Constructed Languages

World-Building - Telepathy

2019-12-11T06:00:00Z

Magic is a funny beast in Fedran. Using some of the concepts I got from my various religion classes in college, I decided that no one actually knows how magic works. While there are some consistent rules that are evolving as I write, no technique or system that encompasses everything. That goes for psionics also. Psychic powers is just a different form of magic, telepathy included.

I wasn't entirely sure how telepathy was going to work until I started writing Flight of the Scions. However, over the years, I think I have refined the concept down to the same concepts in programming and Internet.

Kanéko motioned for him to follow. She led him to a spot a chain distance from the fire and plopped down. “Now, teach me.”

Ruben sat down in front of her. He pointed to his eyes and stared into Kanéko's. “Telepathy is about memories and concepts. To communicate, you bring up a shared memory. For example, say I want to transmit the idea of looking over a cliff, I will pull up these…”

In Kanéko's mind, she found herself recalling the cliff where Maris fell over as she was peering over the side. The memories were bright and sharp.

Ruben continued. “Now, you can read. So I can also bring up letters or words.”

As he spoke, the words he used also appeared in Kanéko's head, but it took her more effort to focus on them. It felt like an obscure thought, one that she struggled with.

— Flight of the Scions 28

The way Ruben describes telepathy is rather important but obscures what I consider as the underlying concept behind mental communication, Internet protocols. For example, the “shared memory” references a URI into a global memory. In modern terms, think of a URI as a website address such as https://octodon.social/@dmoonfire/102017217931449742 which points to a common location anyone can access (the global memory, or we can call it “a social network”).

In world terms, the URI in the Vomen language (Volis) is a series of five-letter names. Those act as an encoded address into that shared memory:

“It is not,” Maris spat, “Ruben Habor!”

Ruben got a pained look on his face. “That was not mannerly.”

Kanéko glanced over at Ruben. “Your name is Ruben Habor?”

Maris's tail wagged back and forth as she spoke, “No, his name is Ruben Habor Kalis Bomen Tater. And I remember that much. But there are seven more names I can't.”

Kanéko cleared her throat. “That's a very long name.”

— Flight of the Scions 27

In the above case, the medium-length version of Ruben's name is “Ruben Habor Kalis Bomen Tater”. A full name doesn't have a limit, but there is scoping rules that let us consider just shorter names instead of a full twenty-five words or more. That is the telepathic version of a web address.

We could also see this as a bit of pseudo code.

let r = uri(ruben-habor-kalis-bomen-tater);

The memory by itself is basically looking at a static website. You can get information, details, or even deeper information but it is unchanging and unfiltered. As I've mentioned in earlier posts, having this detail doesn't grant the ability to process it, which means many telepathys are know-it-alls who don't really know how to apply it.

To work around that, the other part of telepathic communication is the operation. This is a complex concept that we could consider the “verb” in most languages. Effectively, the operation is how we combine static concepts or memories (URIs) together to communicate.

A basic operation is the “intersection” operation which takes two or more memories and results in only the memories that they all have in common. We could view this as a bit of pseudo code.

let lakeMichigan = uri(lake-michigan);
let dock = uri(large-dock);
let docksOfLakeMichigan = intersection(lakeMichigan, dock);

Of course, the concept of programming languages doesn't exist in Fedran, so we have this instead:

The vomen nodded. “You'll notice it is harder. Abstract ideas will always be more difficult to imagine than something personally experienced. So, what we do is we build up a set of images and memories that we both know to make it easier. So, the more we share experiences, the more I can project…”

A series of images, of Kanéko climbing the cliff, the fight in the inn where Kanéko dodged the men attacking her, and a picture of Damagar's eyes combined together into «climb the rock to avoid Damagar.»

— Flight of the Scions 28

Most of the set operations (exclusion, union, and the like) are part of telepathy along with things like temporal sequences and combination operations. So, to tell someone to walk from their house to the store would be a time sequence pointing to the shared memory of their house, the memories of strolling down the street, and the shared memories of that store.

let house = uri(house);
let walking = uri(walking);
let store = uri(store);
let seq = sequence(house, walking, store);
let timeSequence = temporal(seq);

return transform(timeSequence);

Or, in a harder to read format:

transform(
    temporal(
        sequence(
            uri(house),
            uri(walking),
            uri(store))));

The above bit of pseudo code is effectively Volis, the telepathic language of the Isle of Vo. It is my first language in this world but also the least documented because I'm not sure how to write it up until this point.

