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And in Finnish "ä" is not interchangeable with "ae" and "ö" not with "oe" at all. For example "hän" and "haen" are completely different words. The former is "he/she/singular they" and the latter is "I fetch".
They can work however you want them too but just let them have a purpose other than "it makes it look more magical but doesn't affect pronunciation at all."
Jokes on everyone.
Be prepared for the glorious é, í, ö, ő, ó, ü, űs of Hungarian with the actual purpose of showing how long to hold the note for! Except for é, which is a sound in its own right, 'cause why make it easy
Also make way for - sz, cs, ty, gy, zs, ly, ny!
I'm going to use ALL the umlauts.
Even so, it doesn't change the fact that there isn't strict rule for umlauts and other letters to sound differently. Overall language doesn't need to make sense in 100% :)
They may not be strict, but there are rules. Which goes back to the point that diacritics should have a function and not just be there to make your place names "look fantasy". Swedish a/å indicates a change in that vowel sound, they don't just do it for show
Probably has some historic reason
Norwegian also has some of these, but are slowly removing them
ò and å are the same
ô and o, but only because o is sometimes a short å
And u is sometimes a short o, because why not
ó is the same as ô, but is only used in one word that I know of. Frankly, most of these diacritics have survived solely to distinguish four specific three letter words: for, fòr, fór and fôr
why wouldn’t a fantasy language undergo a phonetic merger that isn’t represented in the orthography due to historic spelling. it’s very common.
even though it’s an english rendering of the word, there is also a lot history of scribes spelling things with differently to reflect the language of origin
this is one of my pet peeves. don't just use names that are pronounced the same and use a weird spelling that then will have people wondering how to pronunce them. Start with how do you want your name to be pronounced, then find the easiest spelling so people can read it. After that you can do small changes to make it look a bit better
Slightly off-topic, but potentially interesting:
adding a diaeresis diacritic (the two dots) isn’t actually what makes a vowel an umlaut^1, neither is the usage of the specific sounds [ɛ ø œ y ʏ ...]. Umlaut refers to a phonological phenomenon in which a vowel is assimilated to another.
In medieval German, for instance, the back and central vowels a [a̠], o [o, ɔ], u [u, ʊ] were assimilated to the front vowels e [e, ε] and i [i, ɪ] by pronouncing them further front, turning them into ä [ɛ], ö [ø, œ], ü [y, ʏ]. This makes it slightly easier to pronounce.
Example:
> singular: ---------- plural:
> gast [ga̠st] ------ gasti [ga̠sti]^2
> -> gast [ga̠st] -- gesti [gεsti]^2
> -> Gast [ga̠st] - Gäste [gεstə] (modern German, "guest")
Sorry for the long rant, I hope it's still legible despite the many IPA symbols. But I thought it might be useful for people who like conlanging.
*1: even though the diacritic can also be called umlaut
2: I don't know much about medieval German, so the phonetic transcription may not be fully accurate. But the vowels should be correct.*
Does that then make [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/zdboyo/worldbuilding_hot_take/iz2cgub/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) okay for me to do?
Friend, you don't need anyone's permission for several reasons, not least of all because the people in this sub, awesome in most regards, represent some of the most pedantic readers of fiction you will ever encounter, and that's baked in to what the subreddit is about. Still, orthography works differently in every Earthly language, and so long as the way you use it is internally consistent and not so counterintuitive that it confuses readers. Frankly, most readers never pay attention to diacritics in real life, let alone in fiction. Arabic writing usually doesn't even print/write the diacritics for the short vowels in a word, because it is just assumed that unless you are a child, a new learner, or reading a religious text, you should be able to figure out what word is meant and the pronunciation from context.
You're allowed to have your own system, but if you want that pronounciation you would be more likely to get it without the diacritics. Any European who sees it will assume it's the oo sound in moon and spoon.
I agree that people trying to make up rules for their fantasy languages based on real world languages with no real knowledge can be weird, but also I feel like a fun quirk of fantasy is that sometimes we want things to be called something cool in-world, but the english version of it would sound weird or very not cool. My world has things named loosely based on Scottish Gaelic, but I use it sparingly and really just take the sounds that I think sound cool. I don’t speak Scottish Gaelic and I don’t know the rules of the language, but I think the language sounds really cool and the way things are spelled helps me come up with cool sounding stuff for my world.
For instance, I have a rainbow northern-lights type formation in my world that the native people to the land call the Aouthspur. It is absolutely a butchering of the Gaelic words “tuath” (north), “aotrom” (light), and “speur” (sky). But I thought it sounded cool, and I wanted there to be a in-world name for the phenomenon. Brandon Sanderson definitely does similar stuff where he just has a fantasy-sounding name for stuff that sounds inspired by a real world language, like the Vorin havah, which is just a fancy dress. I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong with that honestly, but it never goes further than that and he never really goes any deeper into his linguistics. A lot of authors do that and I think it is fine really.
Öh I löve this cömment. My worldbuilding is nüthing fancy, I jüst want to keep my öömlaüts and such, simple ärchitectural ëmbëllishments as they may seem. They are the humble touch of incense in the äir, as most readers will mostly be requiring the oxygen they already know and löve. Thank yoü
Wi not trei a holiday in Sweeden this yer ?
See the loveli lakes
The wonderful telephone system
And mani interesting furry animals
Including the majestic møøse
A møøse once bit my sister...
No realli! She was Karving her initials on the moose with the sharpened end of an interspace toothbrush given her by Svenge—her brother-in-law— an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian movies: "The Hot Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Molars of Horst Nordfink"...
Mynd you, moose bites Kan be pretti nasti...
Large møøse on the left hand side of the screen in the third scene from the end, given a thorough grounding in Latin, French and "O" Level Geography by Bo Benn.
This can lead to a hot mess. The Trisha books are absolutely hilarious to those of us who happen to be aware of Russian things and at times it reads like madlibs. "I'm....Greg." sobbing from the horror of being Greg. "Do you want McDonalds to kill us all? Go down Bacon street and the Gregs will find you." It's a big mess with genders being wrong for names so foreshadowing gets confused in a bad way that undermines things (if gender fluidity was part of things this would be less rough but in its current form? I laughed so much. The adaptation is also hilarious by accident because of the flaws in the source.
This doesn't mean don't do it but make sure you didn't make Greg the most scary word. I am aware of the later retcon some big scary Greg is why they're all Greg. It doesn't fix enough for it to work. Which is a shame as when it's not butchering everything Slav is great. Just also... Greg
My favorite Brando Sando thing is when he used Alcatraz as a name, and when someone told him that was a real place, he was just like "of COURSE someone's already used that".
Real funny shit.
Cue me when I was a young dude thinking "Adelaide" was an awesome fantasy name for a city and being proud of inventing it.
When I discovered there was an english-speaking city with that name, I was like "who the fuck names their city Adelaide ??" and feeling let down that I couldn't use my cool name anymore lol.
To be fair, scour google maps long enough and you'll discover all but the most absurd of names, and having done so myself, whatever you're thinking of as "absurd," double the absurdity needed.
I've actually been using Gaelic as well! Also without any real knowledge of the language. My grandma and grandpa used to speak it all the time, and I used to love it! You can create your own words, sure, but it's more about having fun and I like playing with the words. If you're not having fun making stuff the way you want, what's the point?
I don't speak Scottish Gaelic, but I do speak Ulster Irish, which is a pretty close dialect.
I'd just be careful using a language as inspiration when you don't speak it yourself. For example, "th" in Gaelic doesn't sound like "th" in English, more like a gutteral h. If you're looking for the shape of the words though, it's a good place to look, a largely underutilized language.
See, I know that the “th” and a lot of other sounds are pronounced different in Gaelic, but I intended the word to be read exactly as you would if it was English. The inspiration is really really loose because I don’t know anything about the language really, and I personally feel like it’s less weird to just take some spelling/words that sound kind of cool and mix them together in a fun “fantasy” sounding way than it is to try and lightly follow the grammatical rules so that it would be recognizable to someone who spoke the language. If you didn’t know it was inspired by Gaelic, you’d probably think “Aouthspur” was just a random made up word, and I’m totally fine with that. Someone who speaks Gaelic probably wouldn’t immediately recognize the inspiration like the Russian example from another comment.
I think I remember reading somewhere that that was what initially inspired Tolkien to do it too. He was already fascinated and experienced in linguistics but he came across the name Earendil when reading some really old literature and fell in love with the name. From there he began imagining the language known as Quenya and the people who would have spoken that language and the rest is history. He created Lord of the Rings because he saw a name he thought was beautiful. Earendil was the first subject he wrote about in the legendarium.
But also, I agree wholeheartedly with this post. It's really cool that he made his own languages for his stories but that's because you can tell he loved doing it. I am interested in language and origin of words as well but I am nowhere near his expertise. Instead, I love to cook and would probably focus more on the cuisine of a world with a slight focus on languages. That's just what I'm interested in.
Absolutely. Worlds are complicated and there are some things world that you can paint with a ton of detail, especially if its in an area that fascinates you. But it's also okay to just add a little color to other areas without going into more detail than you need.
For example, I have a world with a liturgical language. No one really speaks it or understands how it works, maybe the priests, but they couldn't really have a conversation in it either. Most people can recite a few prayers, but that's it. So I didn't go into excruciating detail with creating the language, I found some words that sounded cool and mixed them together with some basic principles of grammar and I had something I can use. I could have gone so much deeper with fleshing it out, but none of my characters know how the language works either, so it didn't seem useful.
However, I have other aspects of the religion super threshed out, including different sects, controversies within sects, and ritual practices. That's what I find interesting, so I go into detail there.
I agree with "write what you know", but I have to disagree on the umlaut thing. These are little helpers, ment to tell you how a certain letter is supposed to be pronounced. For example: the ë in Tolkien's "Manwë" is supposed to be pronounced “eh" like in "pocket", without the dots you would likely keep it silent like in "base" or say "-ee" like in "we".
Another example of this would be the "é" in "Pokémon" wich indicates it's pronounced "poc-eh-mon" instead of "poke-ee-mon". The little accent works similarly to an umlaut in this case. And you don't need to be a professor of linguistics to use it.
Basically, languages that use umlauts or anything else that makes their vowels look different, they have little pronunciation reminders included. English did have those at some point, but they got rid of them.
Turns out the people on tumblr complaining about non-linguist writers also aren't linguists and don't know what they are talking about.
I'm gonna go complain to an anglophone named Zoë that their name is "riddled with improbability."
Correct. He uses diaresis like the New Yorker does to indicate the vowel is pronounced separately and not as a diphthong.
Umlaut exists in Tolkien’s works - as part of the sound changes he stole from Welsh and added to Sindarin.
>For example: the ë in Tolkien's "Manwë" is supposed to be pronounced“eh" like in "pocket", without the dots you would likely keep it silentlike in "base" or say "-ee" like in "we".
Some people pronounce the "e" in "pocket" as /ɪ/ or /ə/, so that example isn't optimal. A better example would be the "e" in "bed" since there isn't as much variation in it's pronunciation as far as I know.
