I've been going back and forth for a while now on whether to do a post about Vulgarlang. I've found it immensely helpful as a worldbuilding tool, but I worry about seeming like I'm advertising something. But it's been an immensely helpful worldbuilding tool for me, and I've only used the free version anyway. This also seems like a good opportunity to talk about worldbuilding and choice paralysis, especially in epic fantasy.
There are a couple approaches to worldbuilding an epic fantasy story (I'm using the term broadly here: it's in a world that's not this one, there's magic, and the technology is usually less advanced, or at least very different). You can start in one place and build outward, you can build from the top down, or you can start with "Like [Existing World] but..." and address the implications of whatever the differences are as you go. There is such a thing as a generic epic fantasy setting, although it looks more like D&D and less like Lord of the Rings than most people outside the genre seem to be aware of, but there are always gonna be differences. In any case, starting something and then messing with it is to some extent a different process than what I'm talking about here, although some of the same difficulties certainly apply.
When you're creating a world from the ground up, you have to make a lot of decisions. Big decisions like what the continents are shaped like (you did remember to have more than one continent exist?) and whether there's a common language that most people speak. Fantasy specific decisions like are there dragons, and how does the magic work. Incredibly small decisions like what do they make knife handles out of. (In my protagonist's home country, mostly apricot wood). I'm realizing I should do a whole series of posts on this, because different kinds of decisions require different processes, at least when I do them. Anyway, one of the things you have to do is make a shitton of linguistic decisions. How do people's names sound (in each of the different cultures that you have)? What are the norms around last names, middle names, and nicknames? Terms of address? When you have things that don't exist in our world, are you going to make up names for them, or approximate them in English? (Or whatever language you're writing the story in, but I'm gonna just say English going forward). How are you going to keep them feeling consistent without making up an entire language (or several)? Should you just make up a language? Should you finish that before you start writing?
Some people are probably not affected by this problem as badly as I am, because most people don't seem to share my difficulties in making arbitrary decisions. And if your able to make a few arbitrary choices early on, it can simplify things considerably. You just decide on impulse or instinct what to call a few things, or what some of your main characters' names are and maybe what they mean, and that gives you some parameters for what words sound like, and a few roots to build on. (For an example of what I'm pretty sure is an incomplete language managing to feel consistent anyway, you might look at the Old Tongue in the Wheel of Time, and particularly the words and phrases in which "shadar" or "shaidar" appear.) But I'm really bad at naming people, and even worse at naming places and things. I have enough linguistics to be kinda perfectionistic about how a constructed language ought to work, but not enough to know which of the things I do know about it would inform that stuff, especially given that a lot of how living languages develop is the result of crazy random happenstance which I would have to invent, because I'm constitutionally incapable of just saying "Oh, yeah, this word works differently because of random circumstances".
So I would need to build an entire language, if not in its whole vocabulary then at least all the grammar and syntax and a lot of root words, and most of those decisions would be totally arbitrary because whether the preferred word order is subject-object-verb or subject-verb-object isn't gonna inform or be informed by much else in the worldbuilding, and it would take months and be exhausting.
And this is what makes Vulgarlang so damn useful. Basically, it makes random languages. The full version apparently gives you quite a lot of vocabulary and is more customizable, but I don't use it because if I needed a bunch of words and that level of control I would just build the whole thing myself. The free version gives you like 200 vocabulary words, but it also gives you the rules. Word order, what sounds exist, what word ending you use to get from a verb (so like, from "paint" (v) to "painter"), what sounds can or can't go together, emphasis patterns, a bunch of stuff that I want to have exist so I can build from it, but have no particular reason to create.
(There is nothing wrong with constructing a language yourself from scratch, but it can eat up months of writing time, and trying to do it has absolutely caused me to stall out on projects).
This is especially useful in my epic fantasy novel. If I only needed one language, I'd probably just break out the linguistics textbook and do it myself, even if I had to make some dice-rolly tables to randomize arbitrary decisions. (I love dice-rolly tables). But it's a big world. I'm gonna need dozens. Not in their entirety, but enough for names, place-names, plausible grammatical mistakes when people are speaking unfamiliar languages. Different cultures use different elemental magics, so there's gonna be terminology confusion.
