Tag: conlang

Easy way to draw conscripts in Adobe Illustrator

Conscript = writing system for a conlang

This is written for someone with a basic knowledge of Illustrator. You should also be able to adapt it for other software. This post won’t tell you how to design a script (basically, doodle a bunch of things until you get stuff you like. Make sure parts of the glyphs line up consistently). I’m using letter and glyph interchangeably here.

You have my permission to save, archive, alter, and remix this post, so long as you include credit (Silvercat) and the original URL.

To start with, create a new document in Illustrator with a nice large canvas. Turn on the grid. It doesn’t particularly matter what size the grid is, but 8 subdivisions work well for lining things up. I have the grid at 72px, which means each letter will be an inch tall if printed.

Draw your glyphs as lines, keeping a consistent grid system, glyph widths, ascender and descender height, etc. Your grid can be very complex! Multiple ascender and descender heights, sub-grids, etc are not unusual for a writing system. Just make sure you’ve got a system. Use guides and refer to your other letters often.

A wider stroke will make it look more like type – I was using 7 point. You’ll probably have to make adjustments later in any case, so don’t worry overly much about getting it perfect.

Re-use parts of letters where you can, like dots, curves, and angles. It doesn’t matter how many pieces a letter is made up of. I like drawing circles and cutting them to pieces as appropriate to get a good curve, but that probably won’t work for all conscripts.

That last letter probably needs some adjustment.

See how the curve of the first one and the last one line up? And the midline of the two middle ones? It’s the same dot in the first two. The three narrow letters are five boxes wide, while the larger one is eight. Depending on your glyphs that could vary a lot or not at all. Latin letters vary widely, from ‘i’ to ‘m’.

At this point, you could stop – it’ll be an acceptable set of characters, but letter nerds will notice some issues. You can fudge some of these with a round cap on the stroke.

The problem is that the strokes end in whatever direction they’re facing. Whether done as calligraphy or as a font, letters end in a deliberate way. Compare the leg on the first glyph and the curve on the second with similar Latin letters, like below. In both cases, they end horizontally. You’re not limited to horizontal or vertical, but make a decision about it.

How do you fix it? Easy.

Outline the stroke (Object > Path > Outline stroke) then cut away the offending bits with a rectangle and Minus Front in the Pathfinder palette. If you want to be super-accurate (and you should), turn on ‘snap to grid’ (Shift+CTRL+” or View>Snap to Grid) and reposition your shapes to perfectly align to the grid. You’ll likely have to use a combination of selecting shapes with the Selection tool and selecting segments with the Direct Selection Tool. A couple of bumps with the arrow keys and you’ll be spot on.

For angles, like the leg on the first letter, before you outline, you’ll want to reposition it so it stays in your grid (unless you deem that acceptable). And you’ll want to make sure there’s enough extra on any stroke that you can cut it cleanly. This can mean redoing your curves, so think ahead.

Two options for each

How about if you want something fancier? This is where it gets fun.

Go back to your letters that are made of just lines. Open a calligraphic brush library or make a new brush. For something similar to Latin letters, use the settings below.

Brush settings - 0 Angle, 25% roundness, 12 pt size

Apply that to your lines, with a 1pt stroke. You’ll get something like below, with thick verticals and thin horizontals. (You can decide whether you want to apply it to dots or not, or to use a narrower stroker) But now you have a lot of adjusting to do to get it gridded.

You could actually just fix it and then leave it like that. Mess around with different calligraphic brushes to see different effects. You could also do like above to get sans-serif glyphs with variable line weight.

Or you can make a fancy serif version. Note: this is the quick and easy way. You can get fancier with curved serifs. Take a look at different font faces for ideas.

We’re making a slab serif font here.

The first step is to make nice clean angles for the serifs to hang off from. Extend your lines so that the round ends will get cut off, outline the stroke, then go to town with Minus Front. Get everything arranged on the grid nicely. It can be easier to outline each line at a time so you can make adjustments to angles and lengths as the other lines get set into place.