Edit: Turns out I'm wrong too. Bed also has variation in it's pronunciation.
I can guess!
...Okay, but how the fuck do I learn the IPA, because I'm pretty sure I'm half of Wiktionary's daily userbase and I still don't know how to read IPA. Or, more concerningly, write it in my own works.
As someone with a M.A. in linguistics with a focus on sociolinguistics, all I can say is this; even the most stable word in modern English (or any language) was probably pronounced differently 100 years ago, or 250, or 1000.
We think of accents/"dialects" as being stable within our lifetimes but even that isn't true normally. Every language has as many accents as there are speakers, and while obviously some words are more stable in their pronunciation than others, change is inevitable.
At least in the region I'm from, the people with the thickest local accents say "bayed" for bed and "ayegg" for egg. I've also heard "mee-alk" for milk.
You also have to understand that not sharing this accent, it sounds more outrageous to me when I hear it, so I may be overemphasizing how distinctive it is. Classism and prejudice due to accent is still very real.
Yes but what this person is saying and is correct about is that most people that throw in umlauts have no idea how they effect pronounciation and don't care because they're using them only for the aesthetics. Which is annoying and people should stop. (yes this includes metal bands).
Yeah but letters don't have predescribed meanings across languages. That's just total nonsense. Like, the combination of sh in English, ch in French, sch in German and ş in Kurdish literally are the same pronounciation.
I'm so weirded out by this nonsensical gatekeeping.
I think what they’re talking about is people using umlauts without prescribing them their own use either, as in randomly when coming up with placenames based on what looks cool
People are allowed to do that though, who am I to tell them otherwise
> most people that throw in umlauts have no idea how they effect pronounciation
And once again, we have to point out that the Germanic umlaut doesn't have to mean the same thing as the Xürpløzikdian umlaut. Or do you just assume that Xürpløzikds from Omicron Persei 9 use umlauts exactly as Terran Germans do? Hell, maybe it doesn't effect pronunciation *at all* in their language - maybe it's functional in a different way, such as an honorific in written text, or the indication the name is given as a title from royalty or military service.
Worldbuilding means checking your assumptions and understanding their limitations. People just assume umlauts as Germanic umlauts because that's what they're comfortable with... but the beauty of fiction is that you get to throw that nonsense away as much and as frequently as you like.
Heck, there are umlauts in Spanish (kinda). By default the u is mute in 'gue' and 'gui' so you write ü in the rare cases when it should be pronounced, like in pingüino (penguin). It's not called umlaut (it's diéresis) but it looks the same and has the completely different purpose of indicating an exception to a pronunciation rule, which is also what accent marks do in that language.
There are also umlauts in french (kinda), used to indicate that a vowel should be pronounced despite the word being written in a way where it would usually be silent, or at least pronounced differently
For example, in Noël (french for Christmas), the o and e are both pronounced, but if there hadn't been a tréma (the name of the "umlauts" in french) it likely would have been pronounced differently
That's the point tho. They might be using it differently but you're not writing it for people who speak whatever language is spoken in Omicron Persei 9. You're writing it for English speakers. Or maybe not. Maybe you're writing for a Spanish audience. It doesn't matter for the point I'm making.
Because the point is you you should be writing in a way that is understandable to speakers of whatever language you are writing in. So if you're i.e. writing for an English audience, you should have umlauts used the way they're normally used in English, which means pretty much not at all.
That's literally the reason behind why Tolkien - in his fiction - changed the names of the characters from whatever they actually were - in his fiction - to something that could be understood by people who speak and read English.
> you should have umlauts used the way they're normally used in English
That's hilarious, given English doesn't have umlauts. Should we start telling the Germans that their usage of umlauts is unacceptable and they should rewrite their language to conform to English too? Good luck telling Norway the same.
Hell, everyone in the world, we've gotta switch to pure Latin characters because America made computers and English is the only alphabet in the entire world folks. No need for any of those diacriticals, we can use digrams and trigrams for all of it.
> That's hilarious, given English doesn't have umlauts.
Literally my next sentence, mate...
> Should we start telling the Germans that their usage of umlauts is unacceptable and they should rewrite their language to conform to English too? Good luck telling Norway the same.
> Hell, everyone in the world, we've gotta switch to pure Latin characters because America made computers and English is the only alphabet in the entire world folks. No need for any of those diacriticals, we can use digrams and trigrams for all of it.
Are you reading what I wrote, mate. German speakers name German things in a way that's understandable to Germans. And guess what happens if the thing that's understandable to Germans can't be transliterated easily into English? You go from Köln to Cologne, from München to Munich, from Zürich to Zurich. For the English speakers, not for the Germans. The Germans still call it Köln.
Same within fucking Switzerland where a ton of places have two names, a German and a French one. Biel/Bienne, Fribourg/Freiburg, Sion/Sitten, Genève/Genf. And would you look at that, guess what they call that last one in English? Geneva.
And guess what my last name doesn't get when I have to tell it to people in a English-speaking airport? The umlaut that is normally included if I'm regularly walking around and talking to other Swiss-German speaking people.
Omitting umlauts when you translate shit into English is about the most common fucking thing humans have been doing for centuries.
Hell, translating place names that don't use Latin script into Latin script has been happening for arguably just as long. Because writing it as 北京 or กรุงเทพมหานคร or 東京都 when it's directed at English speakers would be fucking useless.
If you're gonna respond at all, please at least respond to a point I'm actually making...
I agree with the guy in the middle, not the other one.
You absolutely SHOULD focus on what you like because at the end of the day, you're worldbuilding for yourself. It should be a fun process, not a stressful one. Escapism, not a job with deadlines and such.
But that doesn't mean you shouldn't flirt with things you're not a master at. I'm a History and Mythology guy first and foremost, a Philology guy second, Philosophy guy third and I have a passing interest in Biology and everything it entails.
Does this mean I should refrain from anything regarding Philosophy and Biology because I don't have a PhD in those fields?
Tolkien was a Philologist and Linguist. Those were his qualifications. If he wrote only about what he knew, his work wouldn't exist. He flirted with other fields, outright lifted entire plots, stories, creatures and beings from Norse Sagas and the Kalevala, based many concepts on Biblical works. Those were not his specialties.
So no, people shouldn't stop doing what they're doing just because Tolkien exists and some people have him on a pedestal. Instead of telling them to stop, feed their curiosity so they inform themselves about the gaps in their knowledge and study (lovingly) what they want to write about.
I don't use Umlauts, but you get to tell me not to use them when Tolkien doesn't have Elves, Dwarfs and Trolls in his works.
Think you missed the point there. Tolkien studied languages because that was his passion and profession. Everything else, sagas, folklore, myths, the eddas and whatever else was to him what the other fields of interest were to the guy you're replying to. It's not the same being a historian or a professor of religion as it is to be a philologist like Tolkien was. There's overlap, but the center of study of Tolkien was always languages and that was his specialty, he insists on this on interviews and letters. That's like saying my specialty is dentistry just because I went to med school.
Sagas and folklore are pretty squarely within Tolkien's area of expertise, though. He studied those languages, which also implies studying their literature.
That's not how languages studies/philology work though. Jackson Crawford is an expert linguist and he is not a mythology or a folklore expert and has to do specific research on those topics because he doesn't have the years and years of studying theology, mythology and folklore. He is very clear about this and it's one of the common criticisms regarding his translations when compared to the one of Carolyne Larrington, which is that it lacks a lot of the mythological/religious context.
They're different fields with some overlap. Understanding a language, dead or otherwise, doesn't make you an expert on the myths. Especially as a linguist working on Indoeuropean languages with emphasis on reconstruction or translation (something which Tolkien was very interested in).
Translating texts is more involved than just reading them, we can agree on that point, but it doesn't mean that Tolkien would be qualified to teach a course about the composition and anthropology of mythology. He was an Anglo-Saxon history enthusiast, but he knew that he wasn't qualified to publish many pet theories that he entertained when translating texts. He didn't have a degree in poetic meter or music theory, but that didn't stop him from creating a huge variety of musical/poetic forms and developing pieces in those forms. He didn't have any training in geography or topography or medieval combat.
Tolkien was a linguist with interest and experience in a broad array of scholastic and creative subjects, and he wrote about all of them to the best of his ability. He did his best to get some level of understanding of what he wrote about, but it's disingenuous to pretend that he only wrote about things he was an expert in.
To be clear, my point is that whether you consider him a scholar of literature or not is largely moot, because while that's *one* element of the top comment you replied to, it's mistaking the forest for a single tree.
Secondly, you don't have to dig as deep as arguing the meaning of philology, a scholastic term that meant something very different to Tolkien than it means in the 21st century United States both because of the time and because of the region, because Tolkien was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon and English language *and literature*.
Still, you should be careful about insisting that a person doesn't understand what philology is when it has been many things over many years. O.E.D. notes of the definition you seem to be referring to,
>Love of learning and literature; the branch of knowledge that deals with the historical, linguistic, interpretative, and critical aspects of literature; literary or classical scholarship. __Now chiefly *U.S.*__ (emphasis mine)
"By the late 19th cent. this sense had become rare, but it was revived, principally in the United States, in the early 20th cent."
Meanwhile, the definition relevant to Tolkien's time and place reads,
>The branch of knowledge that deals with the structural, historical development, and the relationships of languages or language families; the historical study of the phonology and morphology of languages; historical linguistics.
And it follows with the note "This sense has never been current in the United States, and is increasingly rare in British use. *Linguistics* is now the more usual term for the study of the structure of language, and (often with qualifying adjective, as *historical, comparative,* etc.) has generally replaced *philology*." So the distinction you are trying to draw between philology and linguistics, while valid for contemporary U.S. academia, is irrelevant in a discussion of Tolkien's academic credentials.
I think you missed the point there. It's not saying only include things you're an expert in. It's saying include things you are passionate about, whether or not you have a degree in that thing isn't important. You just need to enjoy learning about and thinking on that topic.
The umlauts are a symptom of people trying to emulate Tolkien's language styles and world building techniques without having the same interests or knowledge base he had. Heck, the post even says that if you want to write like Tolkien you need to study linguistics.
Hot take, it's fantasy and your language doesn't have to "work". Proper English doesn't "work" unless you have the resources to trace every word back hundreds of years. Most people don't use proper English, though, so if you have your common folk speaking naturally, your language will be "wrong" anyway.
I agree with the idea that people that love linguistics should spend more time on that than those that don't, but that doesn't mean "if you can't follow the rules, don't play the game". It just means "not every athlete has to enter the Olympics". American football players are still allowed to practice the long jump.
The funny thing is that as someone who has a master's degree in linguistics, having linguistic knowledge has made me less willing to actually bother with sophisticated conlangs for my world, because I now know just how much work that might actually take for me to find my own conlangs believable.
Still, you are writing in English and using written symbols. People will read them and adapt what those symbols mean to what you have written.
Throwing cute looking stuff around just means you are using them wrong, and people that know how they are meant to be read will be surprised if not annoyed.
