Word Building

I’ve finally finished drafting the grammar for the constructed (fictional) language of Graven, currently called Mijanu. I have a handful of words I created earlier, with the original possible sounds (a whole lot of them), but today I’m reducing the number of allowed sounds and reworking the vocabulary a little. Most of the words I already have will remain, although I will edit them a bit to fit the reduced number of sounds. For those interested, I’m using the Risus Monkey: Fantasy Language Cypher Generator to generate words that sound like a combination of Japanese and French. Just input sample text you like the sound of, type or copy in a text you’d like to “translate”, and the generator “translates” the text into a ‘faux-language’ modeled on the sample text. You can use any text as a model, as long as it’s in the Latin alphabet. The easiest way to get samples, especially of languages that don’t use the Latin alphabet, is to go to Omniglot.com, and go to the “Babel Text” page. Omniglot offers hundreds of translations of the passage from the Bible talking about the tower of Babel, and all but one of the samples I looked at had at least one transliteration (French has several, from various Bibles; Chinese has several different styles of pinyin transliteration).

I’m currently working on creating a word list by “translating” Japanese vocabulary words (romanized) into the “faux-language” the Risus Monkey generator creates, and then editing the words as I like. I’m working on a page that shows what I’m doing, with the sample text I’m using. Once I’ve edited the grammar and have a short sample text translated, I’ll post both to show you the full language.