Now the biggest problem that I had with telepathy was Kanéko. She has no magic but she is adept at communicating telepathically. That is somewhat true but not entirely. She is adept at picking up the language and working with memories but she doesn't have the ability to actually communicate.

In effect, telepathy functions like Internet protocols. When you request a website, your browser (Firefox, Chrome) does something called a GET request for that page to retrieve data. When you submit a form, you usually do a POST operation. The data being retrieved from the server or sent to it has a special format… the language in this case.

She looked over at him, and then reached down to grab his hand. As soon as she felt the itch of his telepathy, she brought up the image of the gun. It came quickly, like with Ruben, and she focused on it. Images flashed through her head and she continued to pull the construction of the weapon, how to use it, and what it could do. The images burned through her thoughts and she used it to explode it into parts and reassemble it in her mind.

«Kanéko Lurkuklan, we need to discuss your manners with telepaths,» came the amused thought from Tagon.

— Flight of the Scions 43

In the above example, as soon as Kanéko “connected” to Tagon, she performed a series of GET operations to start retrieving data. (Not expecting her to use telepathy, Tagon didn't think he needed security so there was no login page.)

She projected a burst of an apology but continued to draw out knowledge from him. She focused on the gauge to determine its purpose. When it welled up in her mind, she smiled. The design of the gun would allow five shots but it was made by hand. That meant tiny imperfections changed how it fired the shots. The scratches on the dial must have been Sinmak’s attempt to identify the charge left in the weapon.

— Flight of the Scions 43

The “projected a burst” was the POST operation I explained earlier. In effect, she submitted a form to send the apology to Tagon. This general process, at least in how I envision it is part of the REST protocol.

Kanéko doesn't have the ability to establish a connection (that's magic) but she has the ability to use it once it's there. That way, she still doesn't have magic (a key part of her character) but is adept at communication, visualization, and adapting.

Of course, most of telepathy is obscured by the narrative. The details aren't important in most cases, it just happens that telepathy is a plot-critical component in Kanéko's stories. In most cases, it is just glossed over.

When the waiter pulled himself away, he stared at a cup of coffee still on his platter. He picked it up and held it out. “Did one of you order this?”

An older woman came up and held out her hand.

Without looking, the waiter handed it gently to her and then left without a word and a quizzical look on his face.

— Prospects of Love Among Mages 3

So, that was a somewhat long introduction to telepathy in Fedran, the introduction to my first conlang that I developed, and the underlying concepts that no one in the world will actually figure out.

World-Building - Creating Hissian

2019-11-13T06:00:00Z

So, with me writing Looking for The Wrong Thing, I realized I need to start working on the constructed language Hissian, the language spoken by the United Hidanork Tribes in the creatively named country of Hidanork.

This is more of a process of creating the language instead of an exhaustive introduction to Hissian. The rest of this page is about taking the ideas I've written over the years and start to make them a more formal language.

Existing Almanac Entries

So, I've been toying with the language for a couple of years through my almanac. I only have a few phrases written down until I created more formal rules. Ideally, we can use those phrases to “bootstrap” into a more complex language instead of off-the-cuff ideas.

The applicable entries:

A nomadic Hidanork tribe is called a “ca solidar dac asu misado” which translates to “wind-blown rocks.”
The blood lands (kasinador nic alies shik) are abandoned except in times of battle.
The central government of Hidanork is located in the river city of Gilidam fy Kiso.
The native language of Hidanork is Hissian. Hissian has thousands of accents but few dialects.
Like most languages in Fedran, Hissian does not have capital letters.
Most Hidanork names follow the pattern “of the tribe, given name.”

Translations

So far, I have these proposed translations:

ca solidar dac asu misado
wind-blown rocks

kasinador nic alies shik
blood lands

Wind-Blown Rocks (Family/Tribe)

However, we know some languages that are a bit more verbose than English (French), so I'm sure this will be fine. So, we are going to make this work. That means we need to get “wind-blown rocks” out of ca solidar dac asu misado.

ca is too short, so we'll ignore that for now.

solidar sounds like solid, so I'm going to say this is the basic word for “rocks”.