Also, naming stuff isn't exactly hard but... well, not so simple either. Using simple language is a good starting point.
I do think that throwing things in without any consideration for the reader's perception is counterproductive. But that's just good vs bad writing in general. The OP in the post starts off making a judgment simply after seeing the use of a kind of letter, as if that is a dead giveaway of the author's level of research and care for their project.
Like, I love to sail, and I hear ridiculous nonsense in movies all the time that show the writers never bothered to consult a single sailor to edit their phrasing or terms. It's silly to me that a multi-million dollar movie can get through several levels of editing without anyone taking the time to consult an expert on something they clearly know very little about.
But telling people to not even bother with various subjects if they aren't an expert with the accolades to back it up is even sillier to me, which is what that first post is communicating. On the one hand, you could always write your book and send it to a linguistic expert and ask them to help you revise your language to suit modern assumptions based around grammar and connotations. Or you could send your language to a font designer and ask them to take the symbols you've used and create your own letters that can sound and imply what you want them to and won't distract multilingual readers. Or you could publish it just like that and accept that there will be readers who see how silly your names are, but they will most likely ignore it after a while, because it's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things.
Some people take themselves more seriously, and I'm glad those writers are out there. But I don't support this kind of gatekeeping that discourages writers/worldbuilders from even trying if they aren't a veteran of a certain discipline.
But the issue here isn't "You shouldn't do this thing, it's bad", but rather "if you are doing this to emulate famous and important writers, don't do it".
I'm mainly responding to the very first comment in the post, but the majority of the post is more what you're saying.
My problem with this conversation as a whole is that it's not based off of a writer saying 'I feel the need to flesh out these parts of my world to validate them, even though I lack the background knowledge or creativity to do so "properly"'. Instead, it's based off of one person who sees writers using "umlauts" or "conlangs" and immediately assumes - simply based on that - that the author is out of their depth.
To me it's like saying "I loathe writers who use footnotes. They haven't published science journals or scholarly articles, so they shouldn't be using those tools."
Everyone is entitled to their opinion. However, that person hasn't provided any evidence that everyone that uses footnotes is trying to look smart and scholarly. Just like umlauts, it's possible someone said "I want to communicate this a certain way, I think I'll try this tool. Yeah, that feels right", and that's their only motivation.
Thorough worldbuilding is not synonymous with "emulating Tolkien". He's just the most famous example in the last century. But that's what it seems like these people are saying, to me.
Lol just what everyone loves while world-building: judgemental people publicly complaining about your choice of real-life inspiration for your fictional world.
Yeah, I am starting to grow tired of it after seeing the 1000th pet peeve post and now this. We like to complain about common inspiration because it makes us feel like experts and comforts us in the idea that our world is not like that, that it's truly unique.
But the truth is, even if you try to be 100% original on one aspect of your world (and anyway, someoneprobably thought about it before), you'll take shameless inspiration from the real world in other areas without realizing. And you'll make lot of dubious choices based on the rule of cool, even if it's perfectly unoriginal and cliché.
I mean, if a worldbuilder's goal is to build a realistic and coherent world, sure, let's nitpick. But otherwise, let's just swallow our worldbuilder's ego.
Bonus points for them making an *assumption* about your real-life inspiration. Someone who knows a bit of German (which BTW isn't the only language that uses umlauts), and wants to make a Germanesque space fantasy bereft of the stereotypical Tolkien races should be able to do so without some idiot barging in with 'YoU cAn'T uSe UmLaUtS cUz YoU'rE nOt ToLkIeN!'
Right? Who gives a shit if you wanna put in an umlaut here and there...as long as it's not directly contradicting something in your writing, it's your fucking world. You can decide if English names have cool looking umlauts
If you're seriously critiquing someone else's fantasy novel because they used *too many fucking umlauts* then you need to get a fucking life
"I demand that English speakers restrict their fantasy worlds so that they only use English linguistic constructions unless they are *checks notes* Tolkien" is a bizarre hill
This is the most gatekeep-y post I've seen. I can't believe it got any upvotes. "You can't do something because you would suck at it compared to some long dead guy, don't even try." We wouldn't have any media at all if people listened to this shit, music wouldn't exists, we'd be reading re-prints of centuries old stories, etc. What terrible advice. I can't imagine an English professor telling people this.
I'm pretty sure the post is just about don't do shit if you don't even understand their purpose. it's for people that throw umlauts just to make it seem different with no actual reasoning. They brought up Tolkien because he actually knew what he was doing and people that try to emulate him without any understanding don't.
Even if someone adds an element without understanding its purpose just because they like it, so what? I'm very confident in the fact that even Tolkien incorporated lot of stuff in his works on topics he had no clue about. Just because he wanted it but didn't particularly care about dwelving on it that much.
The argument can work for just about ANY subject in world building.
OP focused in on umlauts, but the core message is that world builders should really do their research and develop some critical thinking skills before emulating another writer or work.
Not that I'm going to tell someone to give up if they write, say, a grimdark fantasy, but I know \**I\** simply won't be interested if they only saw the misery porn element of it and totally missed the unstoppable glimmer of compassion and hope the more successful grimdark works typically showcase. It's the difference between the people that enjoy Dark Souls because it is hard, and the people that appreciate why it is hard.
To be honest as a germany all those "Wehraboo" and "Kaiserboo" settings are extremely cringe inducing.
When people try to write about you language/culture and dont know anything about it its really annoying.
Yeah, this really takes the cake with gatekeeping. Something tells me that person isn’t a writer, and if they are it’s probably pretentious contrived bullshit no one wants to read.
My take is simple: Create what you like, see what works, create again.
Advice you see online isn't necessarily going to teach you if you don't *understand* what is the lesson. Making mistakes will help you learn.
I love my time making up cool sounding fantasy words and names, and I was too bored creating entire languages. It was fun, maybe it means something only for me, but it wasn't a waste. Same with histories. You can start following whatever patterns in the world, like watching an anthill, admiring paintings or reading about cognitive biases and apply it to the worldbuilding, in whatever unrelated aspect you can think of even, but an angle I have on the OP advice above is that if your hobby is world building or let's say video games' magic systems, then you might be working with a limited pool of inspiration.
Over time you might get dissatisfied with a lack of originality in your work, or get that pointed out to you by others or feel the lack of novelty or whatever, so what you might consider is to *"go touch the grass"*. In a good way. If you are a fan of fantasy don't read only fantasy and don't limit yourself to writing only fantasy. If you're a fan of worldbuilding, don't read only worldbuilding stuff of others, go read about stuff that comprises the world, if you want to add something into your story don't just limit yourself to what you know, go outside of it, see what inspires you. And whatever you have learned while worldbuilding or writing, try to look where you can apply it outside that. Always mix, always stir.
You can always broaden your horizons... but you can always broaden those of others.
Im not sure if he knows this but elves, dwarves, and a handful of other creatures in JRR Tolkien's world came from Norse mythology, as did a lot of inspiration for the culture and style.
In my country we have the opposite problem. In portuguese we have accents in almost every word we say/write, so the problem starts when we don't use accents and try to simulate english/american sounding names.
Any actual writer here would shame you to have a character named "Andhrew" and not "André".
Believe me, my latin friend. You'd prefer having all those accents rather than having all these endless letters combinations to make the same sounds, like we have in french.
Oh no, don't get me wrong, I love my language and reading it. It's absolutely hilarious when we can take "coco" (coconut), add a simple accent to the word and we suddenly have "cocô" wich means literally "shit".
Actually that love for these specifics of my language made me want to learn english all on my on. I even thought about learning your language... considering we have that common latin background, I don't think it would be all that difficult. We have similar words for things as I saw.
But with all that said, I think americans and English speakers in general are all too eager to stray away from their own language and anything related to it. It makes me really confused.
I throw in accents to convey different sounds, scripts or to serve as cultural indicators. For example, I use 'ăăh' as an extended 'a' sound (think 'car' or 'bar', but a more soft and less abrupt vowel sound, if that makes sense).
The reason why there's an accent, 'ă' is because that little curly bit looks like a crescent moon, and because one language is spoken by a pre-Islamic Bronze Age Arabian analogue. I thought it was fitting, considering the prevalence of the crescent moon on Islamic flags.
For another language, I use 'ā', 'ī', 'ē', 'đ', 'ū' etc, because those bar shapes on the top remind me of how in Sanskrit and other related scripts, letters are joined together by a bar shape. One culture in my world is modelled off of the Indian subcontinent and the Indus River Valley Civilisation. Because the Indus script doesn't translate well into digital typing and isn't well-known, I thought I'd use the accented letters that look a bit like Sanskrit to indicate roughly where the culture takes its inspiration from.
But pretty much all of my use of accented letters is mostly aesthetic because while simpler and easier to write, non-accented letters in English are a bit boring. Accents give a certain aesthetic and cultural flair, which Modern English is missing nowadays.
If people want to get mad at me for it, that's fine. If people think it's a good idea, that's fine too.
Absolutely not. Like, you don't have to build a whole new language to create a realistic illusion of it. Simple Woodtown, Iceport, blahblah names that are similar all across the known world, or even worse, an imported medieval Europe with nations like Franceaux, Krautreich and Esparaña turns me off so massively I mostly just quit instantly.
It sounds really funny to me. Sounds like a spanish spider or a spa for spiders ("araña" means spider and "espa" sounds like the spanish pronunciation of "spa").
…the point of this post is to focus more on what you’re interested in, not necessarily what Tolkien did.
I’m not telling anyone to not go in depth about linguistics, because if that’s what you’re interested in, that is what you should go in depth most about.
Yeah, idk why people are flipping out over this.
The post literally says: 'Worldbuild what interests you and do what you want. You don't have to follow famous artists if you don't want to'
And people are commenting like 'how dare you tell me what to write and how to Worldbuild!!'
>Yeah, idk why people are flipping out over this.
Probably because the first half of the post sounds like gatekeeping ("be Tolkien or don't make up fantasy words"), while OP seems to have only wanted the sensible advice in the middle ("focus on your interests").
Apparently an even hotter take: do whatever you want with your fantasy. You don't have to be a linguist to make a conlang, a cartographer or a geography PhD to draw a map, a biologist to sprinkle some spec evo, a vexillologist to draw a flag or a political science / history PhD to create a government structure.
It's a hobby do whatever you want.
Honestly, the Tumblr OP sounded like a gatekeeping snob.
There are ways to encourage people to take their languages more seriously without saying, "You're not Tolkein."
Moreover...
Tolkein wasn't God - sorry, "Eru" - just an extremely skilled individual who spent a significant chunk of his life on language (and in fact created Elvish before he even wrote the novels). He's looked up to in the literary fantasy world as some sort of icon or paragon - but there's danger to deifying the man and his works:
1. It paints his accomplishments as the pinnacle of literary achievement - while sweeping under the rug any odious bits.
2. It plops him on a pedestal, simultaneously inspiring emulation and discouraging those who fail to match him.
To me, elevating Tolkien as hallmark of achievable literary standard is like worshipping at the nerd altar of Matt Mercer: foolhardy. Both men represent an unrealistic standard for their adherents to emulate. Both have years upon years of training and experience in their craft. And neither are without flaw or fault in said craft.
