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hrjAll my creative writing has been driven by language.
That might seem like a circular statement, but I mean, by a language other than my native tongue.
I invented my first language when I was ten years old. That was the year we lived in Prague, which was the spark for a number of my loves, including my deep passion for history. It was my first intimate experience with other languages than my own (although I never learned more than tourist-level Czech). That was what spurred me to play with ideas of how languages could encode ideas differently, and being home-schooled that year left a great deal of mental scope for pursuing my own interests.
That first language (Cerani) started as a simple substitution cipher (which I still use for light security when jotting down things like temporary passwords). It then acquired a syllabary associated with the symbols which I used to drive vocabulary creation and finally I developed the apparatus of grammar and syntax, including “inventing” some features (like noun classifier prefixes) that I only later learned were used in real world languages.
The impetus for this column came from a comment I made on![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aryanhwy’s journal that all my angsty teen-age poetry had been written in an invented language, for better diary security. Cerani was that language. I can still recite some of the poems by heart. (Nare po-daru qua si ran po-lers...) They were definitely not masterpieces of versification, but they got me thinking about the role of language in shaping and expressing ideas. (A line of thinking that achieved its apotheosis when I studied cognitive linguistics--but I get ahead of myself.)
I started serious fiction writing when I was seventeen. That was the year we lived in Munich. (You may spot a theme here.) I’d done an accelerated high school graduation so that I wouldn’t have to deal either with finishing my senior year after a break or trying to do a senior year at the American High School in Munich (which would pretty much have eaten up my entire life with commuting). So my time was entirely my own that year (other than teaching myself calculus and sightseeing) and I started churning out a number of rather amateurish fantasy stories. I don’t remember whether the stories I wrote that year had significant linguistic content (I could check -- they’re still in my files somewhere), but the fiction I wrote in the following years when I was in college was very language-driven.
My favorite world-building technique in that period was to create a poem using a sort of “automatic writing” approach, then assign a general meaning to the poem, then start working out what the vocabulary and grammar must be to achieve that meaning, then explore what sort of society would have created that poem and used that language. The poems themselves often fell away from the stories, like scaffolding that isn’t needed after the building is complete. I’d have to dig through the files to find examples. It was a useful way of freeing up my imagination, even though none of those stories were ever read by other eyes.
Another thing that happened the year I was seventeen was that our travels included a few days sightseeing in Wales, trying to locate the town the Joneses had lived in before heading for the New World in the early 18th century. I picked up a pamphlet on the Welsh language while we were there and developed an irrational emotional attachment to the language based on equal parts family history and my love for the neglected and unfashionable things of the world. In the following years, I picked up some textbooks and language learning materials. My activity in the SCA gave a context for diving into Welsh history and the older forms of the language. And that, in time, led me to take a break from working in biotech to get a PhD in linguistics studying the semantics of Medieval Welsh prepositions.
Grad school intersected my writing life in another very practical way: when I needed a part-time job convenient to the U.C. Berkeley campus, I fell into a position at MZB’s Fantasy Magazine. There is nothing like hanging out with authors and publishing people for stimulating one’s own impulses toward writing. I’d still been writing stories in the meantime, but--after a few abortive attempts in college--had never gotten up to the point of submitting anything anywhere. But in that environment, I started working on several lesbian historic romance novels set in my favorite points of Welsh history. (They’re still in my “get back to this” folder, so some day....) And I turned my hand to short fiction because all my friends were submitting to Sword and Sorceress so it seemed like the thing to do.
My first published story, Skins was inspired by the intersection of a dream that gave me the opening scene of the story and a poem/song I’d written about transforming into an owl. As with my college world-building exercises, I’d set about “back-translating” the song into it’s original form, and that gave me the kaltaoven language and, by extension, a significant amount of world-building about the culture of my skin-changers and their relationship to the dominant culture. The skin-singer stories have bits and snippets of the kaltaoven language sprinkled throughout, but I have a great deal more of the language developed and some day (if I’m ever famous enough to have obsessive fans) I may put more of it out there.