The first glyph cleaned up
Nice and clean

Now make a little rectangle where you want a serif to be. The exact size is up to you. I did one square wide and half a square tall. You can use those just like that for serifs, but I want to get a little fancier. Select one corner and bump it up a point or two. Now copy, rotate, and reflect your way around the letter. (It’s easiest if you copy the serifs to a space below so you can just grab them without going back to a previous glyph).

For thinner strokes, you want thinner serifs – for the wide strokes I put the serif halfway into the stroke and for the thin, the back of the serif shape touches the opposite side of the stroke. It helps to turn on Smart Guides so you can get the exact middle on the exact line segment you want. You can use a serif font as a guide, but in the end where you put serifs and where you don’t is up to you.

The same glyph as above, but now with serifs
Fancy

Now do all the rest of your letters and try not to curse past-you for deciding the writing system should have so many glyphs. Could be worse – you could be carving the whole thing into stone.


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Finished a conlang

I’ve already said that I was creating Maanxmusht to borrow words into Nyjichun, but I was actually making two conlangs. The other is Tsako, which is vaguely Finnish inspired, at least for the phonology.

Tsako and Maanxmusht are what’s called “naming languages” – conlangs with just enough vocabulary and grammar to create names. Tsako has less than 250 words – some of those created just to show how to use the couple of derivational prefixes that I’ve invented.

Tsako has paucal and plural, phonotactics that strictly limit what can appear where while still being CVC, and vowel harmony. I really like how the plurals turn out.

You can see all of it on my Neocities site. Here are some words I especially like:

  • nimerøl – to bake, which forms ɯtinimerø, a baker
  • iirikogyl – to barter
  • mørmøkottɑæd – ceramic, βottɑæd – clay (β changes to k medially), ætekottɑæd – potter
  • ʦøpɣø – blanket, paucal – ʦøpɣɑt, plural – ʦøpɔkkɔ, which changes to tsepe in early Nyji
  • to give – ɑɑreel, charity – ɑɑree
  • salt – øʣ
  • to shine – peippel

I could pick a dozen more, but how about I stop there.


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Generating in Inspiration Pad Pro (Part 3 of 3)

As I said in the first part, Inspiration Pad Pro was designed for RPGs, so it’s very flexible, but limited to keyboard characters (it’s possible to use the HTML entity equivalents, and I did that in the final form of the generator1). I hadn’t made this generator, so this will be more step by step. It should be possible to create generators for parts of speech with different endings, and possibly to derive words from an output (I haven’t done either of those tho.)

  1. The IPA symbol HTML codes can be found here or by looking on each one’s wikipedia page which are linked from the IPA page.

Please note, I’m very much a beginner at this and there are likely to be better ways than I use. Our rules and phonotactics for Maanxmuʃt are:

Read more


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Generating in Gen (Part 2 of 3)

In the previous post, I talked about how easy Gen is. In this post, I’ll show what a generator in Gen looks like and what the limitations are. I’m working on a language called Maanxmuʃt, which I had decided I wanted to be Germanic-like so that there would be a bunch of sound changes when words where borrowed, since Nyji words are basically CVC. (I actually stole the phonology and phonotactics from some Germanic language, I don’t remember which) So I wrote up some guidelines for the phonotactics.

Read more


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Two Different Conlang Word Generators (Part 1 of 3)

Sometimes you just want a big list of words for your language. In my case, I’m creating a language (Maanxmuʃt) to be borrowed from for my main language (Nyji). There are two word generators I use:

Both are free, but they have different abilities and results. Before I compare, the obvious caveats:

Read more


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Conlang Stuff

I’ve uploaded the newest version of the Nyjichun wikis! There is now one for the grammar and one for the lexicon (aka, all the words). They are SO a work in progress and are full of notes to myself and half-finished stuff.

In addition to that, I recently made a twine game for a jam on itch.io. I redid my conlang Tynthna. It now has actual IPA sounds and a few more words than it did before. And lots of sound recordings! Which may or may not be accurately said! (when in doubt, the orthography is canon). You can play it in your browser on itch.io.

That makes three conlangs that I’m sort of currently working on: Nyjichun, Tynthna, and Ie. I’ve also done a tiny bit in Ylis (the language of the Thunderian capital) lately, because I needed to be able to say Thunderian for on A Heroic Moment without actually referencing Thundercats. (It’s Lunderka for singular and Lunderkusa for plural – and that’s literally the only words I have for it right now, because the old version was from before I knew what IPA was).


