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Hieroglyphs vs real life examples:

Egyptian vulture (ꜣ = “ah”)

flowering reed  (i = “ee”)

quail chick (w = “oo”)

reed mat (p)

reed basket (k)

For example, the White Chapel birds/glyphs overall look like this:

They are supremely detailed and quite honestly a lot of Egyptologists agree that Senwosret I commissioned some of the most beautiful hieroglyphic inscriptions in existence with the White Chapel.

And this is an example from the tomb of Seti I, where the carved details are additionally highlighted by the paint work:

As you can see, both the vulture and the quail chick have a similar type of detail compared to the White Chapel.

But then we also have incriptions like this one of Intef, chancellor during the reign of Hatshepsut/Thutmose III, which is a low relief and, as you can see, a lot simpler:

Still great craftsmanship, mind you, and you can still tell birds apart. Monumental inscriptions are by and large the most detailed because of the medium (stone), though even when written with ink on papyrus or pot sherds we are able to discern each bird from the other because of their respective unique features.

Egyptian paleography and epigraphy are honestly amazing, you can tell for instance when several workmen worked on the same inscription/stelae (happened a lot!) just by looking at things like the spacing, glyph height, the small idiosyncracies I mentioned above, etc. Sometimes the differences are minute, sometimes they’re very clear.

Hey there Lexiconga users! If you use the Safari browser on any Apple devices (the default engine for iOS, iPad, and MacBook) and you've been relying on Lexiconga's offline mode (i.e. you don't have an account), then you should make an export of your dictionary AS SOON AS POSSIBLE and start using a different browser for Lexiconga. Or you can create an account to make sure your data is saved on our server.

If I'm scaring you, then that's Apple's fault. According to this post back in March that I completely missed until today, Apple has been working toward updating their Safari browser in a few good ways and one very questionable way: Safari will automatically remove local data from your browser if you haven't used the site in 7 days. Included in this list is the common browser storage called "localStorage," which Lexiconga exclusively uses to store offline data.

Which means that if 1) you don't have an account, 2) you're using Safari, and 3) you don't use Lexiconga at least once per week, your dictionary will disappear unless you're regularly exporting it to make backups.

(Making an account will make sure that your dictionary(/ies) are safely stored in our database so that even if Safari clears your data, you can just log in to get it back again.)

This is extremely frustrating because I really like Safari otherwise! I made Lexiconga offline-first because I didn't want to force people to create accounts just to use the tool. But if you're not already using a different browser that will keep your localStorage where you put it (like Firefox), then your Lexiconga dictionary is not safe unless you're making backups or/and have an account.

One irritating and dangerous caveat is that on iOS, all browsers use the Safari engine and are just styled differently! Just because your iPhone or iPad's browser is called Firefox or Chrome (confusingly) doesn't mean that you're exempt—it's Safari under the hood. On a MacBook, you're fine—Firefox and Other browsers actually are different than Safari—but iOS forces developers to use Safari as their browser engine. This may change someday, but as far as I know, Safari is still the only browser engine for iOS.

Anyway, everyone else who's not using Safari should be fine. Just keep an eye out for updates to your browser that restrict, reduce, or remove localStorage specifically if you want to keep using Lexiconga. I'll be trying to research better solutions for those of you who want to avoid creating an account, but for now, please just be sure to make regular backups if you don't have an account!

Happy conlanging,

I would probably only have it display on Safari browsers, but it would essentially be exactly the same as the Import/Export functionality already usable from the dictionary settings menu except in a more easily-accessible location.

Another option that might work is to save Lexiconga to your home page and just use it from there instead. I haven't extensively tested this, but it might be a good option because this apparently keeps its own 7-day timer that's based only on when it's opened, which should make your offline dictionary permanent...but I haven't tested it so I can't be 100% sure.

Anyway, if you have any thoughts on this or experience with using Lexiconga's offline mode in the Safari browser, please let me know!

1. babble in gibberish for 3 - 5 seconds ( give yourself more time or do it in your head if you have speech delay or stutter) and then write all the sounds down.

