conversation, or simply a few people who do not include others in the room. My language (as well as many other languages around the world) distinguish that.
In fact, suffixes are used in many languages to distinguish the state of a word. In my language “lek” means to study. “Lekloc” means studied. Adding “loc” at the end of a verb makes it past tense. Adding “dhot” makes it continuous”. Similarly for adjectives “Gal” means power, whereas “Galgor” means powerful. The noun can have “gor” or “kor” added to the end of it to make it an adjective. This is heavily used throughout my language.
In English, every letter has different sounds. Not so in my language. Every consonant has an individual sound. However, “c” is ch, “x” is sh, “j” is “zh”, and there are other consonants that replace the sounds of blended consonants in English. Vowels also have individual sounds, with vowels that have a “:” added to the end of it sounding different.
This is only the base of my language. I haven’t even thought of a name yet. I have wanted to do this for awhile, and many of the ideas I might not have thought of without Mandarin or Albanian. In fact, going over the difficulties in some languages influenced me more than the simple or easier parts of the languages.
It was this weird idea that vaulted me into using it as a language on a job application. Whether it works or not, I’ll find out.
The battle between keeping complex language and simplifying unnecessary language seems easy to think about. My language attempts to simplify language in order to make it easier to understand. However, should we cater language to that? English itself is undergoing a mass evolution which some would say simplifies the language itself. New words are discovered and used in multiples of cultures daily. Language creation, even in English, is going on at this very moment.
The journey itself really never ends.