Él-taov alyev,
Mél-daegh alyev,
A-gyam doér-bol pen-poengnga,
A-gyam pen-daegh-leos-na,
Kael-keol i'éle i'óe,
je-taov-og v-tev,
njad-noed-gyam go'om-keov j-kéve tón-taen
I wrote the original version of my Mabinogi-inspired short story Hoywverch around about the same time the third skin-singer story appeared (1997) and sold it to Jinx Beers’ Lesbian Short Fiction but the story was killed before appearing when the magazine folded due to health reasons. The original version was language-inspired in that I was trying to capture the flavor and rhythms of medieval Welsh prose, but when I decided to dust it off last year and look around for another venue, I indulged myself by “untranslating” the opening paragraph into 14th century Welsh. And when I submitted it to podcastle.org for their Artemis Rising series, I took the daring step of including the Welsh opening as well as the parallel English text. I confess to some curiosity whether the logistics of finding a reader who could manage the Welsh played any part in the acceptance decisions, but they took it. And now I’m on tenterhooks waiting to hear how it came out. (Soon. Soon. Sometime in the next two weeks!)
Elin verch Gwir Goch oed yn arglwydes ar Cantref Madruniawn wrth na bo i’w thad na meibion na brodyr. A threigylgweith dyvot yn y medwl vynet y hela. Ac wrth dilyt y cwn, hi a glywei llef gwylan. Ac edrych i fyny arni yn troi, a synnu wrthi. A’y theyrnas ymhell o’r mor. Ac yna y gelwi i gof ar y dywot y chwaervaeth Morvyth pan ymadael ar lan Caer Alarch: Os clywhych gwylan yn wylo, sef minnau yn wylo amdanat. A thrannoeth cyvodi a oruc ac ymadael a’y theulu a’y niver a’y chynghorwyr, a marchogaeth a oruc tra doeth i’r mor.
The language elements in the Alpennia stories are a bit more subtle and backgrounded. I’ve written previously on the background to Alpennian language and names:
On langauge
On names
On socio-linguistics
Here the language development didn’t drive the world-building, but given my background there was no way that I was going to ignore the linguistic aspects of inventing an entire country. And the importance of language in the Mysteries of the Saints gave me a large canvass for bringing my linguaphilia to bear.
Even when my writing has not been directly driven by my study and experimentation with language and linguistics, those interests have always shaped and influenced my fiction. If I’ve done it well (which only readers can tell me), the language aspects add flavor--a bit of salt and pepper but not a whole Scotch Bonnet hot pepper in the middle of the stew.
That might seem like a circular statement, but I mean, by a language other than my native tongue.
I invented my first language when I was ten years old. That was the year we lived in Prague, which was the spark for a number of my loves, including my deep passion for history. It was my first intimate experience with other languages than my own (although I never learned more than tourist-level Czech). That was what spurred me to play with ideas of how languages could encode ideas differently, and being home-schooled that year left a great deal of mental scope for pursuing my own interests.
That first language (Cerani) started as a simple substitution cipher (which I still use for light security when jotting down things like temporary passwords). It then acquired a syllabary associated with the symbols which I used to drive vocabulary creation and finally I developed the apparatus of grammar and syntax, including “inventing” some features (like noun classifier prefixes) that I only later learned were used in real world languages.
The impetus for this column came from a comment I made on
aryanhwy’s journal that all my angsty teen-age poetry had been written in an invented language, for better diary security. Cerani was that language. I can still recite some of the poems by heart. (Nare po-daru qua si ran po-lers...) They were definitely not masterpieces of versification, but they got me thinking about the role of language in shaping and expressing ideas. (A line of thinking that achieved its apotheosis when I studied cognitive linguistics--but I get ahead of myself.)I started serious fiction writing when I was seventeen. That was the year we lived in Munich. (You may spot a theme here.) I’d done an accelerated high school graduation so that I wouldn’t have to deal either with finishing my senior year after a break or trying to do a senior year at the American High School in Munich (which would pretty much have eaten up my entire life with commuting). So my time was entirely my own that year (other than teaching myself calculus and sightseeing) and I started churning out a number of rather amateurish fantasy stories. I don’t remember whether the stories I wrote that year had significant linguistic content (I could check -- they’re still in my files somewhere), but the fiction I wrote in the following years when I was in college was very language-driven.
My favorite world-building technique in that period was to create a poem using a sort of “automatic writing” approach, then assign a general meaning to the poem, then start working out what the vocabulary and grammar must be to achieve that meaning, then explore what sort of society would have created that poem and used that language. The poems themselves often fell away from the stories, like scaffolding that isn’t needed after the building is complete. I’d have to dig through the files to find examples. It was a useful way of freeing up my imagination, even though none of those stories were ever read by other eyes.