So like, the lesson for the day is that it's ok to offload massive piles of work that aren't central to the story, if you have a way of doing it, and in this case I do.
There are a couple approaches to worldbuilding an epic fantasy story (I'm using the term broadly here: it's in a world that's not this one, there's magic, and the technology is usually less advanced, or at least very different). You can start in one place and build outward, you can build from the top down, or you can start with "Like [Existing World] but..." and address the implications of whatever the differences are as you go. There is such a thing as a generic epic fantasy setting, although it looks more like D&D and less like Lord of the Rings than most people outside the genre seem to be aware of, but there are always gonna be differences. In any case, starting something and then messing with it is to some extent a different process than what I'm talking about here, although some of the same difficulties certainly apply.
When you're creating a world from the ground up, you have to make a lot of decisions. Big decisions like what the continents are shaped like (you did remember to have more than one continent exist?) and whether there's a common language that most people speak. Fantasy specific decisions like are there dragons, and how does the magic work. Incredibly small decisions like what do they make knife handles out of. (In my protagonist's home country, mostly apricot wood). I'm realizing I should do a whole series of posts on this, because different kinds of decisions require different processes, at least when I do them. Anyway, one of the things you have to do is make a shitton of linguistic decisions. How do people's names sound (in each of the different cultures that you have)? What are the norms around last names, middle names, and nicknames? Terms of address? When you have things that don't exist in our world, are you going to make up names for them, or approximate them in English? (Or whatever language you're writing the story in, but I'm gonna just say English going forward). How are you going to keep them feeling consistent without making up an entire language (or several)? Should you just make up a language? Should you finish that before you start writing?
Some people are probably not affected by this problem as badly as I am, because most people don't seem to share my difficulties in making arbitrary decisions. And if your able to make a few arbitrary choices early on, it can simplify things considerably. You just decide on impulse or instinct what to call a few things, or what some of your main characters' names are and maybe what they mean, and that gives you some parameters for what words sound like, and a few roots to build on. (For an example of what I'm pretty sure is an incomplete language managing to feel consistent anyway, you might look at the Old Tongue in the Wheel of Time, and particularly the words and phrases in which "shadar" or "shaidar" appear.) But I'm really bad at naming people, and even worse at naming places and things. I have enough linguistics to be kinda perfectionistic about how a constructed language ought to work, but not enough to know which of the things I do know about it would inform that stuff, especially given that a lot of how living languages develop is the result of crazy random happenstance which I would have to invent, because I'm constitutionally incapable of just saying "Oh, yeah, this word works differently because of random circumstances".
So I would need to build an entire language, if not in its whole vocabulary then at least all the grammar and syntax and a lot of root words, and most of those decisions would be totally arbitrary because whether the preferred word order is subject-object-verb or subject-verb-object isn't gonna inform or be informed by much else in the worldbuilding, and it would take months and be exhausting.
And this is what makes Vulgarlang so damn useful. Basically, it makes random languages. The full version apparently gives you quite a lot of vocabulary and is more customizable, but I don't use it because if I needed a bunch of words and that level of control I would just build the whole thing myself. The free version gives you like 200 vocabulary words, but it also gives you the rules. Word order, what sounds exist, what word ending you use to get from a verb (so like, from "paint" (v) to "painter"), what sounds can or can't go together, emphasis patterns, a bunch of stuff that I want to have exist so I can build from it, but have no particular reason to create.
(There is nothing wrong with constructing a language yourself from scratch, but it can eat up months of writing time, and trying to do it has absolutely caused me to stall out on projects).
This is especially useful in my epic fantasy novel. If I only needed one language, I'd probably just break out the linguistics textbook and do it myself, even if I had to make some dice-rolly tables to randomize arbitrary decisions. (I love dice-rolly tables). But it's a big world. I'm gonna need dozens. Not in their entirety, but enough for names, place-names, plausible grammatical mistakes when people are speaking unfamiliar languages. Different cultures use different elemental magics, so there's gonna be terminology confusion.
So like, the lesson for the day is that it's ok to offload massive piles of work that aren't central to the story, if you have a way of doing it, and in this case I do.
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