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Lexember 2017 – Nyjichxn #6

I don’t get to garden today. The Santa Ana winds damaged the fence so one of my roommates and the neighbor are fixing it. So instead, ya’ll get updates! Yay!

One of the fun but sometimes frustrating things about translating is that you keep finding situations where what you did before doesn’t work. This is one of them. In previous sentences got the accusative case marker, but it could be replaced by the answer. So, new rule was noted: if can’t be replaced by an object answering the question, it’s unmarked.

Lexeme: sɯa
Gloss: world, planet
Combination Form:
Stress: IPA: Ŋyjichɯn phonetic:
Singular: sɯa sɯa sɯa
Paucal: soosɯ soo ˈsɜːʔ.zɯ soo’zɯ
Plural: sɯasɯ sɯa sɯɜ.ˈzɯ sɯozɯ

Example Usage:

suizɯasɯn sychiyvmowza zɯ
sɯa<uiz>ɯa-sɯn sy<chi-yv>mow-za (stem: syza)
planet<PEJ>planet-ACC origin<1s.SBJ-3s.POBJ>you-origin what
What damn planet are you from?
Phonetic: suisɯazɯŋ sijiyvmoza
IPA: sʊy.ˈsɯa.zɯŋ sy.ˈdʒɪiv.ɱɜ.ˌza

PEJ = pejorative

Singular, Paucal, and Plural


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Lexember check-in

I’ve come up with a bunch of words for Nyjichxn because I was on a roll, but I have to do all the fiddly bits before they’re ready to share. It won’t be tomorrow, because I’m going to a thing. Probably won’t be Sunday because I’m going to prune the heck outta the tomatoes and do other gardening crap. But those eight words are coming soon.


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Lexember 2017 – Ie, Part 1

Ie was supposed to just be a naming language for use in my Shard-verse stories, but me being me, it’s grown a bit. I’m trying to restrain myself because I don’t need another big project AND I still can’t actually make names in it.

Since it’s a lot simpler than Ŋyjichɯn, being an isolating language, I’ll be doing a bunch at a time. I’ll give the IPA in parentheses.

  • 44b – ornament, decoration (zu˧.χəp˧)
  • 6zu1 – name, title, to call (tʃy˧˩˥.zʊ̜˥)
  • tyōu5 – flower, bloom (thjəʊ̜˧˥)
  • diu1 – keep, possess, hold (tiŭ˥)
  • diu1-wŭĭ7j – writing, to write (tiŭ˥.ɰuyj˩). From diu1 + ŭĭ7j (word)

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Lexember 2017 – Nyjichxn #2

Lexeme: nuɒβu
Gloss: wind, draft, breeze
Irregularity: Combo – Type 2 (formed from plural)
Combination Form: muβɯβ

Stress: IPA: Ŋyjichɯn phonetic:
Singular: nuɒβu nuɒβu ɱoɜ.ˈⱱɯ muoβɯ
Paucal: nuɒβɯɯβu nuɒβɯɯβu ɱoɜ.ˈⱱɯːʔ.ⱱʊ muoβɯɯβu
Plural: nuɒβuβu nuɒβuβu ɱoɜ.ˈⱱ.ⱱʊ muoβuβu

Listen:

And here’s how Ŋyjichɯn is said:

And the lexeme from yesterday:


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Lexember 2017 – Nyjichxn #1

Yup, doing Lexember again this year. Yup, I’m behind. The plan is actually to do it for the two languages I’m working on, Ŋyjichɯn and Ie. I’ll have to get caught up on Ie later, but it’s easier because it doesn’t have all the alternation and crap that Ŋyjichɯn does.

Anyway, here’s my first lexeme for the month:

Lexeme: chyjɒovi
Gloss: ice, slush, freeze
Irregularity: Noun – Type 1 (no plural or paucal)
Stress: chyjɒovi
Phonetic (IPA / Ŋyjichɯn transliteration): ˈtʃi.dʒɑɜ.ˌvʏ / chyjɒovi


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