Kryptonian conlang ?

[phanazo]

One of my pet conworlding projects has been to elaborate upon the hhistory/culture/language of Superman's home planet Krypton. There have been many different versions of Krypton in the comics, television, and movies. Sometimes I tweek around with basing my conworld on what's in the comics, sometimes I think about starting from a blank slate.

Zompist and others, how would you go about creating a conlang for a species that is virtually identical to humans, except has a completely separate, independent history on other planet. I know you have to suspend your disbelief to do this. Would the language be completely different from any human language, or could it be similar to Indo-European, Chinese, Semitic, or other human languages, at least in grammatical structure?

I suppose the version of Krypton that has been most elaborated upon in the comics is the "pre-Crisis" version which was depicted prior to 1986. This Krypton had a language, Kryptonese, of which a few interesting details were revealed. Here: http://www.superman-through-the-ages.co ... n/grammar/ are some limited notes about the grammar that can be constructed. Interesting to me is the use of "-o" as a pluralizer. The alphabet, here http://www.superman-through-the-ages.co ... phabet.php of this period was also very interesting, with 118 characters, and different in its structure from any human writing system that I know of, because it used characters that represented consonantal clusters as well as consonants and vowels.

But how would you create a conlang for a human-like extraterrestrial language?

[Pedant]

Hmm. Well, I'm not Zompist, but, I suppose, depends on whether you want to speak it.
First of all, if you do, don't make it too unlike human languages in sound. They're humanoid, they have (almost) the same mouth structure as us, and they make sounds the same way we do. I think. I mean, nobody's seen Clark Kent struggling with a velar consonant, have they? They speak English well enough, it would make sense that they wouldn't have too divergent a phonology. And yes, that's blatantly overgeneralizing, but it works for now.
As for the rest...well, it's a conlanging forum, so I'm actively resisting making my own here. But consider this: it's an alien species nonetheless, with a different world, a different evolutionary path...perhaps that whole "death before dictatorship" business really played a role here. What I mean is, their patterns of thought could be very different from our own, and the vocabulary--what they recognize, how they quantify things--may be quite different from our way of thinking.
I would urge you also to consider looking at Zompist's Elkarîl language for a point or two, but in the meantime, let's try a little syntactic rearrangement. In human languages, in our most basic sentences, we ask what an action was, who did it, and whom it was done to. For Kryptonians, led by a Council of Science, maybe they ask different fundamental questions, like what an object was doing, what immediately preceded it (as a cause), and what will result from it. So a sentence like "dwavli elo ish-äbd fleh" would mean "fusion (from) stars [negative present habitual connector]-clay.lump squishing", thus translating roughly as "fusion in stars is not the same as squishing clay."
Just a possibility, you understand. I wish you good fortune.

[cromulant]

The typical conlang is an a priori "human-like extraterrestrial language." It is the overwhelmingly dominant type.

[CatDoom]

he alphabet, here http://www.superman-through-the-ages.co ... phabet.php of this period was also very interesting, with 118 characters, and different in its structure from any human writing system that I know of, because it used characters that represented consonantal clusters as well as consonants and vowels.

That's not all that unusual; after all, the letter "x" can represent the cluster [ks] in several languages written with the Latin script, and "ξ" does the same in Greek. Likewise, the Greek "ψ" represents [ps], and in ancient Greek "Ζ" represented [zd].

The sheer number of consonant clusters represented in Kryptonian is unusual, but it looks like some of them might actually be ligatures of some sort.

[phanazo]

Very interesting ideas. Especially about the completely different way of constructing a sentence. Thank you for your input, Pedant.

