Welcome to Gaia! ::

For one of my story ideas I wanted a race of aliens which was mentally incapable of learning other languages because their own was more hardwired into their brain than human language. When studying phonetics one of the areas that frustrated me with its complexity was the was sounds shifted around when they were combined into syllables. Also I just generally think syllabaries are more cool than alphabets. And I heard a teacher say so many times that natural languages are never regular, it made me try to imagine what kind of species would naturally have a totally regular language, which also would not change over time since this is the cause of irregular spelling and pronunciation.

So I gave these aliens a language where, for the most part, every possible syllable had a single meaning and was written by a single symbol. These could be used as any part of speech (like the word "love", which can be either a noun or a verb, and with a little more modification can become various verb tenses, a whole array of compound nouns, and several different adjectives and adverbs including antonymic ones like "loveless" "unlovable" and "unloving"). I wanted the structure of the language to be harmonious with the philosophy, "How can you tell the dancer from the dance? Without the dance, there is no dancer; without the dancer, there is no dance. The two are one in the same."

One of the first core words I developed was "ral" meaning light. Adding s to the end of any syllable turned it into its antonym, so "rals" was darkness. Prefixing different consonants made the idea more specific: "gral" was sunlight, "vral" was warmth, "kral" fire, "dral" energeticness, mral "arousal", etc. And their opposites: "grals" shadow, "vrals" cold, "krals" ashes or extinguishing, "drals" antipathy, "mrals" disinterest or nausea.

For symbols I also wanted to use something basic and logical, so I used triangles, circles, squares, pluses, and Xes. I was unhappy to later find that multiple well-known codes had already done this, which would give my language's appearance connotations I didn't want. emo

IIRC, a syllabry is more along the lines of the Japanese language than what you're attempting right now. As in, their words are made entirely of short syllables (i.e. tsu, ki, ha, ne, and occasionally ending with a single "n" sound for Japanese).

Exercise in world-building? =<

Could possibly come in handy as far as quoted material goes, (reading something verbatim, snippits of dialogue, et cetera,) naming people or places, or even just getting a feel for the culture (as far as creating it goes).

Plus, it's fun. 3nodding