Now, I have a preference for nicely broken out languages where everything is separate words, so we are going to establish a language with nouns declination and verb conjunctions. That would let us use soli for the base noun which is nice and short.

That means we need to figure out what -dar means. Number is a good one, so we can use the idea that this is about a family, so we can say -dar means “many”. So, solidar means “many rocks”.

The next big word is misado so that should mean “wind”. Well, we want it short so misa is going to be the noun and we just have to figure out what -do would mean. How about singular or combined? That would make misado mean “single wind”. That fits the family idea.

Since Miwāfu is a language with particles, I think this one should be purely in word order. One of the more common ones is verb-subject-object (VSO) so that means we could say ca means “go” or “travel”.

That leaves me with dac and asu. My gut feeling is that dac asu has to be some way of indicating that the wind is affecting the rocks in some manner, almost a “type of” phrase or a linking clause. That seems rather long, so I'm going to make dac as the “of”.

With asu, we can just have sort of verb for blowing. We want to have our verb conjunctions, so that would lead into as meaning blow and -u is to say it is part of the noun phrase.

Putting that together, that gives me:

ca solidar dac asu misado
[go] [rocks-many] [of] [blow] [wind-singular]
go many rocks of a single blown wind

This probably would get shorted in day-to-day use to ca solidar:

ca solidar
[go] [rocks-many]
traveling rocks

Blood Lands

Now to get kasinador nic alies shik to mean blood lands.

Going with the ordering rules, that means kasinador means lands. It's a common word and one that's important to the culture, so that means kasi is “land” and we need a meaning for -nador.

This is an important idea in the culture since tribes have a number of lands they “claim” and spend their years traveling between them to hunt and harvest. The idea of lands going fallow is also important to let the energies to recover; this is the foundation of their magic system as discussed with Look for the Wrong Thing. We are seeing a bunch of -d* modifiers, so how about saying -nador to mean “a specific number” since a family has a very specific list of claims and it's a Big Deal to claim another land.

The whole idea of blood lands are ones that are left fallow for many years to enough energy to be used for emergencies or for major events. So instead of being part of the annual trip around the country, these are the fallow lands from above. So, we can say nic alies shik is the concept of fallow or not abandoned.

I'm going to use nic to mean “for purpose” and then we can say alies shik means for gathering or restoring energy with alies being the word for fallow or gather and shik for energy/magic. We can also say the Hidanork use blood and magic in the same tense, so shik can also mean blood (plus it sounds like a noise made by a knife in magna).

Since we need some way of indicating that alies is an adjective of shik and not kasi, we can say -es indicates that.

kasinador nic alies shik
[land-specific-number] [for the purpose of] [fallow] [magic]
specific lands that are left fallow for magic

Pronunciation

I'm terrible at this, so I'm just going to mark based on best guess of what they should look like. I prefer to use IPA over the English-style. Mostly I work based on what I think it sounds right, but I would need someone much more comfortable with pronouncing things correctly and know IPA to tell me if I'm wrong.

IPA are enclosed by by // and syllables are indicated by a ..

For the sounds, I'm going to start by using a guide on pronunciations for English.

/ɔ:/ is the “a” in “call” or “hall”.
/æ/ is a harder “a” such as “cat” or “black”. This will typically be used in the beginning of words.
/ɑ:/ is the “a” in “arm” or “father”. I'm leaning toward this being used at the end of words.
/tʃ/ is the “ch” sound in “church” or “check”.
/d/ is “d” in “did” or “dad”.
/i:/ is a harder “i” like “see” or “three”.
/k/ is the “c” in “cat” or the end of “back”.
/l/ is “l” in “leg” or “little”.
/m/ is “m” in “man” or “lemon”.
/n/ is “n” in “no” or “ten”.
/oʊ/ is the “o” in “go” or “home”.
/s/ is the “s” in “see” or “sing”.
/ʃ/ is “sh” in “she” or “crash”.

Apparent Rules

Verb-Subject-Object order.
Modifiers come after the main word.
Nouns are declined with a suffix based on number:
- -do for a single or combined one.
- -dar for many of an unspecified number.
- -nador for many of a specific number, a closed set.
Nouns can be modified in a noun phrase with a particle:
- dac means “of type”
- nic means “for the purpose of”
Verbs in a noun phrase have a suffix of -u.
Adjectives use -es to indicate they modify an secondary noun in a phrase.
- I'm sure the rules will change based on the last letter of the word later.