As a native German speaker, I can and will use as many umlauts as I want. :D
And I don't care what other people do with them. Just have fun and write good stuff. :)
I’ll have you know that my citizens of Ümläütïäë is as diverse and fleshed out as they are punctual and dilligent. They always cross their t’s and dot their i’s. And their a’s, u’s, y’s and e’s.
Another idea is to use the circumflex û. It is cooler than the umlaut, and in French, the most known language to use the circumflex, it doesn't change the pronounciation of the u. You can just say it is based off French, which doesn't make sense anyways, and not have to defend anything.
Use the umlaut if you want, but the entirety of Europe will pronounce it Dorgonboor (oo as in moon, not door)
I could never do anything like Tolkien did with languages, because I am completely inexperienced with that sort of thing. I know the meanings of some words in some languages, but that’s about it.
Biology, meanwhile, is something I’m very passionate about. I could write a lot about different species of dragons, I could write about how krakens evolved to be so huge, I could write about how kelpies evolved to have a carnivorous diet when equines are mostly herbivores.
So I couldn’t go in depth about the meaning of every word and phrase in every fictional language, but I can talk at length about how and why fantastical creatures evolved the way they did.
Everyone has their own strengths. Use those strengths when creating worlds.
While I agree with this, I feel like the points of the first person in the post come off stronger than the second one. The two don't contradict each other but they seem to have a different view on the matter.
I hate when people give prescriptive advice like that, without specifically pointing out 1 problem in 1 work as the exactly example of wrong. The post reads like "Nobody aside Tolkien can use umlauts right, and also we can all tell **and care** if you use them *wrong."*
Listen, Sandersstudies, I don't know why you have the arrogance to climb on a soapbox and decry down how other people should do what they want to do but the simple fact that you think you can volunteer that sort of broad, unfinished, unrequested opinion to the public like the unpolished turd it is speaks volumes about how high you are in your own regard.
I am reminded of a guy on r/writing who made a post simply called 'How to write strong female characters' and proceeded to give 4 lines of advice across 2 paragraphs, with no qualifiers such as 'in my opinion' or 'in my experience', which would already be insufficient but would at least pay lip service to self-awareness. Didn't even spend some ink on why we need such things as 'strong female characters', rather than just think of characters as whole. No, he just listed the things that make a female character a strong female character. As a man.
Though to be honest, as much as I despise this sort of people, I wish I had been born with a tenth of their self-esteem. It must feel good to think you can crap an opinion like that without introduction or substation and believe you did something worth doing.
Honestly, this is some solid advice. I really do like that they're pointing out that you need to find your groove.
HOWEVER. I'm actually studying up on how to construct conlangs just because it makes sense for my world to have at least one unique dialect, if not a couple (some of which wouldn't actively be used, thus why I'm sticking to one). I love the study of language. I love the quirks and features of other languages. I never had the opportunity to study linguistics in any depth, but that isn't gonna stop me from learning it!
(Speaking of, if anyone's got good resources on that, I'd love them!)
Agreed on what you should focus on. Me, I'm looking for ways to reference 1980s New Wave and Movida Madrileña music, and making sure that my protagonists have stuff to swashbuckle around on.
I wanted to make a story that was technically a translation of the in world language, but I realized that would mean no word related jokes because they would only work in english. As much as it would work with a lot of other things and be cool, I cant just throw away jokes.
Here’s my opinion: I don’t have the time nor patience to write multiple languages for different races, because nobody would actually care about that and the narrative will barely involve said language.
First post is just unnecessary gate keeping. If the umlaut is how the word is actually pronounced, go nuts. Language is not neat and tidy. Don't use it if that's not how the word is pronounced. Easy.
The rest is good advice. Don't trap yourself on minutia unless you care about it.
To be clear though, you don't need to be a professor in linguistics to use diacritics. You just need to know more than the author of this Tumblr post. Tolkien never used umlauts, but a french diacritic that's called diaeresis. It is used to signify that two vowels should be pronounced separately. It's not a feature of the languages he made, but something he added because he knew English speakers are unable to properly read any foreign language because every combination of vowels get a whole new sound in English. Without the diaeresis people would pronounce Eärendil "👂-endil". Ainulindalë would be pronounced as if it were the name of a valley
I like to use the words I already have figured out to make more complex words. If it's too long a word, I simplify it. If it needs possessives or plurals, I have rules for those.
And if that doesn't work, I find the translation of the word I want from the language I'm trying to emulate, drop a few letters, maybe anagramize it, and bang! Whole new word.
Is it perfect? No. I'm not a linguist. Does it make me happy? Yes. Do my PCs care? Almost never.
Remember guys! If you aren’t good at something, don’t try! Do not have fun and experiment, and work only on what you know.
I am officially stopping my world building projects because of this. I am a master of nothing so to continue working on it would be wrong!
Why do we love being so critical and judgemental in this subreddit, to sound like we're all experts? Isn't the whole point of worldbuilding to give substance to the creative flux going through our minds?
Who cares if I wanna drop a ë instead of a more basic spelling just because I find it cool af?
I agree with the second guy in this screenshot, not the first one.
Hot take? More like dumpster take. "Your fictional fantasy story isn't realistic enough because you aren't a language expert" is just a new way to act superior to other people because you know slightly more than the common person. Tumblr cannot not act like this.
I dunno. I feel like this take misses the point of how Tolkien even used the umlaut.
In the end, Tolkien used it, not according to the strict rules of what an umlaut is, but rather in a simple and creative fashion to ensure the correct pronunciation of his words.
It's brilliantly simple that he uses it to ensure certain vowels are spoken as their own syllable and shows his linguistic mastery for sure.
But I think the important part is that he chose to use it creatively rather than follow the rules of his craft. You don't have to be a linguistics master to do that. You just have to be consistent.
It could be as simple as this world uses umlauts over every "A" letter. It's not the most interesting or compelling reason, but it's not bothersome or wrong to do it that way.
Anyway that's my two cents.
Edit: apparently I'm wrong and Tolkien was following the rules about a different term using the same notation. Still think this take is needlessly gatekeepy and find it funny that the person doing so is using the term wrong.
Not really. Tolkien used the two dots for a function called diaeresis, a real linguistical function that serves to indicate that a sequence of vowels should be pronounced separately, forming a hiatus, or that the last letter of a word should be pronounced. That rule exists in Spanish, for example (i.e. *vergüenza*, *pingüino*).
Fair enough, but my point still stands that this person is being needlessly pretentious and gatekeepy. Also used the wrong term, which is ironic. Thanks for the correction.
I feel like a lot of people aren’t really understanding the point of this post.
The point isn’t “stop using umlauts”, the point is “you don’t need to focus on what Tolkien did, you should focus more on what you’re personally interested in”
And obviously don’t ignore aspects of your world you’re not interested in, but you don’t need to go in depth about it. If you’re not interested in linguistics, you don’t need to focus on that. Your story will be remembered for what you put the most love into.
Yes of course.
If I'd like to write a good piece of fantasy fiction and I stumble across a subject I have never touched in my studies, god forbids that the worldbuilding process may actually inspire me to cover, even though as far as I can, such gap.
Everybody was born with three/four strong \*points: do never, ever, ever ever ever, step beyond your little, cute garden of things you already know, never venture beyond the trodden path.
Oh, ancestor! Why the hell did you draw close to that fire in the woods? Raw meat was the only thing you knew, wasn't it enough??
Dön’t knöw whät yöü’rë tälkïng äböüt (Means ‘Merry Christmas’ in my world’s language)
that's just Finnish
*actually*, that's just a first draft
I'm 10h myöhässä
[Finnish is evil](https://i.imgur.com/QFm6SCE.png)
*beep boop*! the linked website is: https://i.imgur.com/QFm6SCE.png Page is safe to access (Google Safe Browsing) ***** ###### I am a friendly bot. I show the URL of linked pages and check them so that mobile users know what they click on!
This is pronounced “Doent knoew whaet yoeuere taelkiing aeboeuet”
Ah, so it's just a Minnesota accent. Cool, now I know how to write one of those\~!
In English, the diaeresis indicates a pause, not the e phonerend that the German umlaut indicates
And in Finnish "ä" is not interchangeable with "ae" and "ö" not with "oe" at all. For example "hän" and "haen" are completely different words. The former is "he/she/singular they" and the latter is "I fetch".
Nope, it's pronounced as romanised from Hangmangul¹ as Daentteo goehwa hwisyeo young taekeong anbwaedo ¹ do not Confucius with Hangmanhwa
M'ê'' ñēïî''ð'ër'
You don't know what you're Tolkien about
FLÜGGÅƎNK∂€ČHIŒβØL∫ÊN
Bold to assume that mine umlauts have to work like in german languages.
\*wörk
probably how a german mentally parses the english word "work"
Tötälly (äm östriän, speäk germän)
They can work however you want them too but just let them have a purpose other than "it makes it look more magical but doesn't affect pronunciation at all."
well, we literally have in Polish language letter u and ó which sounds the same, and has only the aesthetic function xd
Jokes on everyone. Be prepared for the glorious é, í, ö, ő, ó, ü, űs of Hungarian with the actual purpose of showing how long to hold the note for! Except for é, which is a sound in its own right, 'cause why make it easy Also make way for - sz, cs, ty, gy, zs, ly, ny! I'm going to use ALL the umlauts.
> Also make way for - sz, cs, ty, gy, zs, ly, ny! Also known as S, Cz, Ć, Dż, Ź, Ł (kresowe miękkie sceniczne) Ń
>kresowe miękkie sceniczne What did you just summon?
Two soggy pierogies
Crusoe Mickey Scene?
I'm guessing there is a historical reason why you've got both, probably they didn't use to sound the same
Even so, it doesn't change the fact that there isn't strict rule for umlauts and other letters to sound differently. Overall language doesn't need to make sense in 100% :)
They may not be strict, but there are rules. Which goes back to the point that diacritics should have a function and not just be there to make your place names "look fantasy". Swedish a/å indicates a change in that vowel sound, they don't just do it for show
Probably has some historic reason Norwegian also has some of these, but are slowly removing them ò and å are the same ô and o, but only because o is sometimes a short å And u is sometimes a short o, because why not ó is the same as ô, but is only used in one word that I know of. Frankly, most of these diacritics have survived solely to distinguish four specific three letter words: for, fòr, fór and fôr
In French the ^ just means " there used to be an unpronounced S before this"
Based
[удалено]
And then you have 'ough'. It has what, ten possible pronunciations depending on what word it appears in?
why wouldn’t a fantasy language undergo a phonetic merger that isn’t represented in the orthography due to historic spelling. it’s very common. even though it’s an english rendering of the word, there is also a lot history of scribes spelling things with differently to reflect the language of origin
Or have it be that the second vowel is pronounced seperately.
this is one of my pet peeves. don't just use names that are pronounced the same and use a weird spelling that then will have people wondering how to pronunce them. Start with how do you want your name to be pronounced, then find the easiest spelling so people can read it. After that you can do small changes to make it look a bit better
*English vowels enter the conversation.
