Category Archives: Conlangs

For my TTRPG Planet of the Week, I’ve created adventures on 11 different planets so far. Which has required me to create at least one miniature constructed language (conlang) for each planet. For unlike Star Trek, with its magical, invisible, instantaneous translator, in Planet of the Week the Universal Translator (UT) is a device that has to be trained over time. So characters always hear a bit of the new language before translation kicks in.

Pravic is a constructed language, even within its setting, where it was created as part of the settlement of the moon Anarres by refugees from Urras. Here are links to the pages that I found most useful to learn more about Pravic.

Lexember is a social-media challenge to add at least one word to your constructed language (conlang) each day of December. This year I’ve created three sets of prompts, depending on how ambitious you are.

To my surprise, Oðblgshezi has taken a life of its own. My absolute favorite is that Goodfire Brewing not only named a Kölsch after it, they put a calculator on the can!

1) You can practice the language with hundreds of people on social media, in bite-sized chunks.

2) You can make up your own words in the language, using established roots and affixes.

3) Many of the speakers are multilingual—they may even speak one or two other conlangs…

I conceived of my artlang Muna Lingi as the language of the pulotu, groups of singers who traveled between the Polynesian islands, sharing songs, stories, and news from other islands. These singers were themselves drawn from many islands, and Muna Lingi was initially their lingua franca when at sea. Over time it became a language in its own right, and the source of songs, tales, and news for isolated islanders.

Lexember is a social-media challenge to add one word to your constructed language each day of December. Lexember was created by Mia DeSanzo and Pete Bleackley in 2012, so this will be its thirteenth year! Add a word a day over a cup of coffee, on a commute, or when using your smartphone.

I’m happy to present this guest post from @skander, a former languages professor who left for the strangely greener pastures of being a corporate drone (and it gives him more time for elf games). – J. Alan Henning In my life, I’ve been a tenured language professor and a TTRPG player, and I’ve seen a few discussions of how to act on the idea of language differences in role-playing games (this one by Tom van Winkle and a discussion around it led me to writing this post). The goal of […]

June 20 marks my third anniversary of studying Esperanto. To celebrate my anniversary, I thought I’d share some resources I have found valuable. Photo by Stefan on Unsplash.

Oðblgshezi (pronounced /oth-blg-SHEH-zee/, with a syllabic /L/) is the name of a "language" consisting of English written with the digits of a calculator.  You type in a number and then turn the calculator upside down to see the word.  In order to make use of all ten digits, I persuaded the Anglo-Saxon letter eth (ð) to return from retirement to stand in for ‘TH’ (whether voiced, like ð, or unvoiced, like þ).  For instance: SHIBBOLETH (SHIBBOLEð) 937088145 Here are the 10 letters of Oðblgshezi: I 1 Z 2 E 3 […]

This year for Lexember, I intended to coin new names for birds and animals in Denju, the ancient language of my RPG campaigns and interactive fiction. I ended up concentrating on birds. I basically just searched through the American Heritage Dictionary Indo-European Roots Appendix, a favorite resource since I was a kid, for inspiration for my own creations. Once I’d finished that, I pulled up a list of the most common European birds and then worked through that to make sure I had translations for each common type. I did a word a […]

Back in October 2019, when Mark Rosenfelder was editing Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, he wrote and asked, “For marketing, I think it’d be nice to be able to say that the book includes some never published material.” I offered him Denju, which I’m now publishing here for the first time. Denju started out as the language I used to name cities in Civilization IV and became the language of Hexedland, the campaign setting for a 5e campaign and three Dungeon World campaigns, and the backdrop for my interactive fiction, A New […]

“All we need now is an expert in gibberish.” – Preston Whitmore “…and what’s really amazing is that if you deconstructed Latin, overlaid it with a little Sumerian, throw in a dash of Thessalanoian, you’d be getting close to their basic grammatical structure. Or at least in the same ballpark. Which is almost exactly like certain obscure offshoots of Chocktaw! Well, obviously using Creek pronunciation, but you get the point, proving once and for all, that Atlantean trade routes accessed the new world centuries before the Bronze Age!” – Milo […]