Hmm. Well, I'm not Zompist, but, I suppose, depends on whether you want to speak it.
First of all, if you do, don't make it too unlike human languages in sound. They're humanoid, they have (almost) the same mouth structure as us, and they make sounds the same way we do. I think. I mean, nobody's seen Clark Kent struggling with a velar consonant, have they? They speak English well enough, it would make sense that they wouldn't have too divergent a phonology. And yes, that's blatantly overgeneralizing, but it works for now.
As for the rest...well, it's a conlanging forum, so I'm actively resisting making my own here. But consider this: it's an alien species nonetheless, with a different world, a different evolutionary path...perhaps that whole "death before dictatorship" business really played a role here. What I mean is, their patterns of thought could be very different from our own, and the vocabulary--what they recognize, how they quantify things--may be quite different from our way of thinking.
I would urge you also to consider looking at Zompist's Elkarîl language for a point or two, but in the meantime, let's try a little syntactic rearrangement. In human languages, in our most basic sentences, we ask what an action was, who did it, and whom it was done to. For Kryptonians, led by a Council of Science, maybe they ask different fundamental questions, like what an object was doing, what immediately preceded it (as a cause), and what will result from it. So a sentence like "dwavli elo ish-äbd fleh" would mean "fusion (from) stars [negative present habitual connector]-clay.lump squishing", thus translating roughly as "fusion in stars is not the same as squishing clay."
Just a possibility, you understand. I wish you good fortune.

[phanazo]

Zompist, I'd really like to know your perspective particularly. I know you've been paid to make conlangs before.

Say that DC Comics paid you to come up with a Kryptonian language, a language for a technological advanced planet-wide civilization. Any ideas pop into your head about how you would approach it?

[Pedant]

Very interesting ideas. Especially about the completely different way of constructing a sentence. Thank you for your input, Pedant.

Glad to help, Phanazo!

[zompist]

The problem is more meta-narrative than linguistic. We have no aliens to look at. But we and our readers are humans, we have thousands of human languages to investigate, and we have expectations based on our cultural context. So the convention is to make languages for fictional worlds that are, well, pretty much like human languages.

You can try to come up with weird features not used by humans, but there are several problems:

* Such ideas aren't easy to come by!
* If you succeed in being really weird, your conlang will be hard to grasp.
* If you don't know the breadth of human languages, you'll probably end up with "slightly weird English". (That's why I write all these books, to show you a much wider range of options.)

For Klingon, Marc Okrand basically went with "features that seem weird to English speakers". And narratively, that was a great choice! Star Trek viewers get a language that seems really alien to them. Yet most of his 'odd' features are common to Native American languages.

For Almea, the overall idea is that cultures and languages should get more unusual as you travel from Verduria. So Verdurian is itself full of recognizable roots; the Eastern languages are recognizably Indo-European, and less English-like features are common farther out. Non-human languages are supposed to be odder yet— Elkarîl includes features that are (so far as I know) unattested in human languages, yet it's still pronounceable. The print LCK includes a brief sample of a very strange iliu language (and it isn't suited to human voices at all).

If DC wanted a Kryptonian language, it would probably be for movies, which means human actors would have to speak it. So it probably couldn't be too weird phonologically. A personal language can be more quirky, but don't overestimate readers' willingness to put up with unusual symbols and non-obvious romanizations.

There is a lot more room for cultural expression in the grammar and lexicon. In a conlang, you can throw in a lot more Sapir-Whorf than in the real world. So you can think about what Kryptonian values are and how to grammaticalize them.

[mèþru]

Klingon also featured a phonology with unusual gaps that have made many people call it ugly and "bad conlanging." Also, some features like "harsh" uvulars and the fact that (at least some) negative words are shorter than their positive equivalents express their culture (and the later one violates a human universal).

[Chengjiang]

Klingon also featured a phonology with unusual gaps that have made many people call it ugly and "bad conlanging." Also, some features like "harsh" uvulars and the fact that (at least some) negative words are shorter than their positive equivalents express their culture (and the later one violates a human universal).

Nothing about this is actually unusual for humans except perhaps negatives being shorter than positives. Even Klingon's gap-happy consonant inventory isn't that strange. Look at Somali's consonants.

Also, FWIW I consider Klingon to be a relatively well-designed conlang. It's much better than Esperanto, for example.