Month: March 2012

World Building Series: Language Construction—Part 1

Joshua A. Mercier
***Originally posted on The Bearded Scribe on March 30, 2012; post has been edited and updated.

World Building Series: Language Construction—Part 1

HELLO, Beardies!

I decided to do yet another post within my World Building Series, this time focusing on language construction. Being a lover of language, especially in Fantasy, I believe this is one of the many elements that sets the genre apart from the rest.

I mean… How exciting is it to open up a new book and find a glossary?!? I love the challenge and the ‘secret’ invitation to get inside the head of the author. How the author forms the language, how it is used by the characters, and how the author incorporates it into the book are all things that make for a stimulating read. At least for me.

I spent years trying to perfect my first language. At first I got in my own way. I was just creating words—with truly no fluidity or method of organization. I even complicated things by trying to incorporate too much complexity into the language. I was my own worse enemy.

I finally had a breakthrough when I realized I needed to simplify. A lot. It was overhaul time, but where to begin? Sure, the words I created were wicked neat (as we say in New England) and evocative of their true meanings, but there was no cohesiveness to their styles or potential etymology. I almost scrapped it completely, but I ran across something that changed my outlook on Tolkien’s genius and fantasy languages altogether.

One chilly winter’s afternoon, I took a sojourn to Lansing, Michigan and my path led me to a newly-finished, outdoor mall. I can’t recall if I went there specifically or happened to stumble upon it, but at any rate, they had one of the largest bookstores I had ever seen (I’ve seen much larger ones since, but this was a great find for us at the time). While browsing the shelves, my eyes were drawn to the bright red binding and the title of the book pictured below: The Languages of Tolkien’s Middle-earth by Ruth S. Noel.

THE image is perhaps too small to read the block of text under the title, so I will oblige all of you with a transcription: A complete guide to all fourteen of the languages Tolkien invented.

Yes. You read it correctly. Fourteen! I figured if it gives me even the slightest inclination as to how he did it with fourteen, then surely I should be able to create at least one!

I read that thing from cover to cover. Twice.

And then I re-read it with a journal and pen to take notes on all the helpful information it contained. It is in no way a reference guide to how Tolkien did it, but it contained enough clues for me to discern a pattern and methodology. And with my journal now full of notes, hints, and questions for me to ask myself about my own language, I decided to jump in head first.

I also discovered something important. Tolkien didn’t create his languages from scratch, he had a little help. I am not saying that Tolkien wasn’t a genius because he didn’t create his language from scratch—because he absolutely was one; I am saying that perhaps the fact that he decided to use an existing language for guidance proved his very genius. Why not borrow parts of a language that already has all of the ‘kinks’ worked out? It made perfect sense to me, so that’s what I decided to do.

As Tolkien based his language upon Finnish (whether it was just one—or perhaps all fourteen—I am not certain), I, too, decided to structure [at least parts of] my language on an existing one…. well, many, actually. Parts of my language are derived from Gaelic, parts from French, parts from Latin, parts from Finnish, parts from Hebrew (the list actually goes on, but I will spare you from its entirety).

Also, like Tolkien, I decided to use combination forms of words so that I could create better-formed proper nouns—names of characters and places and important things.

This post is getting rather long, so I will end it and continue where I left off in a future post. Keep your eye out for it! 🙂

Since this post was first published in 2012, I've actually dissected my languages and have decided to simplify even more, so I removed the section of this post that contained the older language references.

Stay tuned for the next post in this series,

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Joshua A. Mercier

MEET JOSHUA
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World Building Questions: The Rules of Majick

Joshua A. Mercier
***Originally posted on The Bearded Scribe on March 24, 2012.

World Building Questions: The Rules of Majick

WORLD BUILDING QUESTIONS:

  • Where does majick come from: divine source, a tangible energy or resource, the personal will-power of the caster, et cetera?
  • Is the source exhaustible?
  • How does a caster tap into majickal energy?
  • Does it require some rite of passage (investing one’s own energy or lifeforce into an object; divine selection or selection of some other kind; specific knowledge/education; creating, being given, or inheriting a permanent connection to the source/energy; successfully summoning a demon/angel/spirit/divine being/et cetera)? —OR— Does it just happen naturally because of study or as a part of growing up?
  • What things can majick do? What can it not do? (i.e., what, if any, are the limitations?)
  • How much is known about the laws of majick? How much of what is “known” is wrong?
  • What does one need to do to cast a spell (an elaborate ritual, recite spell/poetry, combining the correct ingredients)?
  • Are there objects like a staff, a wand, a familiar, or a crystal ball that are necessary or useful to have before casting spells?
  • If so, where and how does obtain these objects?
  • Can any wand be used by any wizard or are they wizard-specific?
  • How long does it take to cast a spell? Can the spells be stored for later, instant use? Do spells take lots of long ritual, or is majick a “point and shoot” kind of thing?
  • Can two or more wizards combine their power to cast a stronger spell, or is majick done only by individuals? What makes one wizard more powerful than another—knowledge of more spells, ability to handle greater quantities of energy, having a more powerful divine being as a patron, etc.?
  • Does practicing majick have any detrimental effects on the wizard (such as being addictive, crippling/injuring, slowly driving the wizard insane, or shortening the wizard’s life-span)?
  • If so, is there any way to prevent these effects? Are the effects inevitable in all wizards, or do they affect only those with some sort of predisposition? Do the effects progress at the same rate in everyone?
  • What general varieties of majick are practiced (e.g., herbal potions, ritual majick, alchemical majick, demonology, necromancy, etc.)? Do any work better than others, or does only one variety actually work?
  • Are certain kinds of majick practiced solely or chiefly by one sex or another? By one race or culture or another?
  • Does a wizard’s majickal ability or power change over time—e.g., growing stronger or weaker during puberty, or with increasing age? Can a wizard deplete all of his/her majick, thus ceasing to be a wizard?
  • Can the ability to do majick be lost? If so, how—overdoing it, majickal attack, depletion, et cetera?
  • Can the ability to do majick be forcibly taken away? If so, how and by whom?
  • What is the price wizards pay in order to be wizards—years of study, permanent celibacy, using up bits of their life or memory with each spell, a personal sacrifice (killing a family member—perhaps to absorb their majickal energy), a required daily or periodic sacrifice (say, to a demon), sacrifice/loss/depletion of beauty/looks, et cetera?

