Right Side of the Vocab Curve

It's kind of nice to find a quiz that isn't all obvious stuff, and won't end up with results far, far too heavily loaded up on the 100% correct side. In fact, something where 100% is dang near impossible is the only way to make any quiz worthwhile.



Not sure about that Shakespeare thing, but I do have a love for my language, as you know.

I made the image a link. Have a go.

Word to the Wise

(Kind of wish I'd made this one.)

Bloody Philistines.

Linguistic nihilism (if you will) bugs me. A lot. Sure, I screw with the language, but that's because I like the language. A lot. It's like the difference between punching your brother in the arm as you're playing around and decking someone at random on the street. People who insist a word is a word just because someone said it remind me of why someone coined the term "ignoranus". There, I've used that one, and even applied it correctly. Bloody Philistines.

I found the following on Quora while looking for something else entirely. Here's someone who not only understands, but describes it marvelously. (Yes, his description of descriptivism is arguable. It is, however, not in my argument, and therefore I don't want to hear about it. Plus, yes, I know.)

The current fad in linguistics is "descriptivism," which identifies language with communication.  From the descriptive perspective, any time one person says something and another person understands what has been said, the conversation exemplifies perfect grammar and diction ipso facto.  If I point at the remote and say, "hey, gimme, um -- yeah," then (so long as you actually bring the remote) that counted as a complete sentence, made up of proper English words and using proper English grammar, and just as valid as anything Shakespeare ever wrote.  More valid, even, considering that the average man on the street would have a lot easier of a time making sense of the former than the latter.

As you've likely gathered from my diction, I'm not a fan of reducing the study of language to the narrow social science of linguistics.

Let's consider an analogous situation.  Suppose you've got a 1:00 meeting, but your friends want to go out to a restaurant at noon.  You accept, reluctantly; arrive; sit down; and, in the interest of time, ask the waiter what's quickest to prepare.  "In this case, you'll be interested in our daily special, the morceau de bois braisé. It's been simmering for the last several hours, and we can bring it out right now!"  Like any good American, you have no head for French, so you just nod in agreement, preoccupied with the flagging sales figures you have to present in a little over half an hour.

More quickly than expected, the waiter returns with your plate.  The only thing on it, aside from the requisite stack of precisely four haricots verts atop a miniature tomato, is a piece of a cedar log with some bark hanging off of one of the edges.  It appears to have been boiled in a pot of wine for quite some time.

Grabbing the waiter by the wrist before he can get away, you protest: "This isn't food!  This is part of a tree.  And not one of those parts of a tree you're supposed to eat, like a palm heart or, you know, an apple."  After a brief struggle, the waiter decides that this argument is above his pay grade and summons the chef to your table.  Again, you cry: "I came here for lunch.  This isn't food, this is wood!" 

The chef shoots you what is by now a well-practiced look of disdain, and proceeds to educate you to the contrary.  As it turns out, you see, there are actually over three thousand calories in the bois; nothing is preventing your body from using it as fuel, which is of course the definition of "food."  Of course, it's purely plant matter and consequently won't function as a complete protein, and then there's the fact that you'll have to be hospitalized afterwards as the cellulose will pass through your body undigested and may lead to possibly fatal intestinal blockages.  But, you know, it's still technically food.

I'm guessing at this point that most of you would not find the chef's argument very convincing.  So why would we accept the linguist's, which is identical in structure?  Yes, words and phrases like "irregardless," "could care less," and "impactful" can technically be used to communicate something to someone.  On the other hand, they're tasteless, nonsensical, never the most appropriate choice for any given situation, and may lead to possibly fatal intestinal blockages.  If these are words, then wood is food.

Amen.

Cubish Concepts

Ready to get geeky? Tough, I'm doing it anyway.

