How to design a new language that can be spoken, written, and read in 30 minutes

How to design a new language that can be spoken, written, and read.

Abstract: Some others did it — they designed a completely new language. I did as well. Here’s how.

Introduction

je iu, iu rohiiu, hije. I say, be welcome, visitor.

I once admitted to the bet to be capable of designing a new language in 30 minutes. I almost did — yet, it is not pretty and has some flaws. I suppose I’ll work on that once again, but for now, you’ll find the results of the first 30 minutes…

Half an Hour Design of a New Language

What it’s about?

Language is spoken, read, and written. When designing a new one, one should address these aspects. When I showed off to be capable to design a new language in half an hour, I kept this in mind and tried about the fastest way to achieve it.

So the following aspects are needed:

Words: A language needs words that can written, read, and spoken.
Grammar: You should be capable to build sentences out of the words.
Alphabet: For writing the words, you need an alphabet.

Actually, this is not completely true, as seen later. One may design more unusual languages. But for now, let’s review the first design of the named three aspects in the following.

Words

I thought that there are two things of importance: a) make the language unique, b) make it understandable. I asked whether this should be an indo-germanic(-european) language, so that, e.g., “Vater” (German) or “father” (English) have the same root. This was neglected. Actually, this is not really reducing the complexity, as seen later, but yes, it makes a very first shot less complicated.

Finally, I decided to put most of the time into the sound of the language, not on typography or grammar. For a better understanding, I decided to keep common mid-european vocals, not to introduce new or uncommon pronunciations or sounds, like Click_consonants or Overtone singing, neither in the spoken nor in the written word.

I knew I had a dictionary of German words. Actually, it’s a pseudo-dictionary, as it contains a lot of “words”, which in fact have no meaning in German. Here are the first 12 lines:


aal
aalen
aas
aasgeier
ab
abakus
abänderlich
abändern
abänderung
abänderungsantrag
abänderungsanträge

But given that, I should be capable to translate almost everything that is a German word into the new language. So what I did is to write a script which builds a new word for each of the words in the dictionary.

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