Good Luck in this and all of your quests,

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Joshua A. Mercier

MEET JOSHUA
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World Building Series: The Rules of Majick

Joshua A. Mercier
***Originally posted on The Bearded Scribe on March 24, 2012.

World Building Series: The Rules of Majick

HELLO Again Everyone,

Welcome to the third installment of my World Building Series of posts—The Rules of Majick. There have been many fantasy books out there that include their own majickal system—rules, principles, limitations, et cetera—that govern the usage of majick and its consequences… and each with unique answers to specific questions their authors were forced to ask in order to set the basic building blocks for the systems.

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SOME books that come to mind, just to name a few, are J.K. Rowling‘s Harry Potter series (of course), Larry Niven‘s Warlock series, and Ursula K. Le Guin‘s Earthsea series. In the first and third series, the majick is driven by language: Harry Potter by a Latinesque (if only that were a real word) language–specific words spoken to evoke specific purpose (Rowling also requires the use of a wand or staff in order to produce the spells); and in Earthsea, Le Guin uses the concept of an original, primordial language by which the creators of the world originally named things. People who learn these names are able to control the things named, an ability shared by both the wizards who study the language, and the dragons whose native tongue it is. And in the second series mentioned above, the majick is derived from mana–an exhaustible resource in the environment surrounding the caster which can be depleted.

In creating the majickal system for my first series, The Chronicles of Aesiranyn, I asked myself question after question in order to narrow down how my characters would use and manipulate majick and also what the results and consequences of that usage would be. Like Rowling and Le Guin, I decided to use language (perhaps for the mere fact that I am a self-confessed linguaphile). I also, like Rowling, decided to require a wand or staff in order to produce a spell (more on that later), and like in Earthsea, the spells are derived from an Ancient (even protected) language that must be learned in order to produce the proper spells. There are limitations (as there should be), though if the character is a member of the Imperial family, then their limitations are less–and even more so if they are the ruler because their majick is derived from the throne upon which they [figuratively] sit.

My majick system is simple, yet it is complex in all of its different parts. It is elemental majick, of sorts, and it is also broken down into general color categories and then more specific types within the category. As I mentioned before, the majick in Aesiranyn requires a wand or staff, which is crafted by a wandmaker. The intended recipient of the wand/staff must make a blood sacrifice, and then the majick within his/her blood chooses elements, which also hold their own majickal properties. Aside from wands being required, there are other specific spells as well that require other majickal artifacts in order for them to work. I’ve probably given away too much… but hopefully it was a teaser for the future readers of the books!

ABOVE is a link to the list of questions I asked myself (a page that will remain a permanent resource on this blog), which I am offering to all of you in your own quests for the ever-illusive realm of majick. The greatest advantage a writer can have is to know their own world inside and out (without overbuilding, of course), and in order to do that, they must constantly ask questions before beginning to write their stories–and just as importantly, while they are writing it!

Good Luck in this and all of your questions,

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Joshua A. Mercier

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World Building Series: Overbuilding

Joshua A. Mercier
***Originally posted on The Bearded Scribe on March 20, 2012.

World Building Series: Overbuilding

WELCOME BACK, Beardies!

Here is the second installment of my World Building Series of blog posts, as promised, which has to do with the dreaded dilemma of OVERBUILDING.

Overbuilding can cause serious procrastination for a writer, and I can attest that I am perhaps the worst culprit of this—or at least I used to be. Attempting to perfect my languages was the biggest distraction for me, and in doing so, I never actually got much writing done.

I had created three separate languages for my first series (a separate languages for two of my races, and an Ancient dialect used for majick), and I was never completely happy with the first two of them. I kept going back to ‘tweak’ the languages, at first trying to make what I already had work, and then trying to reconstruct them altogether. But it was when I finally decided to simplify that I chose to scrap the weaker parts of both, combining the stronger parts of each and forming a universal language for the world instead of separate ones for the two races. Honestly, a lot of this was decided when I realized that I needed more than two races in my series, which meant possibly creating a separate language for each; and just like that I realized how daunting the task at hand would be and opted to create a unifying language for all the races. It seems like an easy way out–but I had to ask myself the important question: how much of each language would honestly go into the various books in the series? Which meant also asking: shouldn’t I be spending more time on the actual plot?

I can tell you from experience: just as there are flaws in the world we live in, the world you create for your story will never be perfect or to your liking until you actually write the plot. Writing the plot irons out the flaws and answers the questions that are left unanswered while you are in the initial building stages.

Or maybe there are not flaws, per se, but minor issues that arise while writing. For instance: whereas I was happy with my Ancient dialect used for the majickal system in the series, I realized while writing one of the chapters (where the majick system is the most prevalent), that I actually need to ‘tweak’ and define the language a little further to fit the rules and limitations of the majick. This type of building where you build it once it’s needed—as opposed to overbuilding and never using some of the material in the actual writing—is highly encouraged. I feel the choice made my majick system more believable and understandable (not only to my readers, but to me as well).

Stay tuned for the next post in this series,

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Joshua A. Mercier

MEET JOSHUA
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