Cubish (pronounced kyoo-bish, not cub-bish) is conceived as a language for use in multiplayer Minecraft. The overall purpose of Cubish is to allow for quicker and more effective communication of Minecraft issues and concepts by means of the game's text chat functionality. As such, its focus is mainly its written form. It should also be usable verbally, both for out-of-game use and to make the concepts more easily learned by those tending to audible learning styles. That is, if they can hear it mentally as it's being read, it will be learned much more rapidly.

So here are the primary traits, in descending order of importance:
  1. Quick to type
  2. Easy for English-speakers to learn
  3. Able to be spoken

Please note that this language is designed for English speakers, so it may not be much of an improvement for someone speaking Spanish or Mandarin. Or it might be, I don't know. It may well be useful to Germans or Swedes, but trying to accommodate too many thought processes, especially some which are unlikely to ever encounter my little conlang, will only muddy things.

Obviously, there will be some tradeoffs in the above list of goals, since treating one as an ideal to be striven for will give all sorts of trouble to one or both of the others. After some thought, I decided that to achieve the primary traits I should use the following as guidelines:
1. Quick to type
  • Words must contain as few letters as is reasonable, while preserving the other primary traits.
  • When possible, the grammar should allow for using fewer words to convey enough meaning.
  • Special characters should be avoided, especially those which require key combinations.
  • Common Minecraft concepts that require multiple words in English should be able to be referred to very briefly.
  • Numbers are used exactly as in English.
  • Commonly used words are very short.
2. Easy to learn (for English-speakers)
  • Overall sentence structure should be similar to English.
  • Grammar should be simple as possible: no cases or unnecessary “word agreement” structures.
  • Grammar and spelling must be very regular.
  • Similarities may be built in between Cubish and English words of similar or same meanings.
3. Easy to speak
  • No unpronounceable letter combinations.
  • Avoid vague or hard to pronounce letter combinations when possible.
  • As above, numbers are simply the same as in English usage.

The last group, Easy To Speak, was also the easiest to do. Sonority will be the only likely quirk there, and if it sounds a bit blocky, well, that's sort of how the game itself is. Not a problem.

Quick To Type is the main goal, and balancing it with Easy To Learn will be the main challenge. Usability once learned is by far the higher priority, though. To that end, the guidelines for that primary trait are mostly about avoiding unnecessary keystrokes. Dodging special characters and, where possible, even the shift key, is a simple but important step toward high-speed typing. I plan to not even have a different pronunciation for numbers, which allows them to be very fast to type indeed, not to mention easily said aloud when spoken. On the other hand, common number-like ideas like "quarter stack" will have a single, short (or fairly short) word to convey the concept.

Along the same line of thought, there are some distinctly Minecraftian ideas which take several English words to express and which should be reduced to something far more efficient in Cubish. Almost everything regarding a crafting grid falls into this group. Several building, exploring and fighting concepts - and groups of concepts - also take up a lot more space in English, and more time to type, than would be ideal. Ad-hoc abbreviation hasn't solved the problem, when tried, and is actually a lousy way to communicate, since it tends to cause miscommunication. By contrast, building shortened versions (or modified shortened versions) of English words into Cubish would not only codify the shorter form into something agreed upon, it would also speed up the learning process. This whole reduction-of-keystrokes notion is, as you might have guessed, the real impetus behind the invention of Cubish to begin with.

It turns out that natural languages have a lot of redundancy built into them. Different verb forms for each subjective person, agreement of modifiers with the modified, varying declensions, syntactic markers that are redundant to lexical markers, etc. As I understand it, this happens because (a) spoken language is how it usually forms, and is dependent on the hearer hearing properly, and (b) talk is cheap: if you need to say more to get an idea across, it's usually no big deal. Of course, a great many languages (all the Romantic ones, I think) reduce some of this redundancy by things like dropping the subjective pronoun unless it's needed for clarity or emphasis. But it remains, even there, in the structure of the thing. Cubish will minimize redundancy as much as possible. This will allow for fewer keystrokes and faster learning of the language.

