My thoughts on Cryptolangs
Sometimes, conlanging is too much work or it does not fit what one is going for in a project, whether it be a story or just a worldbuilding thought experiment. Sometimes, one just needs a way to make something strange without completely reinventing it. Sometimes, one just needs to create a cryptolang. But a cryptolang is just a cypher with extra steps, isn't it? Well, there could be more to this concept than meets the eye. A cryptolang's could have it's own interesting features without becoming a fully constructed language; its function can fit the themes of something being transformed into something else and can be applied to more smaller groups than an entire conlang for a larger one.
But what is a "Cryptolang?" According to @cryptolangsguy , "Cryptolangs are the perfect middle between conlangs and ciphers. They are tools which can be used to encode text, hide it's meaning but keep it pronounceable." How does it do that? By replacing phonemes with other ones. In fact, they could even replace all the consonants of a word with vowels and vowels with consonants, but that will be covered later. While the exact mechanisms of Cryptolangs are beyond the scope of this post, It is replacing letters with other letters. But it could be so much more than that.
Cryptolangs could be so much more than just a fancy cypher with extra steps, it could be creating a new language from an already existing one. For example, one could take all the letters of a word in the English language, take "green" for instance, and add the letters of that word to the end of the sentence in reverse order, producing "greenneerg." Now, comparisons are formed through the affixing of "-er" for comparatives and "-est" for superlatives to the end of a word. One could do the same for this theoretical cryptolang and produce the conjugated formes "greenerreneerg" and "greenesttseneerg" and that would be an interesting grammatical feature already because it already created infixes, affixes that go within a word. A strange feature indeed. But why stop there? Could there be another way of marking comparison? What if one were to create a new rule in which removing the first letter creates a comparative and the last one creates a superlative? Thus, we get "reenneerg" for "greener" and "greenneer" for "greenest." Does this count as a constructed language? maybe. But it is for sure that the aesthetic and grammar of the language is based on the already English language and grammar and the letters haven't even been rearranged yet. There is so much potential for using such transformations in a thematic way.
One of those themes could be the exploration of how an individual's physical transformation is reflected in their speech. For example, taking the above framework that has already been created, the individual who speaks this language could be obsessed with symmetry and balance. Thus, all the words they say become palindromes and the modifications reflect their own biases in choosing one side over another. Of course, this is more reverse engineering a theme from what one already has. A less cumbersome way would be to come up with the character's, well, character and build the features off of those aspects. Granted, this is more artistic than technical so what is considered for features can vary from creator to creator.
However, these features can be applied to individuals, small groups, or even entire nations, in larger number than a fully original constructed language. According to Mark Rosenfelder himself, the author of the Language Construction Kit, Advanced Language Construction, Conlangers' Lexipedia, and Syntax Construction Kit, the bulk of a conlang's work is in coming up with a lexicon, all the words. With a Cryptolang, a lexicon naturally arises from the changes one makes to the letters of each word with each rule laid out. Naturally, these letter changes can lead to mergers and synonyms. Though, theoretically, one can come up with ways to distinguish words from a source language. But that is a thought experiment for another day. What is possible is that one can create all sorts of cryptolangs by setting up rules, changing them, mixing them together, or stacking one set of cryptolang rules on top of another. It is relatively faster to create rules for a cryptolang's phonology and grammar than it is to come up with an entire lexicon in an original constructed language. Thus, one can create more cryptolangs in comparison to a single conlang.
So, in summary, Cryptolangs can have interesting features, they can reflect the lexical aspects of a character's physical transformation, and they can be more productive than conlangs. Hopefully, this badly worded essay will open you cryptolangers' eyes to the potential of these sorts of creations whether you are a veteran with a thousand under their belt or a rookie creating their very first. Thank you all for reading this, and till next time! ;)
