I’ve been wanting to create my own language for years. Why? Read on!
Believe it or not, I’ve been wanting to create my own language for years. I’ve been a pretty creative person in my life. Still, that’s not that only reason I want to create my own language. While growing up and learning English, I found it’s a horrible language. There are so many stupid rules that don’t even hold up most of the time. Then there’s the punctuation, the fonts, and everything else. Don’t get me wrong, I know many other languages out there aren’t so solid either. I’ve dabbled a bit in both Spanish and Japanese. Each language has its ups and downs, and I know that slang and pronunciation can alter what was the original language.
Font
Lets start out slow with fonts. Yes, the English alphabet has gone a long way since its inception. The way letters were once written are very different from how they are now written, and there are many fonts out there. A few other languages have simplified forms too, but some of these forms mix up some letters. My biggest beef is with uppercase i’s and lowercase Ls — Il. You can’t always control font, but you can try to counteract it with decent alphabets, which brings us to the next section.
The Alphabet
This may be the most important part of any language, and it’s also the most faulty in English. Personally, I think having a set of “uppercase” and “lowercase” letters is a bit retarded. If you want to have capitalization in your language, just use a bigger form of the same letter. I think keeping things simple is always the way to go.
As for the letters or characters themselves, I like a mix of the three languages I have studied — English, Japanese, and Spanish. I like how the Japanese alphabets have a character for each sound in their language. There are some sounds they may have missed out on, but some sounds sound way too similar to each other to become their own character. Forming an alphabet where one letter / character makes one sound will make it far easier for people learning the language.
When it comes to learning from English and Spanish, I like how you can place letters together to form a word. I believe forming words with letters are the best way to go instead of learning whole new characters for words. But where Spanish shines over English, there should only be one sound for a letter and there should NOT be any two letters together in any word. You may ask “What about ll and rr?” Yes, those letters can be found together in some Spanish words, but they are considered their own letter in the Spanish alphabet. I wouldn’t have gone that route when forming an alphabet, but I still enjoy the principle.
So here’s a quick wrap up for the alphabet I would want to create: One letter per sound, no upper / lower case letters, place letters together to form words, no two letters together in a word, and no silent letters in words!
Words
We fixed up the alphabet, and some words were fixed in doing so. Still, there are many annoying words out there that are unneeded. First on the list is similar sounding words. We do not need words that sounds exactly the same but are spelled differently and mean something entirely differently. The most common examples are their, there, they’re and too, to. Some people STILL can’t get those right. Solution: have entirely different words with different meanings.
Similar sounding words aren’t the only problem. There are also way too many words that mean basically — if not exactly — the same thing as each other. Cut down on unnecessary words and keep the vocabulary simple. You don’t need intelligent sounding words to get a point across. A solution could be to add two words or prefixes that will give the words a higher or lower meaning, kind of like very and slightly. Instead of having smart, genius, brilliant, etc, you can have one word for smart and add prefixes for the levels. Very smart, slightly smart and the original smart.
Grammar
The most annoying part of any language is the grammar. Why? Because many rules in probably all languages don’t always hold up. They may even be counteracted by other rules. An example is plural words in English. Lets looks at some words in their singular and plural forms: Chair / Chairs, Ox / Oxen, Box / Boxes. They’re all singular / plural forms, but they all have different results. This can cause massive confusion for anyone learning the language. It will force people to memorize stuff instead of learning a rule and placing it on the language!
Punctuation
When it comes to punctuation, it can get pretty confusing too. Most people get a bit confused with commas. I admit, I can get a little mixed up with when to use commas and when to use periods. Then there’s the semi colon and colon that almost nobody uses. One of the things that annoys me the most is the apostrophe. Apostrophes have three uses in the English language: quoting inside of quotes, indicated possession, and when using contractions. I personally think each bit of punctuation should have only ONE use. If it has more than one use, it can easily conflict with each other.
Speaking of quotes, for some reason, the American English language decided to place sentence ending punctuation INSIDE of quotes, even if it’s not part of the quote! England would use something like, Do you think Jenny said “I need to go in there”? The US would use something like, Do you think Jenny said “I need to go in there?” even though it wasn’t a question that Jenny posed! I believe that’s how it plays out.
I want everyone to know that I’m not an awesome person when it comes to any language. I’m still learning on some and I don’t care to learn others (English English). So, if you find errors in this blog, go ahead and point them out to me in the comments section. And maybe you’ll know why I want to create my own language. 😉