Introduction

Hello! ¡Hola! Aya! Ciao! Aloha! Mba'éichapa! Ni hao!

One of these things is not like the other... One of these greetings is from a constructed language. Can you guess which one? Give it a shot, I'll wait...

You probably guessed the sixth one, 'mba'éichapa', right? It's the weirdest looking one, but nope! Mba'éichapa is a typical greeting in Paraguayan Guaraní. The correct answer is the innocent looking 'aya!' (P.S. More about Pyan Gní in another post!)

People are into different things. Some people enjoy jazz, rock, punk or classical music. Others enjoy backpacking, skydiving or parcour. Some enjoy fine wine and microbrews, others prefer miller and beer-pong. I enjoy languages.

In this blog I am going to talk about languages that exist only in the imagination of their creators, and any others who may have taken an interest in learning them. Esperanto is probably the most successful constructed language of all time, but there is a myriad of others out there. Klingon, Sindarin (aka Elvish) and Nav'i spring to mind.

What separates these languages from the one you've been working on? Not much, if anything, I postulate. 'How can this be?' you may ask. Please, read on.

If you are reading this blog, you already speak English, or perhaps you are learning English. It is probably the hardest language to really master. English is harder than German, Arabic, or Chinese. So you if you speak English, you already have a big advantage, and a big disadvantage. I will elucidate in future posts.


While this blog is aimed at helping you create your own language, the things you will learn could also help you learn real-world foreign languages. For example, I would have had a much harder time learning Mandarin Chinese if I hadn't already experimented with new and interesting forms of grammar and semantics in my own created language. Basically, this blog is designed for language nuts, like me.

Okay, great. Let's get on with it! Fine. Just skip this part and scroll down.

First, a little about myself. My name is Dom, I'm 27, and I'm basically still a kid at heart. A Michigan native, I naturally speak English. (Quite well, I dare say.) I am fluent in Spanish, although my accent and slang is so mixed up that no one can place me. (The typical equation is something like this: Costa Rican slang + Dominican accent + Paraguayan grammar + white guy = ?!... must be Argentine. There is apparently no other explanation for the chimera that is me. But I digress.)  I also speak some French, Italian and I can understand written Portuguese.  I learned Guaraní during my time in the Peace Corps, and I have most recently taken on Mandarin Chinese, just for the fun of it.  I have a degree in anthropology, I have traveled all over Latin America and a little bit of Europe, and I plan on seeing pretty much the entire planet and maybe others before I die young at the age of 113. Solving puzzles and learning new, tricky things makes me smile, and my absolute favorite among these is learning new languages.

While not understanding Spanish as a senior in a Dominican high school, I started to make lists of funny words I thought I might heard my teachers shout. My initial findings were inconclusive. If I repeated the recorded words to others, I received the same blank looks as I always received, instead of the lightbulb face of understanding.

So I failed Literature, Civics and Dominican History. I just barely squeeked by in Chemistry and Math, since the Spanish terms are not terrible different from the English words. I was top of the class in English Language, but the teacher gave me a 99/100 for being a smartass and correcting his grammar mistakes. I did alright in 2nd year French, even though I had never taken 1st year French and I'm pretty sure the teacher hadn't either. Long story short, I had a lot of free time to daydream in class.

My "Dominican vocab" lists started mixing with my lists of trying-not-to-forget-my-Italian vocab lists. Eventually these lists became somewhat boring, and I started creating more interesting words for 1-10 and Monday-Sunday.  Huh. It was actually a little more fun than I thought, and certainly more interesting than my civics teacher yelling at misbehaving classmates. Then I tried colors.

Colors! This was the seed. Numbers and days of the week are easy to render with greco-roman-esque logic, but colors are much more subjective! Granted, most of my original color-words were very similar to their Romance counterparts, but for me, it was a spark in the tinderbox. My red was 'roj', my purple was 'viol' and my black was 'niç'. But my yellow was 'heij', dark red was 'iña', and white was "caj".  It was actually quite fun!

My classmate may have thought I was a little loco, but my hitherto mostly blank notebooks began to fill up with wildly cacophonous mumbo-jumbo. Instead of getting headaches in class, I created words. I left tests mostly blank while I created verb tenses.

This is how my constructed language began.

*As a disclaimer, I do not condone slacking off in high school. In my particular case I was already accepted to my top choice university, but please do NOT forgo your academics in order to pursue a hobby. You will have time when you have time, so do what needs to be done now, NOW. Otherwise you might suck at everything else, and it's hard to create a language when you're working 2 day jobs and a night shift just to pay the bills.

Anyway, enough of this! Continue on to Part 1.