Apparent Words

So here is the beginning of our language.

ali /æ.li:/ Fallow.
as /æs/ v. Blow
ca /tʃæ/ v. Go or travel
dac /dɔ:k/ “of”
kasi /kɔ:s.i:/ n. Land.
shik /ʃi:k/ n. Blood or magic
soli /soʊl.i:/ n. Rocks or stones
misa /mi:s.ɑ:/ n. Wind or breeze
nic /ni:k/ “for the purpose of”

Next Steps

Creating languages is somewhat of an art form and one I enjoy doing despite having little experience in the actual process. Mostly, I just try to fake it from things I've read.

It isn't until a story is posted that I consider these ideas “set in mud” with actual publication being “set in stone”. Until then, I'm willing to change things around so I hope to have a language I'm happy with by the time that happens.

Making a calendar look good

2013-09-24T05:00:00Z

While I thought I was done with making a calendar, someone asked if they could see a visual form of the calendar. I thought this would be a fairly simple thing... but, it wasn't exactly. Took me most of the night to actually come up with something I'm fairly happy with.

In context, here are the posts related to this one.

Part 1: My reasons for doing this
Part 2: Some theory on what makes an interesting fictional calendar
Part 3: An example of creating a messy calendar
Part 4: Creating a visual representation of the calendar

And, the first draft of the calendar:

Arrangement

I decided to use the square boxes for the calendar (much like our own) instead of something fancy like a big circle. This is a lot more readable and shows some of the elements of the calendar.

Like our own, there is the name of each "month" with the Miwāfu glyphs on the left and English on the right. The line of text below it is the name of the weeks. In the boxes, I have simply numbered the days of the month from 1 to 47.

Fall days are shown by the circles, with a single circle being the "one in four", a double being "one in eight", and a triple circle being "one in sixteen". Seems to be fairly obvious, though it might need a bit larger view to see it well.

Numbers

I've been working on Miwāfu for a while, but I apparently completely forgot to actually do the numbers. This is actually what took most of the time, but I think I have a fairly good set of numbers that look pretty decent when put together.

The fun part is trying to figure out little things like decimal points and how a fantasy language would group numbers. Since the number eight pops up fairly often, I decided to keep the desert folk mostly centered around powers of two and went with groups of four but using spaces for grouping since they have the "number bar" that goes over the entire number. The decimal is the vowel placeholder under the number, but with spaces on both side. Since it never made sense to me, I went with using grouping even after the decimal so a large number would be "1234 5678 . 8765 4321".

Continual improvement

Nothing is set in stone with this, but I feel pretty good about what I've gotten done. I'm not planning on focusing on the lunar calendar for a little while longer, mainly because I have other things to do, but it will eventually show up.

Looking for beta readers again

2013-01-18T06:00:00Z

Last week, I finished the fifth round edits on Becoming a Man (BAM). I was pushing to finish it because I wanted to submit it to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel contest. That wasn't the original plan for the novel, but it happened to be at the right time for BAM's lifecycle.

This also marks the point when I think the story is as solid as I can make it. It is nicely short (70k words) but complete. To move forward, I would love to have some opinions. In effect, I'm looking for beta readers.

Now, I've asked some good literary friends to beta read in the future, but since I don't want to ask more than twice, I thought I would just make a general request to see if anyone wants to read it for me.

Below is a bit about the book and why I wrote it.

Length

This is the first novel where I've actually tried to limit the chapter lengths to keep within a "reasonable" word count. The novel came out to 70k words in 30 chapters. This means just over 2k words per chapter instead of the 6k average from Flight of the Scions (FOTS).

Setting

BAM is set in the same universe as FOTS. Originally, it was to help develop the desert clans for FOTS along with some of the culture and constructed languages. It also expanded into something a bit deeper after reading The Language Construction Kit since I realized it could add a lot more depth to the world as a whole.

The setting is actually purely in the desert. The world is based on a super-continent, but the center is mostly desert and tundra. This gave me a chance to have fun with mostly sand verses rocky plains, more so since there are speedster (magically fast runners) in the novel.

Mainly, I didn't want forests since most fantasy novels seem to happen in forests or mountains.

