Category Archives: Conlangs

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’.  For instance: SHIBBOLETH (SHIBBOLEð) 937088145 Here are the 10 letters of Oðblgshezi: I 1 Z 2 E 3 H (h) 4 S 5 G 6 L […]

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 […]

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 twelfth year! Adding a word a day is certainly an easily achievable goal, something that you can do over a cup of coffee, on a commute, or when pulling out your smartphone. If you already have a conlang that you’ll be adding words to, check out Stephen Escher’s “12 Tips for Lexember.” If you don’t have a […]

“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 […]

I finished Level 1 of the Duolingo Esperanto course in 50 days, after about 70 hours of study. Near the end of Level 1, I created an Esperanto-only Twitter account and could read and write basic tweets in Esperanto. All subsequent levels of the Duolingo course after Level 1 are just a repetition of what you’ve already learnt. So the emphasis is really on practice. I completed the Duolingo course on May 14, 693 days in (1.9 years), studying for 15 to 30 minutes a day. And today’s my two-year […]

An avid Trekkie, I had read and admired Marc Okrand’s book, The Klingon Dictionary, when it was first published in 1985. Marc, a linguist by training, designed the Klingon language to sound alien and to embrace features that rarely occurred in natural languages. That said, Klingon could still be a human language. In 1996, I was inspired to create a truly alien language, one unlike any natural language at all: Fith. My inspiration was the postfix notation used on my HP calculator and in the FORTH programming language. The name […]

This afternoon we played Dialect, by Thorny Games, a game about coining words as part of telling the story of a community. The game comes with four types of isolated communities, including a Mars colony, but we picked a 1980s cult, because of course we did. (And there are many third-party frameworks for different types of communities as well.) Unlike role playing games, storytelling games such as Dialect typically involve more player negotiation about directions of the story. This is akin to the collaborative worldbuilding at the start of some […]

In my book Langmaker: Celebrating Conlangs, I have a chapter on creating a naming language. Namelangs are small languages intended primarily for naming people and places in an imagined world. As such, you don’t need to create a grammar or extensive vocabulary, just a short dictionary. Heck, you don’t even have to be formal about what sounds are included in the language and how they are combined (phonotactics). Now much conlanging is for fun and private amusement, but I ran into a problem with Denju, my naming language that I […]