Another thing that happened the year I was seventeen was that our travels included a few days sightseeing in Wales, trying to locate the town the Joneses had lived in before heading for the New World in the early 18th century. I picked up a pamphlet on the Welsh language while we were there and developed an irrational emotional attachment to the language based on equal parts family history and my love for the neglected and unfashionable things of the world. In the following years, I picked up some textbooks and language learning materials. My activity in the SCA gave a context for diving into Welsh history and the older forms of the language. And that, in time, led me to take a break from working in biotech to get a PhD in linguistics studying the semantics of Medieval Welsh prepositions.
Grad school intersected my writing life in another very practical way: when I needed a part-time job convenient to the U.C. Berkeley campus, I fell into a position at MZB’s Fantasy Magazine. There is nothing like hanging out with authors and publishing people for stimulating one’s own impulses toward writing. I’d still been writing stories in the meantime, but--after a few abortive attempts in college--had never gotten up to the point of submitting anything anywhere. But in that environment, I started working on several lesbian historic romance novels set in my favorite points of Welsh history. (They’re still in my “get back to this” folder, so some day....) And I turned my hand to short fiction because all my friends were submitting to Sword and Sorceress so it seemed like the thing to do.
My first published story, Skins was inspired by the intersection of a dream that gave me the opening scene of the story and a poem/song I’d written about transforming into an owl. As with my college world-building exercises, I’d set about “back-translating” the song into it’s original form, and that gave me the kaltaoven language and, by extension, a significant amount of world-building about the culture of my skin-changers and their relationship to the dominant culture. The skin-singer stories have bits and snippets of the kaltaoven language sprinkled throughout, but I have a great deal more of the language developed and some day (if I’m ever famous enough to have obsessive fans) I may put more of it out there.
Él-taov alyev,
Mél-daegh alyev,
A-gyam doér-bol pen-poengnga,
A-gyam pen-daegh-leos-na,
Kael-keol i'éle i'óe,
je-taov-og v-tev,
njad-noed-gyam go'om-keov j-kéve tón-taen
I wrote the original version of my Mabinogi-inspired short story Hoywverch around about the same time the third skin-singer story appeared (1997) and sold it to Jinx Beers’ Lesbian Short Fiction but the story was killed before appearing when the magazine folded due to health reasons. The original version was language-inspired in that I was trying to capture the flavor and rhythms of medieval Welsh prose, but when I decided to dust it off last year and look around for another venue, I indulged myself by “untranslating” the opening paragraph into 14th century Welsh. And when I submitted it to podcastle.org for their Artemis Rising series, I took the daring step of including the Welsh opening as well as the parallel English text. I confess to some curiosity whether the logistics of finding a reader who could manage the Welsh played any part in the acceptance decisions, but they took it. And now I’m on tenterhooks waiting to hear how it came out. (Soon. Soon. Sometime in the next two weeks!)
Elin verch Gwir Goch oed yn arglwydes ar Cantref Madruniawn wrth na bo i’w thad na meibion na brodyr. A threigylgweith dyvot yn y medwl vynet y hela. Ac wrth dilyt y cwn, hi a glywei llef gwylan. Ac edrych i fyny arni yn troi, a synnu wrthi. A’y theyrnas ymhell o’r mor. Ac yna y gelwi i gof ar y dywot y chwaervaeth Morvyth pan ymadael ar lan Caer Alarch: Os clywhych gwylan yn wylo, sef minnau yn wylo amdanat. A thrannoeth cyvodi a oruc ac ymadael a’y theulu a’y niver a’y chynghorwyr, a marchogaeth a oruc tra doeth i’r mor.
The language elements in the Alpennia stories are a bit more subtle and backgrounded. I’ve written previously on the background to Alpennian language and names:
On langauge
On names
On socio-linguistics
Here the language development didn’t drive the world-building, but given my background there was no way that I was going to ignore the linguistic aspects of inventing an entire country. And the importance of language in the Mysteries of the Saints gave me a large canvass for bringing my linguaphilia to bear.
Even when my writing has not been directly driven by my study and experimentation with language and linguistics, those interests have always shaped and influenced my fiction. If I’ve done it well (which only readers can tell me), the language aspects add flavor--a bit of salt and pepper but not a whole Scotch Bonnet hot pepper in the middle of the stew.
