Guest Post by A.J. Abbiati

Joe sez: If you've missed the previous guest blogs, they've been fascinating and informative.

You can read Todd Travis talking about fear here:http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2013/06/gust-post-by-todd-travis.html

You can read Patrick Balester talking about how he learned to love e-publishing here: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2013/06/guest-post-by-patrick-balester.html

You can read Shantnu Tiwari talking about publishing cliches here:http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2013/06/guest-post-by-shantnu-tiwari.html

You can read Mike Dennis talking about noir here:http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2013/06/guest-post-by-mike-dennis.html

You can read Douglas Dorow talking about the publishing game here: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2013/06/guest-post-by-douglas-dorow.html

You can read Iain Rob Wright's 10 self-publishing tips here: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2013/07/guest-post-by-iain-rob-wright.html

You can read about Tracy Sharp talking about just doing it here: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2013/07/guest-post-by-tracy-sharp.html

Now here's today's guest poster, A.J. Abbiati...

Greetings!

I’d like to take this opportunity to share a nifty little writing tool I created a few years ago.

For those who don’t know me, I have a background in science. Twice now I’ve used that background to solve particularly gnawing artistic problems. The first time came at the start of my MFA program when I found out that, apparently, no university, no workshop, and no how-to book teaches writers how to actually write. Really? Yup. Sad but true. No one teaches a logical, step-by-step process for learning how to construct professional quality prose. As such, I had to figure it out for myself (using a scientific approach), and I wrote The NORTAV Method for Writers so I could teach the process to others (using a non-scientific approach). In fact, some very well-known, well-respected authors, authors who frequent this site, offered me their prose for use as examples in The NORTAV Method, and I want to thank them again for their generosity!

Anyway, the second time science bailed me out of an artistic problem, and the point of this post, came during the writing of my episodic novel Fell’s Hollow. Fell’s is a dark fantasy, and I needed to come up with three new languages to support certain aspects of the story. I didn’t want to make up fictitious words on the fly. That’s a rather hack way to go about it, in my view, and experienced readers will pick up on a shortcut in an instant. I also didn’t want to pull a Tolkien: I didn’t have ten years to build three new languages from the ground up. So I decided to do a little research into linguistics, and I ended up creating a tool that, in a matter of minutes, can define a “new language” from scratch. I call the tool “The Transliterator.”

You can download the Excel or PDF version of The Transliterator here. My gift to you.

In the span of this relatively short post I don’t have the luxury of walking you through The Transliterator in detail, with screen shots and explanations and all the associated theoretical background, etc., but I can give you an overview of how a transliteration works. If you download The Transliterator, you can follow along as I go, but it isn’t necessary to get the gist of the idea.

Basically, The Transliterator will help you transpose the phonetic sounds of an English word or sentence into a non-English representation, using a different set of consonants and vowels, thus recreating the English word in a “new language.” (This is not a letter-for-letter transposition from English to something else. That approach introduces WAY too many technical problems, which I won’t get into here.) For example, you could set up The Transliterator to map the English vowel sound “i as in fine, line, behind” to a new vowel representation aa. Thus, whenever you encounter the long vowel sound “i” in an English word, you represent it physically and phonetically as aa in the new language. The rest of the transliteration process simply involves tailoring the new language to taste.

Note: The Transliterator is not a computer program! It’s a reference sheet on which you mark down and save your transliteration choices for your new language. You then, by hand and by ear and by using the reference sheet, transliterate the words you need, as you need them.

Let’s say you’re writing a humorous thriller in which the hero must learn how to communicate with a newly resurrected cave man in order to solve a 30,000-year-old mystery. The cave man, we’ll call him Grunch, speaks his own strange, prehistoric language that will be quoted throughout the novel. (And of course you want Grunch’s language to look and act and sound as real as possible, which is why you use The Transliterator!) There are six steps required to set up The Transliterator. The seventh and final step is to actually perform an English-to-“Grunchian” transliteration.

STEP 1: Choose the Consonants and Vowels for the New Language

Here you need to choose what the new alphabet or script will be. That is, you need to choose the letters and letter combinations that will represent individual Grunchian phonetic sounds. Since you will probably want Grunchian to be a rough and guttural language, you might want to eliminate some of the softer or more pleasant-sounding letters, such as j and f and i, etc. Thus your new Grunchian consonant representations might be:

b, d, dd, g, gg, k, kk, p, pp, r, rr, s, ss, t, tt, v, w, z, gh, kh

And your new Grunchian vowel representations might be:

a, aa, o, u, uu

STEP 2: Map English Consonant Sounds to New Language Consonants

Next you want to map (i.e., assign) each individual phonetic consonant sound from the English language to one of your new Grunchian consonant representations. There are at least 24 individual consonant sounds in the English language, so you will end up with some Grunchian consonants representing more than one English phonetic sound. That is, the Grunchian gg could represent the English sounds “qu as in queen” and also “sh as in shut,” just like an English c can sound like a hard k or a soft s.