2. Congratulations, this is your entire phonetic inventory. Assuming you have some to choose from, pick one consonant at random. If not, write down the first consonant that comes into your head.

3. Words can only end in either a vowel or this consonant. If you didn't make any vowel sounds before, speak in gibberish again making only vowel sounds for 3 - 5 seconds and add them to your inventory.

Once you start coming up with words however, do yourself a favor and avoid using Excel or Word or something and use something like ConWorkShop.com or Lexiconga instead! ConWorkShop is a powerful tool with lots of linguistic flourish to help you round out your conlang plus a community and automatic linking between your words and the same words in other conlangs! Lexiconga is super fast, simple, and works entirely offline, though creating an account lets you access dictionaries from any computer and also store more than one dictionary much more easily. You can also (completely optionally) make your dictionary public so you can easily share it with others! Here are some of my (unfinished) conlangs in Lexiconga to give you an idea of what you can do with it: Gobahai, Ehw

I've been wanting to remove Lexiconga's advertisements for a while now, and I finally got a chance to do it today! The ads were essentially only there in the first place to 1) advertise my other personal projects, 2) give friends free exposure for cool things they did, and 3) to see if anyone else would be willing to help me pay for Lexiconga's hosting in exchange for exposure. Ultimately, they just ended up being an annoyance that didn't help anybody at all, which is the opposite of Lexiconga's purpose.

So I've finally just removed them wholesale.

That being said, I'm still hosting Lexiconga entirely on my own dollar, and while it's not that much of a burden for me, I would love to know that other people also like Lexiconga and want it to stay online! I know people use it and enjoy it (including myself), but I'd love to get some kind of monetary thank-you every now and again.

That sounded a little ominous... Let me say here and now in case I haven't before:

I intend to keep Lexiconga online for as long as I possibly can, hopefully indefinitely!

I make enough money from my day job to keep it online, but it would be a dream come true if Lexiconga could support its own costs from donations! It might also motivate me to work on that backlog of new features that I've been setting aside for a while now...

Anyway, if you want to donate, first of all thank you! You can do that using the "Support Lexiconga" button in the site footer on https://lexicon.ga, which will take you to LibraPay, but there are also other links on that page to other popular services (BuyMeACoffee & Ko-fi) as well.

Thanks so much for your support, and I hope you enjoy the new ad-free Lexiconga experience!

Sometimes I get asked for feedback about languages, or get asked to for commissions, but I also get questions of the sort “What is the easiest way for a non-language-geek to create a language that’s just “good enough”?” for background purposes in some fictional setting. So I thought I’d post my thoughts on this.

First, a caveat - as you are probably aware - realism and depth are proportional to the time put into the language. They are also a spectrum, so “how much” is enough can be hard to answer. Additionally, if you succeed and make it interesting enough, fans will want to poke around and find out how it works. Then they will realize whether there’s more to the language or not. (And possibly make their own version of it.) You’re better off creating more depth and detail than you need, because trying to flesh out something AFTER the fact is much more difficult. You will end up with inconsistencies and explaining them away will eventually take more work than creating a detailed grammar in the first place. From my experience working on languages with people who had already named characters before trying to make the language, making a language invariably ends up forcing name changes.

(1800-word wall of text to follow)

Why the fuck is it so hard to make a realistic fictional language?!

I have literally scoured the deepest, darkest places of the internet to try and understand how to make my own fictional language that is important to story but I just don’t get it.

I have watched behind the scenes Star Trek, Game of Thrones, and Avatar to try and understand how they came up with such beautiful and articulate languages but once again, came up empty, it’s like trying to explain physics to a donkey AKA me.

Can you help me? And if you can, please explain it to me like I am a dumb toddler trying to learn how to write my name for the first time?