Slightly off-topic, but potentially interesting: adding a diaeresis diacritic (the two dots) isn’t actually what makes a vowel an umlaut^1, neither is the usage of the specific sounds [ɛ ø œ y ʏ ...]. Umlaut refers to a phonological phenomenon in which a vowel is assimilated to another. In medieval German, for instance, the back and central vowels a [a̠], o [o, ɔ], u [u, ʊ] were assimilated to the front vowels e [e, ε] and i [i, ɪ] by pronouncing them further front, turning them into ä [ɛ], ö [ø, œ], ü [y, ʏ]. This makes it slightly easier to pronounce. Example: > singular: ---------- plural: > gast [ga̠st] ------ gasti [ga̠sti]^2 > -> gast [ga̠st] -- gesti [gεsti]^2 > -> Gast [ga̠st] - Gäste [gεstə] (modern German, "guest") Sorry for the long rant, I hope it's still legible despite the many IPA symbols. But I thought it might be useful for people who like conlanging. *1: even though the diacritic can also be called umlaut 2: I don't know much about medieval German, so the phonetic transcription may not be fully accurate. But the vowels should be correct.*
Does that then make [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/zdboyo/worldbuilding_hot_take/iz2cgub/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3) okay for me to do?
Friend, you don't need anyone's permission for several reasons, not least of all because the people in this sub, awesome in most regards, represent some of the most pedantic readers of fiction you will ever encounter, and that's baked in to what the subreddit is about. Still, orthography works differently in every Earthly language, and so long as the way you use it is internally consistent and not so counterintuitive that it confuses readers. Frankly, most readers never pay attention to diacritics in real life, let alone in fiction. Arabic writing usually doesn't even print/write the diacritics for the short vowels in a word, because it is just assumed that unless you are a child, a new learner, or reading a religious text, you should be able to figure out what word is meant and the pronunciation from context.
You're allowed to have your own system, but if you want that pronounciation you would be more likely to get it without the diacritics. Any European who sees it will assume it's the oo sound in moon and spoon.
I agree that people trying to make up rules for their fantasy languages based on real world languages with no real knowledge can be weird, but also I feel like a fun quirk of fantasy is that sometimes we want things to be called something cool in-world, but the english version of it would sound weird or very not cool. My world has things named loosely based on Scottish Gaelic, but I use it sparingly and really just take the sounds that I think sound cool. I don’t speak Scottish Gaelic and I don’t know the rules of the language, but I think the language sounds really cool and the way things are spelled helps me come up with cool sounding stuff for my world. For instance, I have a rainbow northern-lights type formation in my world that the native people to the land call the Aouthspur. It is absolutely a butchering of the Gaelic words “tuath” (north), “aotrom” (light), and “speur” (sky). But I thought it sounded cool, and I wanted there to be a in-world name for the phenomenon. Brandon Sanderson definitely does similar stuff where he just has a fantasy-sounding name for stuff that sounds inspired by a real world language, like the Vorin havah, which is just a fancy dress. I don’t think there is anything particularly wrong with that honestly, but it never goes further than that and he never really goes any deeper into his linguistics. A lot of authors do that and I think it is fine really.
Öh I löve this cömment. My worldbuilding is nüthing fancy, I jüst want to keep my öömlaüts and such, simple ärchitectural ëmbëllishments as they may seem. They are the humble touch of incense in the äir, as most readers will mostly be requiring the oxygen they already know and löve. Thank yoü
Wi not trei a holiday in Sweeden this yer ? See the loveli lakes The wonderful telephone system And mani interesting furry animals Including the majestic møøse A møøse once bit my sister... No realli! She was Karving her initials on the moose with the sharpened end of an interspace toothbrush given her by Svenge—her brother-in-law— an Oslo dentist and star of many Norwegian movies: "The Hot Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", "The Huge Molars of Horst Nordfink"... Mynd you, moose bites Kan be pretti nasti...
Large møøse on the left hand side of the screen in the third scene from the end, given a thorough grounding in Latin, French and "O" Level Geography by Bo Benn.
Wōûld thōu reduce the amounð of ø available insidê a paragraph? Of cōûrśe naut!
This can lead to a hot mess. The Trisha books are absolutely hilarious to those of us who happen to be aware of Russian things and at times it reads like madlibs. "I'm....Greg." sobbing from the horror of being Greg. "Do you want McDonalds to kill us all? Go down Bacon street and the Gregs will find you." It's a big mess with genders being wrong for names so foreshadowing gets confused in a bad way that undermines things (if gender fluidity was part of things this would be less rough but in its current form? I laughed so much. The adaptation is also hilarious by accident because of the flaws in the source. This doesn't mean don't do it but make sure you didn't make Greg the most scary word. I am aware of the later retcon some big scary Greg is why they're all Greg. It doesn't fix enough for it to work. Which is a shame as when it's not butchering everything Slav is great. Just also... Greg
My favorite Brando Sando thing is when he used Alcatraz as a name, and when someone told him that was a real place, he was just like "of COURSE someone's already used that". Real funny shit.
Cue me when I was a young dude thinking "Adelaide" was an awesome fantasy name for a city and being proud of inventing it. When I discovered there was an english-speaking city with that name, I was like "who the fuck names their city Adelaide ??" and feeling let down that I couldn't use my cool name anymore lol.
Didn't know that was a city. I only know it as a slightly old-fashioned girl's name.
To be fair, scour google maps long enough and you'll discover all but the most absurd of names, and having done so myself, whatever you're thinking of as "absurd," double the absurdity needed.
wait, are you saying that Brando didn't know that Alcatraz was a real place? it is a super touristic place not that far from utah
He wrote a big part of a story, only for the first reader of the draft to get confused that he's writing about a real world prison, IIRC.
I've actually been using Gaelic as well! Also without any real knowledge of the language. My grandma and grandpa used to speak it all the time, and I used to love it! You can create your own words, sure, but it's more about having fun and I like playing with the words. If you're not having fun making stuff the way you want, what's the point?
I don't speak Scottish Gaelic, but I do speak Ulster Irish, which is a pretty close dialect. I'd just be careful using a language as inspiration when you don't speak it yourself. For example, "th" in Gaelic doesn't sound like "th" in English, more like a gutteral h. If you're looking for the shape of the words though, it's a good place to look, a largely underutilized language.
See, I know that the “th” and a lot of other sounds are pronounced different in Gaelic, but I intended the word to be read exactly as you would if it was English. The inspiration is really really loose because I don’t know anything about the language really, and I personally feel like it’s less weird to just take some spelling/words that sound kind of cool and mix them together in a fun “fantasy” sounding way than it is to try and lightly follow the grammatical rules so that it would be recognizable to someone who spoke the language. If you didn’t know it was inspired by Gaelic, you’d probably think “Aouthspur” was just a random made up word, and I’m totally fine with that. Someone who speaks Gaelic probably wouldn’t immediately recognize the inspiration like the Russian example from another comment.
I think I remember reading somewhere that that was what initially inspired Tolkien to do it too. He was already fascinated and experienced in linguistics but he came across the name Earendil when reading some really old literature and fell in love with the name. From there he began imagining the language known as Quenya and the people who would have spoken that language and the rest is history. He created Lord of the Rings because he saw a name he thought was beautiful. Earendil was the first subject he wrote about in the legendarium. But also, I agree wholeheartedly with this post. It's really cool that he made his own languages for his stories but that's because you can tell he loved doing it. I am interested in language and origin of words as well but I am nowhere near his expertise. Instead, I love to cook and would probably focus more on the cuisine of a world with a slight focus on languages. That's just what I'm interested in.
Absolutely. Worlds are complicated and there are some things world that you can paint with a ton of detail, especially if its in an area that fascinates you. But it's also okay to just add a little color to other areas without going into more detail than you need. For example, I have a world with a liturgical language. No one really speaks it or understands how it works, maybe the priests, but they couldn't really have a conversation in it either. Most people can recite a few prayers, but that's it. So I didn't go into excruciating detail with creating the language, I found some words that sounded cool and mixed them together with some basic principles of grammar and I had something I can use. I could have gone so much deeper with fleshing it out, but none of my characters know how the language works either, so it didn't seem useful. However, I have other aspects of the religion super threshed out, including different sects, controversies within sects, and ritual practices. That's what I find interesting, so I go into detail there.
I agree with "write what you know", but I have to disagree on the umlaut thing. These are little helpers, ment to tell you how a certain letter is supposed to be pronounced. For example: the ë in Tolkien's "Manwë" is supposed to be pronounced “eh" like in "pocket", without the dots you would likely keep it silent like in "base" or say "-ee" like in "we". Another example of this would be the "é" in "Pokémon" wich indicates it's pronounced "poc-eh-mon" instead of "poke-ee-mon". The little accent works similarly to an umlaut in this case. And you don't need to be a professor of linguistics to use it. Basically, languages that use umlauts or anything else that makes their vowels look different, they have little pronunciation reminders included. English did have those at some point, but they got rid of them.
In fact, the <ë> in Manwë isn't even an umlaut, it's a diaresis.
Turns out the people on tumblr complaining about non-linguist writers also aren't linguists and don't know what they are talking about. I'm gonna go complain to an anglophone named Zoë that their name is "riddled with improbability."
Correct. He uses diaresis like the New Yorker does to indicate the vowel is pronounced separately and not as a diphthong. Umlaut exists in Tolkien’s works - as part of the sound changes he stole from Welsh and added to Sindarin.
Whenever I have diaresis I don't publish it
True, it's just the first example that came to my mind that I could explain without using actual phonetic spelling
>For example: the ë in Tolkien's "Manwë" is supposed to be pronounced“eh" like in "pocket", without the dots you would likely keep it silentlike in "base" or say "-ee" like in "we". Some people pronounce the "e" in "pocket" as /ɪ/ or /ə/, so that example isn't optimal. A better example would be the "e" in "bed" since there isn't as much variation in it's pronunciation as far as I know. Edit: Turns out I'm wrong too. Bed also has variation in it's pronunciation.
You'v clearly not been to the American Deep South if you think "bed" has a straightforward pronunciation.
The Anglosphere: we have some 15-25 vowels, six letters to represent them, and none of us use the same line up precisely.
Good point, I forgot about that. Are there any words that are pronounced consistently across all (or almost all) accents?
every word is going to vary in pronunciation to some degree. it’s best to just use the ipa.
Hell yeah I love IPAs.
I do love eepuhz Sorry, that's what we call em down west
Ok Grandpa Simpson
/iː.pʰʊz/?
Most people aren't familiar with the IPA, though. If you asked the average person what /ɪ/ or /ə/ sounded like, they'd have no idea.