STEP 3: Map English Vowel Sounds to New Language Vowels

You can probably guess what happens here. Map each individual phonetic vowel sound from the English language to one of your new Grunchian vowel representations. There are at least 16 English vowel sounds, so again, Grunchian vowels will represent more than one English vowel sound. Hence, the Grunchian a could represent the English sounds “uh as in but, ocean, caution” and “oh as in boat, moat, home, comb.”

STEP 4: Define New Language Consonant and Vowel Separators

Next you want to decide if Grunchian will be a language that can be pronounced by your readers. After transliterating, you often end up with new words that contain consecutive consonants or vowels that make the new words difficult, awkward, or impossible for English speakers to pronounce. This might be a desired effect (e.g., an alien language), or it might not be. If you want Grunchian to be pronounceable, you can define a standard “separator” vowel to be inserted between any pair of unpronounceable Grunchian consonants in your new words. You can define a standard “separator” consonant to be inserted between any unpronounceable Grunchian vowels as well. For example, if you transliterated the English word frat to the Grunchian dkkaz, you could use a standard consonant separator e to make the word more pronounceable, as in dekkaz.

STEP 5: Define a Syllable Split Value

After transliteration, words can sometimes grow in length due to adding multiple separators or changing a single English letter into a double letter representation in your new language. This may or may not have an impact on the style of language you’re trying to create. You probably want to keep your Grunchian words relatively short. You can do this by defining a “syllable split value” and then splitting into two any new word that has more syllables than that value. Simply count that many syllables into each new word and split it at that point if it’s longer. Thus if your split value is three, and your new word is ghakuukasoratad, you would end up with two new words after the split: ghakuuka and soratad. After splitting, if you still have words containing more syllables than the split value, you can repeat the process again and again.

STEP 6: Define Custom Start and End Values

Lastly, you now want to take a close look at the new language consonants and vowels you created in STEP 

1. After transliterating, separating, and splitting, any new word could theoretically start or end with any of these consonants or vowels. Most will not present a problem, but some might. If you do not want any of your new words to start or end with any particular consonant or vowel, define standard prefixes and suffixes to be used when these undesired consonants or vowels end up at the start or end of a new word. For example, if you do not want any new words to start with the consonant gg, you could define a prefix u to be tacked on the front of any words that do begin with gg after transliterating, separating, and splitting. Thus ggud would end up as uggud. Similarly, if you defined a suffix of d for any words ending in aa, the word rokkaa would become rokkaad. Note: This step can also be used to add even more flavor to your language by defining certain styles of prefixes or suffixes. For instance, adding Latin-like prefixes and suffixes to words will give your new language a magical or scientific feel.

STEP 7: Transliterate

When you finish STEPS 1-6, which shouldn’t take more than ten minutes or so, you are now ready to use The Transliterator whenever you need to create words or sentences in your new language. Transliteration consists of five phases (which you already understand if you’ve gotten this far). I will use our Grunchian example to illustrate the five phases below. (The complete Grunchian setup can be found in The Transliterator.)

I.                   Choose the English words or sentence to transliterate.

This is a wild transliterator!

II.                Use the mappings created in STEP 2 and STEP 3 to transliterate your English words or sentence into your new language, one phonetic sound at a time.

Wuk ukh aa guasgh zkkugkhsuzukkaazukk!

III.             If desired, use separators between any unpronounceable consonants or vowels.

Wuk ukh aa gunasegh zekkugekhesuzukkaazukk!

IV.             If desired, split any overlong words. Repeat if desired.

Wuk ukh aa gunasegh zekkugekh esuzukk aazukk!

V.                If desired, add custom prefixes or suffixes where needed.

Wuk ukh kaa gunasegh zekkugekh esuzukk kaazukk!

That’s all there is to it.

I hope you find The Transliterator as useful as I have. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at http://ajabbiati.com or http://thenortavmethod.com. If you’re interested in checking out the first episode of Fell’s Hollow, you can download it for free from my website here.

Joe, thanks so much for the opportunity to guest blog. Tess, I’m thrilled to have contributed to such a worthy cause!

And as Grunch might say…

Zu zu dukk gug! 

Joe sez: Thanks, AJ.

I haven't had the need to create a new language, but for many hardcore fantasy writers and readers, it can mean the difference between disappointment and immersion in an alternate world. 

Now some savvy programmer reading this needs to take The Transliterator and make it into a computer program, like Babelfish. I can easily see a whole segment of fans geeking out by translating English into something else, and back again, bringing a greater depth and new techy element to fantasy books. Why have a glossary when you can translate for yourself?

I admit that fantasy is one genre I never got into (after the ninth poem in The Hobbit I lost interest in Tolkien) but I also admit that there are plenty of worldwide fans who go nuts for it. In my Timescaster sci-fi series, I took the Burgess Nadsat approach (aka the Adams Watership Down approach) and made up words, acronyms, and portmanteaus to give the book a futuristic feel. But I never understood the lengths writers will go through to attain authenticity in a made-up universe until I read this post.

I have no doubt, AJ, that going to Comic-Con with this will gain you fans, and possibly even some cosplay action.

If anyone has experience creating new languages for their stories, I'd love to hear your comments, and what you think of The Transliterator.