Oof. Now, there's many conlang guides out there, but they're all for people who actually like conlanging and I, dear reader, do not. I hate conlanging, I suck at it, and analytic grammar is a consistent foe of mine that I cannot beat. But, conlanging is one of the best ways to introduce a whole heaping helping of realism to your setting as well as getting you to really think about how said setting works as you need to figure out what would have an individual word and why. Now that'll make sense in a moment, I promise.

But first...

Jack's Quick 'n Dirty Guide To Conlangs For If You Hate Conlanging

Step One: sounds.

Sounds (ha!) easy right? Weeeeeell... yes and no. Now, the easy part is making the sounds, really. Just start babbling in a way that you want your conlang to sound like and get going! Sing a bit, put on whatever accent you want, really have some fun with it until it sounds right. You got that? Good, now note that down in plain text as best as you can. Do whatever makes sense to you, but make sure you know exactly how to pronounce the sound once you've annotated it so you can reproduce it later, trust me on this one. But now comes the hard part.

Step Two: IPA

If you don't know what IPA is, bless your heart you innocent soul, you're about to learn something that will make you lose a bit of innocence today. IPA stands for the International Phonetic Alphabet and it can annotate the exact pronunciation of any words in any language in the world. If you've ever had a dictionary in front of you and you see that little section underneath the word where it's written again but like, with upside down Es and symbols that look like æ and đ and even ɮ? Congrats, you know what IPA looks like. Now, this thing was designed by some very clever people with an eye for thoroughness but not for practicality. See, it can notate every pronunciation there is, but boy oh boy, will it not make that easy for you. Read up on it anyway, learn how to use it, pull out an afternoon for it, you're gonna need it. IPA Chart is a good website that will help you out here, it's an interactive version of the IPA alphabet with short pronunciation sound clips attached to each symbol. Done all that? Good. Now we get to the really bitchy part.

Step Three: notate every funny sound you made down in IPA

Yes, every single one. Pull up an excel spreadsheet, notate the plain text in one column, a pronunciation in the second, and leave a third open for later. Notate every single word as best as you can, and make sure to save your work. This is gonna be long work, this is gonna be tedious work, and it's gonna be necessary work. You won't like it, you won't have fun, but future you will thank you and you would do anything for that bitch so get notating until you get to

Step Four: What does anything even mean????

Finally, some fun again. Now we get to the part where you get to assign meaning to each sound you've produced. Remember how I advised you to sing a little song? Yeah? Excellent. A quick and easy way to get a bunch of words sorted is to write a roughly similar song in a language that does exist and one you preferably understand already, and use that as a "guide" of what each word is "supposed" to mean. Make your own rosetta stone! Give yourself a break, trust me, it's much easier this way. And don't be afraid to get creative. See one sound or syllable you used a lot? Great, that can be a pronoun or an article or something else that's often used in a language.

Example: I liked the word "ra" a lot, so that's the word for "I" in Karilaa. From there I picked a few other words I liked and roughly hashed out the following

Ra = I

Ta = You

Su = We

Vu = They

Easy, good, simple. I don't bother with gender because fuck gender, but if you want it, go for it champ, now's the time. And you know what else I noticed while doing this? I was using "ra" and "ta" a lot in the last syllables of words, so I figured out how tenses work in my language as well in one fell swoop and made them affixes to verbs.

Really, there are no rules, so make them up to suit whatever aesthetic you want your language to have, but make sure to write everything down. No exceptions. Everything has to be written down.

Step Five: Rinse and repeat

Congrats, you now have some basics of a language! You can basically use and reuse this recipe to get More Language of the language you already have and guess what! Now you already have some language so you won't have to start from scratch! It's like a sourdough starter! Now ain't that neat. Now, if you do this and keep meticulous notes like I told you to you'll essentially be building up your own dictionary as you go, ready to consult for all your future conlanging needs.

Now, is this how good conlangers do it? No! Hell no! Absolutely not! But I'm not a good conlanger, and if you want this guide, neither are you. I'm sorry, but I'd rather you hear it from me than them when they invoke J.R.R. Tolkien's ghost to roast you. This is a guide for people who want a conlang but suck at conlanging. This is a guide for people who can't do it all neat and according to the rules but need to brute force a bitch in order to get some practical results for immediate use.