Characters

I love stories that aren't about the Chosen One or the one who answers all the problem. Instead, I want stories where people make terrible mistakes and manage not to save the world. Yes, FOTS kind of breaks that but Kanéko is neither the first nor the most powerful of her type. She is special and heroic, but she won't be saving the world any time soon.

On the other hand, I wanted to write a story about someone who wanted to be the best, but wasn't. And, just to make life difficult for them, two of the characters in the novel are close to the legendary characters stories are written about. Just not the main character.

Constructed Languages

Even though there are no large chunks of it, the novel does explore Miwāfu, a constructed language I started with FOTS. There are a couple of words that aren't critical to the plot, but the main part was to explore the names in that language. Just as French or Japanese names are uncomfortable for most English speakers (as I observed), I wanted to use the Miwāfu as a naming language to see if it "felt comfortable" to me.

The writing group struggled a bit in the first chapter with the main character's name, Rutejìmo, but I found that as long as I didn't introduce more than 2-3 names per chapter, they seemed to grow comfortable with the names. Though, no one really tried to say their names and instead used his nickname (Jimo).

Survival

When I was in Boy Scouts, I remember reading over the survival section of the book endlessly, both terrified that I would encounter a broken bone in the wilderness or having to find food in the sand, but also wondering what it would be like. Guess what? I consider this story gritty because there are broken bones (actually a compound fracture) and a bunch of teenagers trying to figure out how to survive with such an injury.

Rites of Passage

I'm guilty of writing two novels about growing up. I love stories about teenagers growing up, but I don't write fluffy young adult novels. There is stabbing, kidnapping, and rather... violent reactions to high stress in here. Why? Because as much as I love reading Harry Potter, I love the Grimm Brothers more. Also, there are a lot of lovely coming-of-age stories that are what I would call fluffy and I love reading them. But, there aren't that many that talk about hard lives in hard worlds.-

Sample

(Actually, the beginning of the first chapter.)

Rutejìmo's heart pounded in his chest as he held himself still. The cool desert wind blew across his face, teasing his short, dark hair. In the darkness of night, his brown skin was lost to the shadows, but he was exposed if anyone shone a lantern toward the top of the small building. Fortunately, the shrine house was at the southern end of the Shimusògo Valley, his ancestral home, and very few of the clan went there except for meetings and prayers.

He held his breath as he tested the brick tile on the shrine house roof. It shifted underneath his bare toe and he stepped back. Braced on both hands and one foot, he tested the second brick. It held and he eased his weight onto it before lifting his other foot. He was light and thin, slightly over five stones, and thankful of that as he shifted his balance. He glanced up to his destination, an opening in the roof to let out smoke and incense. It was only a few links beyond his fingers, but he didn't dare jump for it.

Shifting his weight to his forward foot, he walked his hands along the tiles until he found two more stable footholds. Inching forward, he stretched his foot and tested the next tile. It was solid and he shifted to it.

The tile suddenly shifted. A crack snapped through the air and he felt the tile jerked underneath his weight.

Rutejìmo winced at the sound.

Inside, the guard pulled out a knife. Rutejìmo bit his lip as he strained to identify whoever was inside. If it was Gemènyo, he would just be sent back to his home. But, if Hyonèku was on duty, then he would be suffering for days. His stomach knotted in fear and he listened for the tell-tale blast of air of the clan's magic, speed, or the whisper of bare feet on stone.

A sand fly landed on his neck, its little legs pricking his skin. He tensed as he fought back a whimper. Sand flies bit when disturbed. He tried to lean forward, avoiding the tile, to encourage it to fly off but it just crawled up to his earlobe.

Another fly landed on his shoulder. He caught sight of it in the corner of his eye from the dim light from the shrine. It fluttered its wings as it crawled along, looking for some delicate spot to bite.

He forgot about the first fly until it bit down. The sharp pain broke his concentration and he let out a yelp. He clapped his ear but missed the fly.

The cracked tile shifted again, spreading apart. His foot, resting along the crack, twisted as the tile shattered and he lost his balance.

"Sands!" he screamed as he slipped down the sloped roof. His back crushed another tile before he rolled off and plummeted toward the hard rock beneath. He tumbled in the air and saw the earth rushing up to him. Closing his eyes, he threw his hands in front of his face to protect himself.

There was a bang of the shrine door and a blast of wind. Rutejìmo fell into a pair of muscular arms. From the smell of a flowery perfume and the scrape of scaled leather, it was Hyonèku that caught him.