The other main method I'll use to keep things to a minimum of letters needed is making it a highly inflected language, with some agglutinative properties. The short form of what that means is this: a lot of meanings will be combined into a very few sounds, and affixes (prefixes, suffixes and even infixes) will be major players in that. If I can, I'll push it into being a polysynthetic language, which is sort of an extreme version of that. Though very tempted to ramble on this subject for a bit, I'll bore you with my observations and plans about it some other time. For now, just remember: many meanings overlayed into few letters. That's the goal.

For example, Cubish verbs carry the number and person of the subject in their inflection, just as, say, Italian does, and like Italian, the subject's pronoun is usually not used at all.

Another similarity to natural languages is that most commonly used words will be quite short.

The grammar itself will be very regular and predictable, with no irregular verbs or any such nonsense. In that, it will be absolutely unlike any natural language. In general structure, it'll be a lot like English, especially in the crucial subject-verb-object order. A couple of the other items I've listed under Easy To Learn I'm less certain of. For example, when you look at cases as essentially a prepositional phrase with the preposition simply tacked on to the phrase's noun (and modifiers such as adjectives often getting markers to indicate they're with the band), it's tempting to make every preposition part of the noun, which pretty much makes a pile of cases. That part will take some careful consideration. I'm probably going to include several verb moods, and make them prefixes for the verb, and the more I think about it, the more I suspect I'll choose to do the same for prepositions/cases and nouns.

As a couple of final notes for this overview: Punctuation will be handled exactly as in English. Most keyboards are designed to make that reasonably efficient, and there's little point making complication where none need exist. Also, clauses will be designated as they are in English. That is, dependent clauses may come before or after their independent clause, and in either case they are headed by their joining word.

It's funny how much thought goes into making something so that it is simple to use.

Made For Poetry

The majesty and grandeur of the English language: it's the greatest possession we have. The noblest thoughts that ever flowed through the hearts of men are contained in its extraordinary, imaginative, and musical mixtures of sounds.

Also sprach Higgins, and I am inclined to agree. Yes, deeply noble thoughts have been expressed in Latin, Greek, German, and who knows how many other languages, but that's not the point of the thing, even in the above line (spoken by Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, in case you're not familiar with it). The sound of English is unusual, its agility extraordinary. There is nothing else like it.

Unusual people are generally made by way of an unusual childhood, and the same goes for the English language. Though part of the Germanic family, it resembles its relatives only in general bone structure and a few basic - and thus unchanging - features. I'm tempted to go into a lot of detail about its truly remarkable history, but I'll spare you (for now) and sum it up in an explanation that looks like a metaphor:

I once read that each culture has a particular "genius" about it, and the genius of England is being invaded. Everyone invades England at some point, it seems. The curious thing is that after a couple generations, the invaders have become English. It's an exaggeration, since the process usually takes longer than that, but by the third generation after invasion, the process is very well underway. Eventually they get absorbed entirely, merely another flavor in the pot. That even goes for the Angles from whom England and its language got their name. America has inherited a certain amount of this ability, but the British Isles do it very well.

This same thing happens with the language itself. A joke that resurfaces periodically is that while most languages borrow words, English mugs other languages in dark alleys and goes through their pockets for loose grammar. What really happens is pretty much what happens culturally in England: outside influences are adapted and folded into the overarching tongue, which, thus enriched, goes on its merry way. Because of this (and several things like the Great Vowel Shift, which I won't get into now), English doesn't much resemble even Dutch, its closest relative. If you go back just to the Middle English of Chaucer, though, the similarities begin to show through. A recent episode of Sleepy Hollow included some very nicely done Middle English, if you want to hear it in practice.

What comes of all this? English has become a language with a naturally interesting sound (if it's your native language, hearing the Middle English gives an idea of how this sounds to a fresh ear) that can adopt a variety of musicalities, both in sounds and tonal patterns, with ease. Its grammar is flexible enough to allow presentation of facts in almost any order without confusion, and can even modify the clarity of the facts at will. The set of tenses available to the verbs is more thorough and specific than any other I am aware of, with the ability to convey mind-bogglingly precise combinations of time and continuation. One phrase can tell you that, at a point in the future, a particular action will be ongoing, and had started before that point but in the future from the speaker's point of view. And native speakers do it without realizing what complexity they invoke.

