Activity Details:
2 to 3 person Activity
Time to Complete: 3 days to 1 week.
Communicating through Language be it Visual, Text or Sound has been vital for us as Homospeins to accumulate and pass on our skills and knowledge to our future generations, this has also lead us to be at the top of the food chain.
Since 200 million years, each Group, Tribe, Culture, and sub-cultures have represented their ideas, concepts, skills, and understandings through various expressions and forms, the divergence in creative intelligence is astounding then seen through the leans of communication.
Equally important is to see the beauty of Languages through the Lens of Creation.
Creating our own language allows us to observe, experience, reflect and represent our world in a multitude of ways and build a deeper sense of association with our world, people, process, and environment.
There are so many languages, then Why create your Own?
Learning an existing language is essential for interaction with our world, however creating a language even if limited has a different purpose.
Creating Languages can be both fun and yet complex. Many movies have also created their own language forms to express to, examples include Avatar, Game of Thrones etc.
Here our main task is to use Divergent thinking, lucid imagination to create a simple language that you can call your own.
This exercise will help us build Observation, Empathy, Reflection, and apply creative thinking to create our own written and spoken form.
The Goal:
Before we move further, it is essential that we recognize that the goal exercise is to form a crude language only as the main essence is to get the user to think as divergently as they can to represent their Natual and Abstract world in their own terms through visualization, expression, and representation.
The Essentials:
Step 1: The Scope of your Language
Keep it simple is the key here. To begin with, let us draw or note down few ideas we want our language to convey. Our goal is to have a limited language for the time being but functional and fun to what ideas we want our language to represent and express.
Ideas for Concepts and Expressions we want to communicate - Observe, Reflect and Imagine what you see around you as Life - The Events, objects, People, Animals, Behaviours, Emotions, Qualities & Actions.
Draw or Note them down in the language you are comfortable with.
Draw to represent their interactions with each other.
Tip: Prepare a mind map for the ideas you want to express.
Step2: Let's create our Alphabets ( Count and Visual)
Keep the number of Alphabets less for simple language construction, say around 10-15 letters.
Draw Alphabets on paper to give them their Visual Identity.
The visual representation can be pictographic where each letter could be a visual logo or script.
Use your imagination and you can borrow ideas for a visual representation of letters be it- abstract, natural, Sign Lang.
Don't bother about the Sound just yet.
Step3: Give your Alphabets their own Sound
Give each alphabet its own sound.
You can use sounds coming from your vocal track.
Some alphabets can be given Nasal sounds to add variation, but not necessary.
Keep sounds simple and avoid a blend of multiple sounds for a single Alphabet.
If you want to add a twist your Alphabets can be divided further into two categories based on their Sounds though this is not required for all languages-
Vowels: Alphabets whose sounds some uninterrupted while speaking, meaning they are produced with an open vocal tract; that is the air escapes the tongue without the tongue touching or not obstructing the airflow of the sound as you speak.
Consonants: The remaining Alphabets who send is obstructing the air flow or where your tounge touches the mouth one can classify as Consonants.
Sounds
Words
Sound blends,
The Rules: Grammer
Tones
Sentence structure,
Sign language
Glyphs for the words
Complex sentences
and being specific when needed are covered
Toki Pona: The Language of Good
Letters -
Nouns
Verbs
Adjectives
Adverbs
Function Words - Don't have an identity of themself but are used along with other words to complete them or define them.
Articles (the, a),
Demonstratives (this, that),
Quantifiers (most, few, some, little),
Prepositions (up, from, to, with),
Conjunctions (but, or, and, yet)
Rules
about half of the world's languages deploy subject–object–verb order (SOV);
about one-third of the world's languages deploy subject–verb–object order (SVO);
a smaller fraction of languages deploy verb–subject-object (VSO) order;
the remaining three arrangements are rarer: verb–object–subject (VOS)