"Sands," muttered Rutejìmo as he looked up into the face of his rescuer.

Interested?

If you're interested, I'd love to have opinions from someone who doesn't talk to me every day (e.g., friends and family that I interact every day). Just send me an email at contact@brokentypewriterpress.com.

I'm not looking for copy editing, but mostly opinions of the characters, flow, and "big picture" stuff for the novel.

Miwāfu glyphs

2012-10-29T05:00:00Z

One of the inspirations for the cover for BAM and FOTS is DaVinci. In specific, the semi-technical writing with the careful notes written in the whitespace. They used it in Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 in much the same manner and I think it would be perfect for the theme I'm setting for both books.

In BAM, the main language is Miwāfu, though it is notationally written in English. But, I decided the cover could still follow that idea of filling in the space with notes. Naturally, to do this, I want to use Miwāfu directly instead of writing in English. That means I have to create the glyphs for Miwāfu along with enough of the language that it is reasonable accurate.

Introduction to Miwāfu

Glyph Inspiration

I find Tolkien's Elvish and Sanskrit-based languages to be beautiful. Sadly, the attempt to make it closer to Sanskirt failed miserably but after a few weeks of fumbling, I came up with something I'm pretty happy with.

This does take inspiration from a Tengwar version of Lojban. Mostly, it uses a fair amount of diacritics for the vowels. Mostly the smaller marks on the top are the six vowels: a, e, i, o, u, and y.

I also tried to think about how it would be written. In this case, I wanted something flowing as if someone was tracing in the sand or rocks. In my case, I used the steamy door after my shower.

This is a fairly thick font. I could make a narrower version, but until I see it on the cover, I won't know how thick I need it to be. I also wanted something bold to enforce the drawing in the sand with a finger.

Initial Glyphs

Below are the initial consonant I came up with for Miwāfu:

I did decide that voiced are opposites of the unvoiced version. And for the vowels (including accented versions) for the "w" constants.

Drawing These

When I started working on these, I used a graph pad and a pencil. It took a few weeks of just playing around with symbols, trying to get the right combination of appearance without too much duplication.

One notable aspect of written language is being able to identify characters easily. I needed to make sure that characters didn't turn into each other if you drew the beginning slightly curved or had a little flare at the end. There were quite a few times when I said "great, I'm done" and then realized two characters were pretty much identical if written in a hurry.

Once I had the symbols, I used Inkscape to draw them out as vectors. Each vowel, accent, and consonant was put on a different layer. This made it easy to layer them on top of each other, to make sure they were roughly balanced with each other.

Trying it out

Now, manually setting out the characters could be a royal pain. Fortunately for me, I'm perfectly willing to spend an hour writing a program to save myself two. So I banged up a little Perl program that took the SVG, split out each of the layers into a separate PNG image, and threw it into a directory.

A second Perl program took a text file with example text and creates an image using ImageMagick of the various glyphs. That way, I can see how the language looks when written out and make changes.

Making a Font

Since I'm intending to put these glyphs on the cover of BAM, I want to make it a proper font. This will let me do a few things that the Perl program can't easily do, in specific kerning.

Kerning is the space between characters. In the above example, "akope" (which means "additional object of sentence, negated"), the "a" and "ko" could be brought closer so the "ko" is in the curve of the "a". This is kerning and make the spacing look better.

Creating the font is also fun and one of my other interests. I want to create a few fonts for this fantasy world I'm building, this just happens to be the first one I'm doing (because of BAM).

Having the font also means I can create it as a web font. This will let me put it on the wiki-like site for the language to help document it. This is getting rather important since I'm quickly reaching six different works that have this naming language.

Introduction to Miwāfu

2012-10-25T05:00:00Z

One of the things I have on my dependency list for BAM is to finish up a chunk of Miwāfu, a naming conlang I used in both BAM and in FOTS. Conlangs (constructed languages) are one of my (many) interests, so I thought I would write a bit of why I created Miwāfu, its influences, and some of the things that have come up while using it.

What is Miwāfu?

When I was working on FOTS, one of the themes I wanted to work with was racism. Kanéko's father is from Kormar, white, and in the majority. Her mother, Mioráshi, on the other hand, is from the desert and not only is a stranger to the culture, she also chooses not to adapt to the world she lived in for the last sixteen years. Kanéko is also a racist, but that is mostly influence from her parents.