On top of all this, the borrowed words, which swell English to by far the largest language on the planet, let a speaker or writer choose exactly what is wanted. An author can choose the sound of a word, its implications and nuance, and then decide whether to repeat a word or choose a synonym.

My native language may be an international conglomerate of words and ideas with a strange history, but the net effect is so interesting and flexible that it seems to have been designed for poetry.

Conlang General Sketch: Cubish

cubish n. (kyoo'-bish) a language designed for text chat in multiplayer Minecraft.

By request of my son, I have begun designing a conlang for a very specific context, but one more frequently encountered than the contexts of my other planned languages. Minecraft, if you are unfamiliar with it, is a sandbox-style building and adventure game. In strict point of fact, it's more of an environment with game elements to spur invention and creation. It has a couple of ways to include multiple players in simultaneous use of a given Minecraft world, but unlike high-cost, combat-intensive games like World of Warcraft, the players often do not have mic/headset verbal contact with each other, instead relying on text. The trouble with text is the slowness of it (which is why coordination in combat games is best done verbally). Many common topics of communication in Minecraft are rather cumbersome when spelled out in English, even when abbreviated somewhat, and abbreviations often generate miscommunications.

The resulting request looks to be one that will get me back into language design pretty smoothly. One of the main requirements is that it be fairly easy for local players to learn - or else it won't be learned - so basing parts of the vocabulary on English is not only an acceptable shortcut, to a certain extent it might be a good idea. This lets me focus more on the structure of the language.

I'll get into specifics of the grammar and the reasons for my choices another time, but the short version is that in order to reduce the number of keystrokes needed, Cubish will be highly inflected. That is, words can be adjusted in such a way as to convey different information without adding verbiage. At the same time, precision will be easy to come by, both in specifying things like tense, mood, etc, and also in specialized vocabulary that reduces commonly needed concepts which use multiple words in English to a single Cubish word.

Should be fun.

So what's this conlang thing, anyway?

Turns out, it's a deep, deep rabbit hole, and I only recently realized how far down it I'd gone as compared to most people's understanding of the topic - which is to say, they've never heard of it. The reason I didn't notice is that there are a lot of people who are much more deeply into conlanging (as it's put) than I am. My intent in writing my little articles on the subject is as much to inspire myself to return to it as to inform and perhaps interest you in this uniquely geeky topic.

For now I'll just answer the biggest and most common question I get: Why?

My interest in constructed languages began with those made for Middle Earth by J. R. R. Tolkien. More precisely, I became interested in them as a curiosity which turned to wonder when I found that, in truth, Middle Earth was created for his languages! To keep the story short, I later became aware that not only does thought influence language, but language in its own way influences thought. Therefore, understanding why someone says things they way they do is a key to understanding the person behind the words.

Here's a quick, easily-digested taste of some conlangs you've actually heard.


Be sure to have a look at the actual TED page for a bit more!

Conlang General Sketch: Magic

As I said in the introductory post for my conlangs, 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. So many diagrams have been created over the years that it seems that it should be workable. You would be able to tell what a magical drawing was about by how it looks. It could make life much easier for game masters who need glyphs and role players who want a touch more realism. The most useful version of magical writing that I know of was come up with by Dr. John Dee, court astrologer to Queen Elizabeth I, and while he worked on his Angelic Script for a long time, it's not the most coherent thing ever. Of course, he had the handicap of trying to make something that actually works. I just want to make something that is useful to authors and gamers.

