Conlang General Sketch: Parseltongue

My Dwarven language is designed to be easy for casual learning and use by role-players. Conversely, Parseltongue is designed for an author to create sentences in a very foreign language (snakes having a very alien thought process), difficult perhaps to learn to speak as far as grammar and vocabulary go, but easy to pronounce. It puts the onus on the writer to figure out how to communicate, without giving the reader too much trouble.

It has no labial consonants (snakes have no lips), which makes it feel rather odd to say. It also includes voiced and unvoiced vowels, which I thought was totally novel until I found that certain North American tribes have it, too. As a purely spoken language (snakes also lacking limbs), our usual Roman letters will suffice, which also makes printing questions easier: Dwarven has its own writing system and two romanization methods; Parseltongue just has the romanization.

Snakes are skilled speakers for the most part, and slippery of thought, and their language allows them to make use of that. Parseltongue therefore has many cases, and is mostly agglutinative. This way the speaker can deliver the level of precision desired, and the information in whatever order they wish. As in Latin, the parts of a sentence may be expressed in whatever order produces the best effect even though there may be patterns that are fairly standard.

Would I love for J.K. Rowling to take notice of this? Naturally. It's unlikely that she'd object to this rather extreme fan gesture, and if she did, I'd simply rename it Serpentine and develop it in a fully separate manner. It's also unlikely that she'd sponsor it, or other efforts along that line, since I'm a musician, not a professional linguist. But considering her own history, who knows? I would cheerfully throw myself into such a project or series of projects if such a thing were to occur.

In the mean time, it is a strange and intriguing undertaking, very nearly the opposite of Dwarven.

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.