To make the racism a bit easier to identify, I wanted a language that looked different than the language of the land (Lorban, notationally in English). Fortunately, I had a number of rules for the Lorban, including that all proper names start and end in constants. This made it easy to find a way of making it different, by having names end in vowels.

Influences of Miwāfu

I'm a hack, let's start there. Most of my ideas are remixes of different things put together. In this case, Miwāfu is actually based on Japanese, a language I still want to learn, coupled with some ideas from other languages I know.

The syllables comes from Japanese, except that I took out a few and added in the rest of the "f" pairs (fa, fi, fe, fo).

I wanted a language that was obviously gendered, but I didn't want to use the "la" and "le" of French. Instead, I went with an accent over the penultimate syllable. Later, I changed it so only the penultimate syllable of the phrase is accented, so instead of Waryōni, pagáni, and héru, we have this:

Waryoni pagani héru
Waryōni pretty mare
Waryōni's pretty mare

I went with three genders: male, female, and neuter/child. They are represented by the acute, grave, and macron respectively. I bounced back and forth between using circumflex and macrons, but after an in-depth opinion poll (I asked Fluffy), I went with macrons.

Going with the macron is somewhat of a mistake. Japanese allows "n" as a syllable itself. So does Miwāfu, but very few fonts can handle the "n" with a macron. I'm planning on creating a glyph to represent it, but for the time being I'm not allowing "n" to be the accented character.

Another difficulty I had with readers is not accenting proper names that are adjectives or "of" relationships. For example, Waryōni is the name of a clan. Garèo is a man in that clan. So, instead of saying Waryōni Garèo, they use Waryoni Garèo.

A third one is that it is hard to touch-type accents. I ended up having a rather large auto-correct list while writing it.

Names

The entire reason I first created Miwāfu was to figure out Kanéko's name. It went through quite a few iterations before I found a name I liked. I also didn't think I needed it to much, mainly because it was just for her name. And maybe her mother's and the other desert guy. But, then as I was building up the world, I needed clan names and then horses and, from there, it just blossomed into this whole little ecosystem of names.

I went with relatively long names for characters. Minimum three characters with 3-5 being common for someone's first name and 3-6 for a clan name. This is obviously influenced by my Indian co-workers but also because I'm comfortable with longer names like Rutejìmo (main character of BAM) or Mioráshi (Kanéko's mother).

Names became a very big thing in the world. The people of the desert name everything: their mounts, their weapons, their vehicles. Each one is a "member of the clan" as it were and may have a gender associated with it.

The longer names did cause problems for some of the readers, most so when there are scenes with a large number of characters. I tried to reduce it in BAM, mainly by adding a few chapters to slowly wind up the characters, but everyone in that novel speaks Miwāfu. I found that around chapter 5-6, the writing group was getting somewhat comfortable talking about them.

Politeness Levels

But, there was an unexpected benefit of the longer name. It started because I wanted to go with different levels of politeness in Miwāfu, but mostly subtle. With the names, I could use the penultimate and ultimate syllables as the informal name.

Polite: Garèo
Formal: Waryoni Garèo
Familiar: Rèo
Inferior (to Superior): Great Waryoni Garèo
Superior (to Inferior): Boy, thief, idiot, etc.

Making it Fun

I love conlangs, so this was actually just a way of having a bit of fun with the world while giving some structure to how I name people. I honestly wasn't expecting it to expand out, but I'm getting so the names feel right when I read them.

I think what Tolkien did with Elvish was an inspiration, but I also like that you didn't have to know the language to read the book. It was just a little bonus feature if you took the effort to know it.

Constructed Languages

World-Building - Telepathy

World-Building - Creating Hissian

Existing Almanac Entries

Translations

Wind-Blown Rocks (Family/Tribe)

Blood Lands

Pronunciation

Apparent Rules

Apparent Words

Next Steps

Making a calendar look good

Arrangement

Numbers

Continual improvement

Looking for beta readers again

Length

Setting

Characters

Constructed Languages

Survival

Rites of Passage

Sample

Interested?

Miwāfu glyphs

Related Posts

Glyph Inspiration

Initial Glyphs

Drawing These

Trying it out

Making a Font

Introduction to Miwāfu

What is Miwāfu?

Influences of Miwāfu

Names

Politeness Levels

Making it Fun