Late Update

Wow, it’s been awhile. I have been working on several projects, on and off, but haven’t taken the time to update.

I have a new update for the map I’m creating for Matt Hoffman (technospiritualist):

Commissioned Map

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And I recently (re-)started my world building project. You can follow my progress at Worlds of Sand, where I hope to update at least weekly. I’m also open for all sorts of commissions! You can find me on the Cartographers Guild forums or just e-mail me through this blog (I’m thinking of setting up on Deviantart too).

I am still planning on rearranging this blog a bit, which means some posts may disappear pretty soon as I move things around. I’m not restarting, though; I just want to move some things to a different home (like those photos of Paris, randomly taking up tons of post-space …). Most everything will reappear somewhere else at some point, so if you’re just coming to the site and wondering if you missed something, you probably haven’t.

Hopefully I’ll be able to update more often now!

 

Mijanu, new Graven map, and SteamPunk!

I’m currently working on 2 different projects at once – developing vocabulary (and semanto-phonetic character-glyphs) for the Graven conlanguage Mijanu, and completely rebuilding Graven from the ground up with a whole new island shape, new organization, new everything. Except key locations, that is. They’re staying, just … staying somewhere new. It’s a little complicated, but basically my original map was totally higgly-piggly (I just *had* to use that word today), not very well organized, and pretty much just slapped together in a week from a collection of other partially finished maps I’d started and gotten tired of over the course of a year or so. This time, I’ve actually planned out the different areas, what they’re “based on” (real-world associations, if you will), and I’m starting with streets instead of buildings. That way things are a little more organized and realistic looking, but still with a good, solid “growth flair” as I like to call it. Basically, I want this planned, but planned so it looks like the city “grew” into a lovely whole. I’ll post the first iteration once I have some streets to show scale; I’m working at 24″x36″ and 300 dpi, as I plan to print this out as a massive poster and then have it laminated so I can take notes on the map itself, as it hangs gloriously on my wall. I’m really looking forward to that, actually.

Now, Mijanu. I’m still working on fleshing out the grammar and getting some sample texts translated, but here’s a little “taster” of what the language looks like in the Latin alphabet (American, English, romanized, whatever).

“Ete.na irra.ren nina eskitu.tan. Ete.na orei.sun koreya.tan, hera par.sun yu.fararu.led. Terre, ete.na kora.sun navu.tan.” (trans. “I went to the market yesterday. I wanted (to buy) a cow, but couldn’t find one. So/therefore, I bought a monkey.”)

Obviously nothing particularly deep or special, it was just something I came up with while working on a comic script I’m in the process of writing. The characters live in Graven, where you can get monkeys at the market. There’s a lot of the grammar missing, and while I have quite a few vocabulary words I have to not only keep building new ones, I also have to create “glyphs” for them. It’s going to be awhile before I can write anything longer than a single short sentence or two in the full script. Hopefully by the end of the weekend I’ll have some sketches with single words or short phrases in them, as signs and such. I’d really like to get some environment sketches done, complete with signs advertising fresh vegetables.

Now, just as a note, I was looking for some good SteamPunk reference for one of the districts in Graven, and came across this *absolutely amazingly fantastic* looking new game that I am just drooling over. I think I might die of dehydration, but be that as it may, here’s the press release about CLOCKWORK EMPIRES. I don’t even dare try to explain how awesome this game looks. Just read the article and see for yourself. I think one hint is all I need to give you – procedural generation of buildings. How cool is that? (If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say “procedural generation”, basically you get to not only build a city by placing buildings – think Age of Empires series, but you can also edit individual buildings).

 

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.