Language consistency?

[Jester85]

Could anyone direct me toward any resources or offer any tips for developing alien languages in ways that sound consistent? Like it's actually a language instead of me making up a bunch of weird words and throwing them together?

Also for character names within different alien races?

 

[Glitch]

A quick internet search for 'Creating an alien language' brought up a lot of hits. The first one The Language Construction Kit looked good at a glance.

 

[sknox]

Take a few courses in linguistics.

Seriously, making up a language is non-trivial. Or should be more specific: making up a language that will convince people who know how languages work is non-trivial.

OTOH, if you keep your words brief and free of punctuation, and as long as you don't try to pull off entire dialog scenes in it, you probably don't need to worry. SF and F readers have long experience with linguistic goofiness, and you'll never please the specialist anyway.

 

[nightdreamer]

That Language Construction Kits looks like a pretty good resource. I didn't know about it when I wrote this. My intent was to present some things to think about when developing a language rather than to suggest a specific methodology for doing so. As the construction kit suggests, it can be a lot of work and it helps if you have some knowledge of linguistics. I tend to develop them only so far as needed and so it varies from story to story. Trarsanzik is pretty well developed and has grammar rules that are at least intelligible to a human, but I don't have it all written down. Tolkien designed real languages, but he was a linguist. I'd suggest taking some time and looking at the basic structure of languages. Chinese and Turkish are almost opposites along one axis, and Austronesian languages go off in an other direction that doesn't really use the same concept of a verb that we have. It's a fun thing to do, but I repeat, it takes time.