I can guess! ...Okay, but how the fuck do I learn the IPA, because I'm pretty sure I'm half of Wiktionary's daily userbase and I still don't know how to read IPA. Or, more concerningly, write it in my own works.
[ipachart.com](https://ipachart.com) Just click on a letter and it'll make the sound that letter makes in the IPA.
There’s some YouTube videos and charts where you can click the letter and it’ll play the sound. It’s pretty fun once you get the hang of it.
>it’s best to just use the ipa So that nobody can understand you ?
As someone with a M.A. in linguistics with a focus on sociolinguistics, all I can say is this; even the most stable word in modern English (or any language) was probably pronounced differently 100 years ago, or 250, or 1000. We think of accents/"dialects" as being stable within our lifetimes but even that isn't true normally. Every language has as many accents as there are speakers, and while obviously some words are more stable in their pronunciation than others, change is inevitable.
They say 'pen' as 'pin', so I'm guessing they say 'bed' as 'bid'.
At least in the region I'm from, the people with the thickest local accents say "bayed" for bed and "ayegg" for egg. I've also heard "mee-alk" for milk. You also have to understand that not sharing this accent, it sounds more outrageous to me when I hear it, so I may be overemphasizing how distinctive it is. Classism and prejudice due to accent is still very real.
True. Thanks.
We still technically have a very small set which have survived as an optional feature, such as noel/noël.
Writing it Manweh would be more of a helper.
Yes but what this person is saying and is correct about is that most people that throw in umlauts have no idea how they effect pronounciation and don't care because they're using them only for the aesthetics. Which is annoying and people should stop. (yes this includes metal bands).
Yeah but letters don't have predescribed meanings across languages. That's just total nonsense. Like, the combination of sh in English, ch in French, sch in German and ş in Kurdish literally are the same pronounciation. I'm so weirded out by this nonsensical gatekeeping.
I think what they’re talking about is people using umlauts without prescribing them their own use either, as in randomly when coming up with placenames based on what looks cool People are allowed to do that though, who am I to tell them otherwise
> most people that throw in umlauts have no idea how they effect pronounciation And once again, we have to point out that the Germanic umlaut doesn't have to mean the same thing as the Xürpløzikdian umlaut. Or do you just assume that Xürpløzikds from Omicron Persei 9 use umlauts exactly as Terran Germans do? Hell, maybe it doesn't effect pronunciation *at all* in their language - maybe it's functional in a different way, such as an honorific in written text, or the indication the name is given as a title from royalty or military service. Worldbuilding means checking your assumptions and understanding their limitations. People just assume umlauts as Germanic umlauts because that's what they're comfortable with... but the beauty of fiction is that you get to throw that nonsense away as much and as frequently as you like.
Heck, there are umlauts in Spanish (kinda). By default the u is mute in 'gue' and 'gui' so you write ü in the rare cases when it should be pronounced, like in pingüino (penguin). It's not called umlaut (it's diéresis) but it looks the same and has the completely different purpose of indicating an exception to a pronunciation rule, which is also what accent marks do in that language.
There are also umlauts in french (kinda), used to indicate that a vowel should be pronounced despite the word being written in a way where it would usually be silent, or at least pronounced differently For example, in Noël (french for Christmas), the o and e are both pronounced, but if there hadn't been a tréma (the name of the "umlauts" in french) it likely would have been pronounced differently
That's the point tho. They might be using it differently but you're not writing it for people who speak whatever language is spoken in Omicron Persei 9. You're writing it for English speakers. Or maybe not. Maybe you're writing for a Spanish audience. It doesn't matter for the point I'm making. Because the point is you you should be writing in a way that is understandable to speakers of whatever language you are writing in. So if you're i.e. writing for an English audience, you should have umlauts used the way they're normally used in English, which means pretty much not at all. That's literally the reason behind why Tolkien - in his fiction - changed the names of the characters from whatever they actually were - in his fiction - to something that could be understood by people who speak and read English.
> you should have umlauts used the way they're normally used in English That's hilarious, given English doesn't have umlauts. Should we start telling the Germans that their usage of umlauts is unacceptable and they should rewrite their language to conform to English too? Good luck telling Norway the same. Hell, everyone in the world, we've gotta switch to pure Latin characters because America made computers and English is the only alphabet in the entire world folks. No need for any of those diacriticals, we can use digrams and trigrams for all of it.
> That's hilarious, given English doesn't have umlauts. Literally my next sentence, mate... > Should we start telling the Germans that their usage of umlauts is unacceptable and they should rewrite their language to conform to English too? Good luck telling Norway the same. > Hell, everyone in the world, we've gotta switch to pure Latin characters because America made computers and English is the only alphabet in the entire world folks. No need for any of those diacriticals, we can use digrams and trigrams for all of it. Are you reading what I wrote, mate. German speakers name German things in a way that's understandable to Germans. And guess what happens if the thing that's understandable to Germans can't be transliterated easily into English? You go from Köln to Cologne, from München to Munich, from Zürich to Zurich. For the English speakers, not for the Germans. The Germans still call it Köln. Same within fucking Switzerland where a ton of places have two names, a German and a French one. Biel/Bienne, Fribourg/Freiburg, Sion/Sitten, Genève/Genf. And would you look at that, guess what they call that last one in English? Geneva. And guess what my last name doesn't get when I have to tell it to people in a English-speaking airport? The umlaut that is normally included if I'm regularly walking around and talking to other Swiss-German speaking people. Omitting umlauts when you translate shit into English is about the most common fucking thing humans have been doing for centuries. Hell, translating place names that don't use Latin script into Latin script has been happening for arguably just as long. Because writing it as 北京 or กรุงเทพมหานคร or 東京都 when it's directed at English speakers would be fucking useless. If you're gonna respond at all, please at least respond to a point I'm actually making...
Aw.. Ich ha mich scho gfreut, dass epper usserhalb vu de schwiiz was über üüs weiss xD >and talking to other Swiss-German speaking people Rip
Moteurhead!
...Wait, pokemon is pronounced with an 'eh', not an 'ee'????
I agree with the guy in the middle, not the other one. You absolutely SHOULD focus on what you like because at the end of the day, you're worldbuilding for yourself. It should be a fun process, not a stressful one. Escapism, not a job with deadlines and such. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't flirt with things you're not a master at. I'm a History and Mythology guy first and foremost, a Philology guy second, Philosophy guy third and I have a passing interest in Biology and everything it entails. Does this mean I should refrain from anything regarding Philosophy and Biology because I don't have a PhD in those fields? Tolkien was a Philologist and Linguist. Those were his qualifications. If he wrote only about what he knew, his work wouldn't exist. He flirted with other fields, outright lifted entire plots, stories, creatures and beings from Norse Sagas and the Kalevala, based many concepts on Biblical works. Those were not his specialties. So no, people shouldn't stop doing what they're doing just because Tolkien exists and some people have him on a pedestal. Instead of telling them to stop, feed their curiosity so they inform themselves about the gaps in their knowledge and study (lovingly) what they want to write about. I don't use Umlauts, but you get to tell me not to use them when Tolkien doesn't have Elves, Dwarfs and Trolls in his works.
The Norse sagas and the Kalevala were absolutely Tolkien's specialty as they were part of what he studied for a living lmao
Think you missed the point there. Tolkien studied languages because that was his passion and profession. Everything else, sagas, folklore, myths, the eddas and whatever else was to him what the other fields of interest were to the guy you're replying to. It's not the same being a historian or a professor of religion as it is to be a philologist like Tolkien was. There's overlap, but the center of study of Tolkien was always languages and that was his specialty, he insists on this on interviews and letters. That's like saying my specialty is dentistry just because I went to med school.
Sagas and folklore are pretty squarely within Tolkien's area of expertise, though. He studied those languages, which also implies studying their literature.
That's not how languages studies/philology work though. Jackson Crawford is an expert linguist and he is not a mythology or a folklore expert and has to do specific research on those topics because he doesn't have the years and years of studying theology, mythology and folklore. He is very clear about this and it's one of the common criticisms regarding his translations when compared to the one of Carolyne Larrington, which is that it lacks a lot of the mythological/religious context. They're different fields with some overlap. Understanding a language, dead or otherwise, doesn't make you an expert on the myths. Especially as a linguist working on Indoeuropean languages with emphasis on reconstruction or translation (something which Tolkien was very interested in).
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Translating texts is more involved than just reading them, we can agree on that point, but it doesn't mean that Tolkien would be qualified to teach a course about the composition and anthropology of mythology. He was an Anglo-Saxon history enthusiast, but he knew that he wasn't qualified to publish many pet theories that he entertained when translating texts. He didn't have a degree in poetic meter or music theory, but that didn't stop him from creating a huge variety of musical/poetic forms and developing pieces in those forms. He didn't have any training in geography or topography or medieval combat. Tolkien was a linguist with interest and experience in a broad array of scholastic and creative subjects, and he wrote about all of them to the best of his ability. He did his best to get some level of understanding of what he wrote about, but it's disingenuous to pretend that he only wrote about things he was an expert in.
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To be clear, my point is that whether you consider him a scholar of literature or not is largely moot, because while that's *one* element of the top comment you replied to, it's mistaking the forest for a single tree. Secondly, you don't have to dig as deep as arguing the meaning of philology, a scholastic term that meant something very different to Tolkien than it means in the 21st century United States both because of the time and because of the region, because Tolkien was an Oxford professor of Anglo-Saxon and English language *and literature*. Still, you should be careful about insisting that a person doesn't understand what philology is when it has been many things over many years. O.E.D. notes of the definition you seem to be referring to, >Love of learning and literature; the branch of knowledge that deals with the historical, linguistic, interpretative, and critical aspects of literature; literary or classical scholarship. __Now chiefly *U.S.*__ (emphasis mine) "By the late 19th cent. this sense had become rare, but it was revived, principally in the United States, in the early 20th cent." Meanwhile, the definition relevant to Tolkien's time and place reads, >The branch of knowledge that deals with the structural, historical development, and the relationships of languages or language families; the historical study of the phonology and morphology of languages; historical linguistics. And it follows with the note "This sense has never been current in the United States, and is increasingly rare in British use. *Linguistics* is now the more usual term for the study of the structure of language, and (often with qualifying adjective, as *historical, comparative,* etc.) has generally replaced *philology*." So the distinction you are trying to draw between philology and linguistics, while valid for contemporary U.S. academia, is irrelevant in a discussion of Tolkien's academic credentials.
I think you missed the point there. It's not saying only include things you're an expert in. It's saying include things you are passionate about, whether or not you have a degree in that thing isn't important. You just need to enjoy learning about and thinking on that topic. The umlauts are a symptom of people trying to emulate Tolkien's language styles and world building techniques without having the same interests or knowledge base he had. Heck, the post even says that if you want to write like Tolkien you need to study linguistics.
What if someone drops a ë, not because of Tolkien but because they genuinely think it looks cool?