This would be one of the most difficult items on my list of languages to create even though, like mathematics, it’s primarily a written language. A friend of mine has a book that promises to allow diagramming the logic of an argument just as a student of English would diagram a sentence. It looks like it could actually allow me to get somewhere on a logical yet magical language in a coherent way, which is a relief. I'd really like to make this work. The biggest issue, however, I suspect will be formulating the subjects to be covered. Just as math, chemistry or physics express things not normally said aloud, magic covers a very unusual set of topics. Even after I get some sort of visual grammar in mind, it will be an interesting process going back and forth between that and the symbolic vocabulary in order to make it all work together.

Conlang General Sketch: Arboreal

For a society of philosophers and mystics who live in the trees of a rainforest, I want to make a language unlike any I've seen. They are trained in the ways of shadows and dreams, of layers of reality and in meditation styles and uses seen nowhere else. Their language reflects this.

The grammar is to be highly inflected, and the words build of radicals and infixes, like the Semitic family of languages. At this point I have no real idea what it sounds like.

Their writing system is symbolic, but is made of ideograms that incorporate the inflections to allow complex meanings. The result would look like the Chinese/Hunan system of Nu Shu, with marks within each character to tell you the tense, mood, etc. of each word.

I'm fairly enamored of this concept, but the above is pretty much all I have for it. This one will take some doing.

Conlang General Sketch: Orcish

This is a useful one. There are a few partially-created Orcish dialects out there, but I may be able to publish a fully developed language anyway. The concept here is, again, like Tolkien's, in that it is a worn-down version of Black Speech used by creatures who don't care enough about language to maintain one of any complexity. This will almost certainly be the easiest for writers and players to learn and use, should they so desire.

Because orcs are orcs, sloppy usage of Orcish will be considered a fairly minor issue. This makes it even easier on the players. Note that even orcs can speak their language well enough if necessary, for worship, military directions, diplomatic situations, etc, so having a "proper" way to do things is still needful. However, their grammar is quite simple.

The sound of Orcish should take into account the speech issues inherent in creatures that generally have tusks or other enlarged teeth. Subtleties such as tones are out of the question.

The difference between casual and "proper" Orcish speech extends to the vocabulary as well. While the usual sort of dictionary could (and shall) be made, largely of words derived from Black Speech, a gloriously and inventively foul additional vocabulary comprises orcs' daily speech. Most languages would consider this slang, but in Orcish it is the better part of the language. By "better" I mean not only more commonly used, but also where orcish subtlety can be found. Most scholars look at Orcish, an apathetic version of Black Speech, itself simplified from Draconic, and see a low-minded mire. This is not an unfair assessment. However, in a bewildering array of grotesque metaphors, orcs have a startlingly precise and nuanced mode of communication.

Needless to say, a lot of the time a literal translation might not be the best idea.

As I mentioned at the top, there are Orcish glossaries to be found, mostly online, and have been for a long time. What's funny is that the Orcish dialect makers and gamer-users get along with each other far better than the Elvish ones. I think it's partly because the assumed origin of Orcish means that since every major group of orcs has its own dialect, new creations just add to the depth of things, whereas most Elvish want to be definitive, when not actually created for an elvish sub-race... and then they want to be definitive for that group.

I think it's also because people who have orcish fun are less uptight in general. These are also reasons why I created Dwarven and tend to prefer that species in general. But don't tell the Elf-folk.

Conlang General Sketch: Black Speech

The first thing this one's going to need is a better name. Sure, it's what Tolkien called the language Sauron created for his minions, but frankly it's a lousy name. Since its story is about the same - created by a big baddie on purpose to unite underlings - I'll probably name it after that someone. Whatever that name ends up being. I should probably work on that, too.

Instead of basing it on Elvish, as Sauron did, this will be based on Draconic. Now, Draconic is probably the most grammatically complex language in my long list, and my Black Speech emphatically is not. It's much simpler, as the evil overlord in question is essentially human in nature. He just reveres dragons. My goal in this is to make something that feels like a fairly educated knock-off of Draconic in sound and vocabulary, but without the intricate grammar.

