Speaker's/Author's tone

[shockandawe232]

Being this is my first post on here let me introduce myself a little first. I'm a college student studying history who recently got into fiction writing, science fiction mostly, but also I do some political,religious and sports blogging. Getting into writing i decided to learn more about fiction writing and got multiple how to books on fiction writing, but I realized I didn't know all that much about the science fiction genre so i started looking for books on writing specifically science fiction. One of the books that came up on my search on amazon was The Language Construction Kit. Creating fictional languages? While I had read the Lord of the Rings and being a quasi-treki -- I like watching the show but have no desire to try and read Hamlet in Klingon -- I have watched plenty of Star Trek, I had never heard of or even considered that there was such a thing as conlanging. I know I'm a genius, I must have thought the creaters of star trek went and talked to a bunch of klingons or something to learn it. Anyway, the plot i had been working on was a scifi spy novel, and was looking into learning some cryptography to use in the story, but that wasn't too appealing to me. Then I came across Mark's book and an idea clicked, I remembered the code talkers from WWII and liked the idea of a conlang that very very few people know being the secure means of communications (no universal translator) in the novel, so I got the book.

That brings us to today and my question. About 20 plot ideas and at least as many outlines later, I no longer need a conlang for my story, but am working on a personal language as a way to learn more about conlanging and for other reasons also. Right now I am rereading the book and jotting down ideas as I go along about what I might want to include in my language, and one of those ideas is the reason for this question. One of the things that I hear a lot is with written language, is that it is hard to know if the person writing the message is being serious, sarcastic, unexcited, humorous or what. My ideas is to somehow have a way to show that in my language, but I have no idea where to show that.

[maıráí]

If it works with your language, you could maybe come up with a variety of sentence-ending particles, for one thing. Similar to that ma question marker in Chinese, you could have a few for those tones you want conveyed.

Also, welcome to the ZBB!

[shockandawe232]

If it works with your language, you could maybe come up with a variety of sentence-ending particles, for one thing. Similar to that ma question marker in Chinese, you could have a few for those tones you want conveyed.

Also, welcome to the ZBB!

Thanks for the welcome, and the idea. That might work, I'm just beginning so I don't know it if it would work or not yet. The extent of my language right now is a word document with the title "Personal Language #1" and a heading that says phonology and two bullet points: english minus some things; and add some other things. At this point i think i've still given myself enough leeway to make something like that work.

[shockandawe232]

a follow up question, any suggestions for tones that one might want say that that is the explicit tone of this sentence?

[din]

Maybe modal particles might interest you (No.1oser already alluded to them). They do a good job at expressing the speaker's attitude. Here's the wikipedia article on German modal particles: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_modal_particle

And I'm sure you've read this already in Mark's book, but some languages contrast a pretty large number of 'grammatical moods', which can convey all kinds of attitudes and emotions: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_mood

[clawgrip]

If you don't think it unbecoming of me to link to my own work, you can take a look at how my language deals with these things. It employs sentence-final particles like many Asian languages.
viewtopic.php?f=4&t=40025&start=25#p1004916

[Melteor]

lojban also has attitudinals which are just emoticon grunts.

[Daistallia]

Maybe the "attitude particles" a la Quechua would work.