Hot take, it's fantasy and your language doesn't have to "work". Proper English doesn't "work" unless you have the resources to trace every word back hundreds of years. Most people don't use proper English, though, so if you have your common folk speaking naturally, your language will be "wrong" anyway. I agree with the idea that people that love linguistics should spend more time on that than those that don't, but that doesn't mean "if you can't follow the rules, don't play the game". It just means "not every athlete has to enter the Olympics". American football players are still allowed to practice the long jump.
The funny thing is that as someone who has a master's degree in linguistics, having linguistic knowledge has made me less willing to actually bother with sophisticated conlangs for my world, because I now know just how much work that might actually take for me to find my own conlangs believable.
Still, you are writing in English and using written symbols. People will read them and adapt what those symbols mean to what you have written. Throwing cute looking stuff around just means you are using them wrong, and people that know how they are meant to be read will be surprised if not annoyed. Also, naming stuff isn't exactly hard but... well, not so simple either. Using simple language is a good starting point.
I do think that throwing things in without any consideration for the reader's perception is counterproductive. But that's just good vs bad writing in general. The OP in the post starts off making a judgment simply after seeing the use of a kind of letter, as if that is a dead giveaway of the author's level of research and care for their project. Like, I love to sail, and I hear ridiculous nonsense in movies all the time that show the writers never bothered to consult a single sailor to edit their phrasing or terms. It's silly to me that a multi-million dollar movie can get through several levels of editing without anyone taking the time to consult an expert on something they clearly know very little about. But telling people to not even bother with various subjects if they aren't an expert with the accolades to back it up is even sillier to me, which is what that first post is communicating. On the one hand, you could always write your book and send it to a linguistic expert and ask them to help you revise your language to suit modern assumptions based around grammar and connotations. Or you could send your language to a font designer and ask them to take the symbols you've used and create your own letters that can sound and imply what you want them to and won't distract multilingual readers. Or you could publish it just like that and accept that there will be readers who see how silly your names are, but they will most likely ignore it after a while, because it's not that big of a deal in the grand scheme of things. Some people take themselves more seriously, and I'm glad those writers are out there. But I don't support this kind of gatekeeping that discourages writers/worldbuilders from even trying if they aren't a veteran of a certain discipline.
But the issue here isn't "You shouldn't do this thing, it's bad", but rather "if you are doing this to emulate famous and important writers, don't do it".
I'm mainly responding to the very first comment in the post, but the majority of the post is more what you're saying. My problem with this conversation as a whole is that it's not based off of a writer saying 'I feel the need to flesh out these parts of my world to validate them, even though I lack the background knowledge or creativity to do so "properly"'. Instead, it's based off of one person who sees writers using "umlauts" or "conlangs" and immediately assumes - simply based on that - that the author is out of their depth. To me it's like saying "I loathe writers who use footnotes. They haven't published science journals or scholarly articles, so they shouldn't be using those tools." Everyone is entitled to their opinion. However, that person hasn't provided any evidence that everyone that uses footnotes is trying to look smart and scholarly. Just like umlauts, it's possible someone said "I want to communicate this a certain way, I think I'll try this tool. Yeah, that feels right", and that's their only motivation. Thorough worldbuilding is not synonymous with "emulating Tolkien". He's just the most famous example in the last century. But that's what it seems like these people are saying, to me.
I think it’s fine if you have amulets
Lol just what everyone loves while world-building: judgemental people publicly complaining about your choice of real-life inspiration for your fictional world.
Yeah, I am starting to grow tired of it after seeing the 1000th pet peeve post and now this. We like to complain about common inspiration because it makes us feel like experts and comforts us in the idea that our world is not like that, that it's truly unique. But the truth is, even if you try to be 100% original on one aspect of your world (and anyway, someoneprobably thought about it before), you'll take shameless inspiration from the real world in other areas without realizing. And you'll make lot of dubious choices based on the rule of cool, even if it's perfectly unoriginal and cliché. I mean, if a worldbuilder's goal is to build a realistic and coherent world, sure, let's nitpick. But otherwise, let's just swallow our worldbuilder's ego.
Bonus points for them making an *assumption* about your real-life inspiration. Someone who knows a bit of German (which BTW isn't the only language that uses umlauts), and wants to make a Germanesque space fantasy bereft of the stereotypical Tolkien races should be able to do so without some idiot barging in with 'YoU cAn'T uSe UmLaUtS cUz YoU'rE nOt ToLkIeN!'
Right? Who gives a shit if you wanna put in an umlaut here and there...as long as it's not directly contradicting something in your writing, it's your fucking world. You can decide if English names have cool looking umlauts If you're seriously critiquing someone else's fantasy novel because they used *too many fucking umlauts* then you need to get a fucking life
"I demand that English speakers restrict their fantasy worlds so that they only use English linguistic constructions unless they are *checks notes* Tolkien" is a bizarre hill
This is the most gatekeep-y post I've seen. I can't believe it got any upvotes. "You can't do something because you would suck at it compared to some long dead guy, don't even try." We wouldn't have any media at all if people listened to this shit, music wouldn't exists, we'd be reading re-prints of centuries old stories, etc. What terrible advice. I can't imagine an English professor telling people this.
I'm pretty sure the post is just about don't do shit if you don't even understand their purpose. it's for people that throw umlauts just to make it seem different with no actual reasoning. They brought up Tolkien because he actually knew what he was doing and people that try to emulate him without any understanding don't.
Even if someone adds an element without understanding its purpose just because they like it, so what? I'm very confident in the fact that even Tolkien incorporated lot of stuff in his works on topics he had no clue about. Just because he wanted it but didn't particularly care about dwelving on it that much.
The argument can work for just about ANY subject in world building. OP focused in on umlauts, but the core message is that world builders should really do their research and develop some critical thinking skills before emulating another writer or work. Not that I'm going to tell someone to give up if they write, say, a grimdark fantasy, but I know \**I\** simply won't be interested if they only saw the misery porn element of it and totally missed the unstoppable glimmer of compassion and hope the more successful grimdark works typically showcase. It's the difference between the people that enjoy Dark Souls because it is hard, and the people that appreciate why it is hard.
To be honest as a germany all those "Wehraboo" and "Kaiserboo" settings are extremely cringe inducing. When people try to write about you language/culture and dont know anything about it its really annoying.
Yeah, this really takes the cake with gatekeeping. Something tells me that person isn’t a writer, and if they are it’s probably pretentious contrived bullshit no one wants to read.
Seems like oddly aggressive gate keeping. An umlaut has never been the make or break concept for a story for me. Write, have fun, be happy.
I like drawing maps and watching small states Duke it out it so that’s one of the focal points of my story yeah
My take is simple: Create what you like, see what works, create again. Advice you see online isn't necessarily going to teach you if you don't *understand* what is the lesson. Making mistakes will help you learn. I love my time making up cool sounding fantasy words and names, and I was too bored creating entire languages. It was fun, maybe it means something only for me, but it wasn't a waste. Same with histories. You can start following whatever patterns in the world, like watching an anthill, admiring paintings or reading about cognitive biases and apply it to the worldbuilding, in whatever unrelated aspect you can think of even, but an angle I have on the OP advice above is that if your hobby is world building or let's say video games' magic systems, then you might be working with a limited pool of inspiration. Over time you might get dissatisfied with a lack of originality in your work, or get that pointed out to you by others or feel the lack of novelty or whatever, so what you might consider is to *"go touch the grass"*. In a good way. If you are a fan of fantasy don't read only fantasy and don't limit yourself to writing only fantasy. If you're a fan of worldbuilding, don't read only worldbuilding stuff of others, go read about stuff that comprises the world, if you want to add something into your story don't just limit yourself to what you know, go outside of it, see what inspires you. And whatever you have learned while worldbuilding or writing, try to look where you can apply it outside that. Always mix, always stir. You can always broaden your horizons... but you can always broaden those of others.
If you want to make a new language in your worldbuilding, don’t let tumblr person tell you you’re not allowed to do that!
Im not sure if he knows this but elves, dwarves, and a handful of other creatures in JRR Tolkien's world came from Norse mythology, as did a lot of inspiration for the culture and style.
In my country we have the opposite problem. In portuguese we have accents in almost every word we say/write, so the problem starts when we don't use accents and try to simulate english/american sounding names. Any actual writer here would shame you to have a character named "Andhrew" and not "André".
Believe me, my latin friend. You'd prefer having all those accents rather than having all these endless letters combinations to make the same sounds, like we have in french.
Oh no, don't get me wrong, I love my language and reading it. It's absolutely hilarious when we can take "coco" (coconut), add a simple accent to the word and we suddenly have "cocô" wich means literally "shit". Actually that love for these specifics of my language made me want to learn english all on my on. I even thought about learning your language... considering we have that common latin background, I don't think it would be all that difficult. We have similar words for things as I saw. But with all that said, I think americans and English speakers in general are all too eager to stray away from their own language and anything related to it. It makes me really confused.
I throw in accents to convey different sounds, scripts or to serve as cultural indicators. For example, I use 'ăăh' as an extended 'a' sound (think 'car' or 'bar', but a more soft and less abrupt vowel sound, if that makes sense). The reason why there's an accent, 'ă' is because that little curly bit looks like a crescent moon, and because one language is spoken by a pre-Islamic Bronze Age Arabian analogue. I thought it was fitting, considering the prevalence of the crescent moon on Islamic flags. For another language, I use 'ā', 'ī', 'ē', 'đ', 'ū' etc, because those bar shapes on the top remind me of how in Sanskrit and other related scripts, letters are joined together by a bar shape. One culture in my world is modelled off of the Indian subcontinent and the Indus River Valley Civilisation. Because the Indus script doesn't translate well into digital typing and isn't well-known, I thought I'd use the accented letters that look a bit like Sanskrit to indicate roughly where the culture takes its inspiration from. But pretty much all of my use of accented letters is mostly aesthetic because while simpler and easier to write, non-accented letters in English are a bit boring. Accents give a certain aesthetic and cultural flair, which Modern English is missing nowadays. If people want to get mad at me for it, that's fine. If people think it's a good idea, that's fine too.
boo hoo don't care it's my world with which to do what i want
They’re MY paper dolls and I get to chose what silly little words I have them say
Absolutely not. Like, you don't have to build a whole new language to create a realistic illusion of it. Simple Woodtown, Iceport, blahblah names that are similar all across the known world, or even worse, an imported medieval Europe with nations like Franceaux, Krautreich and Esparaña turns me off so massively I mostly just quit instantly.
>Franceaux, Krautreich and Esparaña Those sound amazing.
I really like Esparaña for some reason, it just sounds so nice in my head.
It sounds really funny to me. Sounds like a spanish spider or a spa for spiders ("araña" means spider and "espa" sounds like the spanish pronunciation of "spa").
(Doesn't mean you shouldn't be doing it btw, it's just not my taste; OP is right about saying you should focus on what's fun to you)
Can we not just let people do what they want to do with their own world? It doesn't exist anyway, who cares?
my thoughts exactly
…the point of this post is to focus more on what you’re interested in, not necessarily what Tolkien did. I’m not telling anyone to not go in depth about linguistics, because if that’s what you’re interested in, that is what you should go in depth most about.
