My Planned Languages

Designing languages is fun, and it's easy to get carried away with it.  I realize that it's unlikely I will get all of my ideas into a functional form, but the plan is to get some real development done on each. Even if they never get done they can be handed off to someone else, and failing that I'll at least amuse and educate myself.

The following list is a very brief description of each. I'll sketch out fuller plans in later posts.

• Dwarven:  Designed for gamers to actually use, this is made to be easy for English-speakers to learn. This is the only one with any real work done on it so far, and in fact I'm likely to publish something on it in the not-too-distant future.
• Parseltongue:  It was partly created for the Chamber of Secrets movie but no information seems to be on it anywhere.  So I'll do it.  It would be spectacular to talk Ms. Rowling into publishing or at least signing off on it. For one thing, it'd ensure development of probably the entire list.
• Draconic:  This is conceived as the head of a language family, and sort of a sister language to Parseltongue.
• Black Speech:  That's what Tolkien called Sauron’s created tongue for his minions, so I'll need a different name, though mine is for the same purpose exactly:  created by a big baddie to unite his disparate underlings.  Unlike Tolkien's, though, it's based not on Elvish but Draconic.
• Orcish:  Again like Tolkien’s, a simplified Black Speech, worn down by dumb underlings (orcs) who have no love or knowledge of language and little brainpower for using it.  Certainly easy to use by gamers, and possibly publishable.
• Arboreal:  I have a great idea for a language which is built of radicals and infixes, like the Semitic languages, and which uses a symbolic writing system that reflects it. The fictional speakers are a race of deeply philosophical tree-dwellers.
• Magic:  It would be very helpful to have a writing system for magic which is as regular and functional as the writing system for mathematics. It's been tried without much success for centuries. However, it seems there is a system which allows one to chart logic like a sentence diagram, and that makes it very promising.

I suspect I've left something off the list. Not that the above isn't more than enough.