It should sound pretty overtly evil. Though a central part of the Draconic language group, I really haven't given much thought to the specifics. However, it needs to have a fair bit done before I work on anything else in the group except perhaps Parseltongue, to which it has no direct relationship.

Conlang General Sketch: Draconic

Has there been a serious attempt at a dragon language before? Bits and pieces have floated around for decades, but mostly it's names and the occasional phrase or noun. There have been several times that I'm aware of wherein a coherent (even if partial) language to be spoken by an intelligent dragon would have added depth and richness to a setting or story. Yet the only instances of such a thing I can recall are humans (or similar) saying that thus or such comes from some ancient language of dragons. I think the trouble with making one that has real meat to it has been a problem of not really thinking about what it is or comes from, or how one wants to use it. Or it could be that no one wanted to really bother.

That's where I come in.

As I mentioned before, my underlying concept for Draconic is that it begat a family of languages. It therefore is, appropriately for its speakers, an ancient and mysterious tongue, alien and difficult. Its nearest relative is Parseltongue (or Serpentine, if legal circumstances require). The plan is for it to be weird, majestic and dangerous sounding, instead of slithery, edgy and dangerous like the Parseltongue. (Parseltongue shouldn’t necessarily sound evil, but should hopefully play on humans’ natural distrust of snakes.) It should have a large and solid feel to it, as though of casual power. By the time I begin building this in earnest, I should be able to convey all this.

The grammar will also have a similar construction to Parseltongue. Dragons are wily, intelligent, and witty creatures, and the flexibility of their conversation should match the flexibility - and cunning - of their minds.

Because they have prehensile forepaws, it's a distinct possibility that I'll be able to make a writing system for Draconic. Should it be based on scratches, leading to straight lines predominating? Or should I go with a brush-based system, leading to complex and beautiful calligraphy? It's not too far out of line to suggest that they have both, or that the former could lead to the latter, and yet be kept around for casual or hasty use.

It probably seems odd that while Draconic leads to at least 3 other languages in my list, it's not the first even of its family in my plans for creation. Yes, bits and pieces of it will be done in a structural sort of way as I progress, but the truth of it is that it's less useful than the others and can, with that initial planning, be reverse-engineered. It may even end up better that way.

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.

Conlang General Sketch: Dwarven

There are three main problems with using languages in role-playing games:

1. While a different writing system can convert the player's language into something obscure enough for written items, you simply can't do the same for spoken words, which are by far the most common part of such games.
2. There's not remotely enough available to use for anything beyond a phrase or two outside of Tolkien's various Elven languages, and even then the corpus is pretty small without doing some serious research and extrapolation.
3. Learning a different language even to a basic conversational level is not exactly reasonable for the usual gamer.

Designed for gamers to actually use, my Dwarven language is based only in part on the sounds of Tolkien’s Dwarven, as a tribute to the linguist who inspired so much. But contrary to Tolkien’s proverbial “hard language” of Middle Earth, this is merely foreign. To make it easy for English-speakers to learn and use, it’s supposedly an ancestor or contributor to Common Tongue (which English stands in for, in my games, naturally). This means that some similarities in sound or structure can be justified. The sounds are in fact mostly the same as in English, with some German to augment them. The writing system is also set up in a very logical and regular manner, the better to remember what sound goes with what letter. Speaking of which, the orthography of Dwarven is emphatically not like those found in most natural languages: it is simple, predictable, and consistent.

The grammar uses a simplified ergative case system, pretty unusual in the real world (Basque is an example), but very easy to learn in the form I have. This makes it foreign without being difficult. The noun phrases are constructed like those in German or Italian, which is much like English but with the noun first instead of last. Obviously there's more to it than that, but that's it in essence.

There is a Berlitz-style phrasebook I've already written, and once I have some recording equipment purchased I'll be readying it for publication. A grammar will follow, and something along the lines of Pimsleur's courses might happen as well. We'll see. This is probably the conlang I'll write the most about.

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.