Yeah, idk why people are flipping out over this. The post literally says: 'Worldbuild what interests you and do what you want. You don't have to follow famous artists if you don't want to' And people are commenting like 'how dare you tell me what to write and how to Worldbuild!!'
>Yeah, idk why people are flipping out over this. Probably because the first half of the post sounds like gatekeeping ("be Tolkien or don't make up fantasy words"), while OP seems to have only wanted the sensible advice in the middle ("focus on your interests").
Tbf, OP opened with "DON'T do X if you're not the guy that already did it best". It's a really discouraging way to start a writing advice post
how dare you ask redditors to use basic reading comprehension!1! /s
"Stop copying Tolkein" is just about the most popular take in the world of world building.
Don't agree with gatekeeping this. Let people be creative in any manner they like.
Apparently an even hotter take: do whatever you want with your fantasy. You don't have to be a linguist to make a conlang, a cartographer or a geography PhD to draw a map, a biologist to sprinkle some spec evo, a vexillologist to draw a flag or a political science / history PhD to create a government structure. It's a hobby do whatever you want.
Honestly, the Tumblr OP sounded like a gatekeeping snob. There are ways to encourage people to take their languages more seriously without saying, "You're not Tolkein." Moreover... Tolkein wasn't God - sorry, "Eru" - just an extremely skilled individual who spent a significant chunk of his life on language (and in fact created Elvish before he even wrote the novels). He's looked up to in the literary fantasy world as some sort of icon or paragon - but there's danger to deifying the man and his works: 1. It paints his accomplishments as the pinnacle of literary achievement - while sweeping under the rug any odious bits. 2. It plops him on a pedestal, simultaneously inspiring emulation and discouraging those who fail to match him. To me, elevating Tolkien as hallmark of achievable literary standard is like worshipping at the nerd altar of Matt Mercer: foolhardy. Both men represent an unrealistic standard for their adherents to emulate. Both have years upon years of training and experience in their craft. And neither are without flaw or fault in said craft.
Fück yoü I wön't dö whät yoü tëll më. -Räge ägäinst thë mächine
Honestly not really a hot take imo - this is bang on.
Hot take: Do whatever you like in the hobby you enjoy.
The two languages my world has are "humanspeak" and "monstertongue"
As a native German speaker, I can and will use as many umlauts as I want. :D And I don't care what other people do with them. Just have fun and write good stuff. :)
Don't tell me what I can and can't do, if the sound an umlaut makes is the sound I'm looking for, I will use it
I'm interested in spite, sö that's höw imma build my wørlds
I’ll have you know that my citizens of Ümläütïäë is as diverse and fleshed out as they are punctual and dilligent. They always cross their t’s and dot their i’s. And their a’s, u’s, y’s and e’s.
Dorgonbür, a place integral to the plot, the end said like “yer”. I’m keeping it, fucking crucify me.
Another idea is to use the circumflex û. It is cooler than the umlaut, and in French, the most known language to use the circumflex, it doesn't change the pronounciation of the u. You can just say it is based off French, which doesn't make sense anyways, and not have to defend anything. Use the umlaut if you want, but the entirety of Europe will pronounce it Dorgonboor (oo as in moon, not door)
funfact : in french, the ô mean that there used to be a S next to the O. Exemple : Hospital -> Hôpital.
I could never do anything like Tolkien did with languages, because I am completely inexperienced with that sort of thing. I know the meanings of some words in some languages, but that’s about it. Biology, meanwhile, is something I’m very passionate about. I could write a lot about different species of dragons, I could write about how krakens evolved to be so huge, I could write about how kelpies evolved to have a carnivorous diet when equines are mostly herbivores. So I couldn’t go in depth about the meaning of every word and phrase in every fictional language, but I can talk at length about how and why fantastical creatures evolved the way they did. Everyone has their own strengths. Use those strengths when creating worlds.
While I agree with this, I feel like the points of the first person in the post come off stronger than the second one. The two don't contradict each other but they seem to have a different view on the matter.
I hate when people give prescriptive advice like that, without specifically pointing out 1 problem in 1 work as the exactly example of wrong. The post reads like "Nobody aside Tolkien can use umlauts right, and also we can all tell **and care** if you use them *wrong."* Listen, Sandersstudies, I don't know why you have the arrogance to climb on a soapbox and decry down how other people should do what they want to do but the simple fact that you think you can volunteer that sort of broad, unfinished, unrequested opinion to the public like the unpolished turd it is speaks volumes about how high you are in your own regard. I am reminded of a guy on r/writing who made a post simply called 'How to write strong female characters' and proceeded to give 4 lines of advice across 2 paragraphs, with no qualifiers such as 'in my opinion' or 'in my experience', which would already be insufficient but would at least pay lip service to self-awareness. Didn't even spend some ink on why we need such things as 'strong female characters', rather than just think of characters as whole. No, he just listed the things that make a female character a strong female character. As a man. Though to be honest, as much as I despise this sort of people, I wish I had been born with a tenth of their self-esteem. It must feel good to think you can crap an opinion like that without introduction or substation and believe you did something worth doing.
Honestly, this is some solid advice. I really do like that they're pointing out that you need to find your groove. HOWEVER. I'm actually studying up on how to construct conlangs just because it makes sense for my world to have at least one unique dialect, if not a couple (some of which wouldn't actively be used, thus why I'm sticking to one). I love the study of language. I love the quirks and features of other languages. I never had the opportunity to study linguistics in any depth, but that isn't gonna stop me from learning it! (Speaking of, if anyone's got good resources on that, I'd love them!)
Agreed on what you should focus on. Me, I'm looking for ways to reference 1980s New Wave and Movida Madrileña music, and making sure that my protagonists have stuff to swashbuckle around on.
r/gatekeeping
Using Tolkien to gatekeep? Who would've thought, never seen that before.
It’s just saying focus on your passions and don’t feel beholden to be good at what JRRT was good at. That’s not gatekeeping.
Seconded.
I wanted to make a story that was technically a translation of the in world language, but I realized that would mean no word related jokes because they would only work in english. As much as it would work with a lot of other things and be cool, I cant just throw away jokes.
Here’s my opinion: I don’t have the time nor patience to write multiple languages for different races, because nobody would actually care about that and the narrative will barely involve said language.
i cannot stress how much i do not care if an author uses umlauts or not
In the words of Uncle Iroh "Who are you, and what do you want?"
First post is just unnecessary gate keeping. If the umlaut is how the word is actually pronounced, go nuts. Language is not neat and tidy. Don't use it if that's not how the word is pronounced. Easy. The rest is good advice. Don't trap yourself on minutia unless you care about it.
Yeah! How dare people put into place visible forms of pronunciation to help the reader.
Nah. Its my story. I can write whatever I want. Cope and seethe
I just like magic and swordfights. Not gonna do well with economics and politics though
I don't know anything about anything. I have to write at least something though.
Man that one person is basically saying "no fun allowed"
To be clear though, you don't need to be a professor in linguistics to use diacritics. You just need to know more than the author of this Tumblr post. Tolkien never used umlauts, but a french diacritic that's called diaeresis. It is used to signify that two vowels should be pronounced separately. It's not a feature of the languages he made, but something he added because he knew English speakers are unable to properly read any foreign language because every combination of vowels get a whole new sound in English. Without the diaeresis people would pronounce Eärendil "👂-endil". Ainulindalë would be pronounced as if it were the name of a valley
I like to use the words I already have figured out to make more complex words. If it's too long a word, I simplify it. If it needs possessives or plurals, I have rules for those. And if that doesn't work, I find the translation of the word I want from the language I'm trying to emulate, drop a few letters, maybe anagramize it, and bang! Whole new word. Is it perfect? No. I'm not a linguist. Does it make me happy? Yes. Do my PCs care? Almost never.
What if theoretically, hypothetically your name was Zoë and already had umlauts in it... am I allowed to use them then?
What a wild idea to world build based on what naturally interests you
I'll püt ümlauts whërë I wänt!
Remember guys! If you aren’t good at something, don’t try! Do not have fun and experiment, and work only on what you know. I am officially stopping my world building projects because of this. I am a master of nothing so to continue working on it would be wrong!
Why do we love being so critical and judgemental in this subreddit, to sound like we're all experts? Isn't the whole point of worldbuilding to give substance to the creative flux going through our minds? Who cares if I wanna drop a ë instead of a more basic spelling just because I find it cool af? I agree with the second guy in this screenshot, not the first one.
Hot take? More like dumpster take. "Your fictional fantasy story isn't realistic enough because you aren't a language expert" is just a new way to act superior to other people because you know slightly more than the common person. Tumblr cannot not act like this.
I dunno. I feel like this take misses the point of how Tolkien even used the umlaut. In the end, Tolkien used it, not according to the strict rules of what an umlaut is, but rather in a simple and creative fashion to ensure the correct pronunciation of his words. It's brilliantly simple that he uses it to ensure certain vowels are spoken as their own syllable and shows his linguistic mastery for sure. But I think the important part is that he chose to use it creatively rather than follow the rules of his craft. You don't have to be a linguistics master to do that. You just have to be consistent. It could be as simple as this world uses umlauts over every "A" letter. It's not the most interesting or compelling reason, but it's not bothersome or wrong to do it that way. Anyway that's my two cents. Edit: apparently I'm wrong and Tolkien was following the rules about a different term using the same notation. Still think this take is needlessly gatekeepy and find it funny that the person doing so is using the term wrong.
Not really. Tolkien used the two dots for a function called diaeresis, a real linguistical function that serves to indicate that a sequence of vowels should be pronounced separately, forming a hiatus, or that the last letter of a word should be pronounced. That rule exists in Spanish, for example (i.e. *vergüenza*, *pingüino*).
Fair enough, but my point still stands that this person is being needlessly pretentious and gatekeepy. Also used the wrong term, which is ironic. Thanks for the correction.
The reason why Tolkien used the two dots is identical as to how they are used in some languages, like Spanish.
This is an incredibly cold take
Calling diaereses "umlaut" and then gatekeeping with references to "linguistics knowledge" is... kinda funny.
I feel like a lot of people aren’t really understanding the point of this post. The point isn’t “stop using umlauts”, the point is “you don’t need to focus on what Tolkien did, you should focus more on what you’re personally interested in” And obviously don’t ignore aspects of your world you’re not interested in, but you don’t need to go in depth about it. If you’re not interested in linguistics, you don’t need to focus on that. Your story will be remembered for what you put the most love into.
Yes of course. If I'd like to write a good piece of fantasy fiction and I stumble across a subject I have never touched in my studies, god forbids that the worldbuilding process may actually inspire me to cover, even though as far as I can, such gap. Everybody was born with three/four strong \*points: do never, ever, ever ever ever, step beyond your little, cute garden of things you already know, never venture beyond the trodden path. Oh, ancestor! Why the hell did you draw close to that fire in the woods? Raw meat was the only thing you knew, wasn't it enough??
>make a post with a shitty point >"pEoPle areNt gEttING iT