Language

Conlang, Poster Design, 2022

The project began with research into existing languages for inspiration. I focused on European languages, specifically Germanic and Uralic ones such as Swedish, Dutch, Icelandic, and Sámi. A little bit of Celtic languages such as Irish and Scottish Gaelic were also referenced for some flavor, as well as some oddball languages like Portuguese and French. While it would have been interesting to reference a more diverse range of languages, wrapping my English speaking brain around the linguistic differences of Papuan or Native American languages would have been more difficult and time consuming.

At the same time as this research I created a poster, along with the rest of the seniors, to introduce our theses. My poster played with wave imagery to allude to sound, and combined this with IPA letters to suggest language in an unfamiliar way.

A phonetic inventory was selected based on the research done. This included 25 phonemes, 24 of which would later be represented by a letter, with the addition of ʔ which would be shown by an apostrophe. From there the phonotactic rules were created, again with help from research into natural languages. Other phonetic elements were worked on as well, such as consonant clustering, diphthongs, a romanization system, and research into German phoneme frequency. A very small lexicon was started, but ultimately only amounted to 53 words. Lastly, work on syntax was started, but the work on the language element of this project had to stop there due to time constraints.