While technically Bodhan is a conlang in its own right, I think I might hold off talking about how the language itself works for now because in fairness, this is primarily a naming lang. 

The IPA included doesn’t include context, but the short explanation is that some consonants soften in the presence of “i” and “e” to the second consonant shown. This definitely isn’t a perfect system and I think in hindsight I wouldn’t have “th” and “dh” entirely independent phonemes, and ditching the short vowel marker entirely because it is frankly redundant.

The concept of this script (and language) was a “sci-fi” appropriate alphasyllabary script that would look cool on the dash screen of a space ship. I think I overall achieved this goal, although the standout detail to me that I like enough I want to use again is the way the vowels are represented. The initial vowels are simply a rounded box with a single additional line to distinguish between the four, and in the CV forms the consonant radiates from a smaller version of the initial vowels. It’s not a very natural way for a script to develop but considering the setting this was made for, it is not unreasonable for it to have been made by a committee of a bunch of graphic designers. Which is to say, in-universe a neography as well as out. This script was made pretty quickly in fonstruct, the tables in WPS Office, and while this script isn’t ideal for writing English it is probably the easiest of my creations so far to learn. A nickpicky issue I have with this script is that there is a slight kerning issue with some of the characters, but they could be fixed easily enough if I wanted to work with it further.

(I cross mine from R to L, but Jake does his straight through)

I was watching a kdrama and they were tallying a vote and I was just like: 😍😍😍😍

Cus I’d never considered the cultural implications of tally marks. Lol, I just thought lines to five are lines to 5, ya know? Then I read the whole wiki page and now I want to learn more!

You know what analytical/isolating, agglutinative, and fusional languages are, I presume. You’ve heard about heads and dependents and word-orders, you can tell the difference between head-initial and head-final. You know what SOV, SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS, and OSV mean, and which ones like prepositions and which ones like postpositions. Maybe you know what an ergative language is. Is that all? What else do you know about your language? Some things to think  about:

Does your language have vowel harmony? OK, but does it have consonant harmony?

What restrictions does it place on the shape of roots? Are they different from restrictions on the shape of words or syllables? Can the same phoneme occur twice in a root? Are phonemes from the same class required, or banned?

Is its prosody stress-timed, syllable-timed, or mora-timed?

If it’s tonal, does it have contour tones? Is tone lexically determined? Does each syllable have marked tone?

Does your language mark grammatical relations in clauses? Does it bother to mark them at all?

Is your language accusative, ergative, tripartite, transitive, or neutral?

Is your ergative language totally ergative or split-ergative?

Does it have active-stative alignment? What determines the alignment of intransitive subjects? The semantics of the subject? The semantics of the verb? Something else?

Is it a topic-prominent language?

Does it use some other system, like an Austronesian ‘trigger’ system, or direct-inverse marking? What determines the order / marking of the arguments? An animacy hierarchy?

Does it mark experiencers of experiential verbs like agents or patients or something else?

Does your language have any ditransitive verbs? Is it dechticaetive or secundative?

Can a sentence omit any argument of the verb? Only the subject? No arguments at all?

What is the word order, and what determines it?

Is it consistently head-final or head-initial, or mixed? And where does the split occur?

Is there V2 order, or another unusual order?

Do certain structures, like subordinate clauses or questions, require different orders?

Does something other than syntactic relations determine word order?

Do relative clauses precede their head, or follow their head, or does it have internally-headed relative clauses?

Does it use a relative pronoun, another linking word, a special inflection, or no marking on the relative clause?

Does it allow gaps in a relative clause, or require resumptive pronouns?

Does it use some less common relativization strategy, like correlative constructions?

Is your language highly deranking? Are coordinate or subordinate constructions more marked?

Do you allow serial verbs?

Is your language head-marking or dependent-marking? Or double-marking? Or zero-marking? Or marks relations on something else?

Is your language inconsistent in marking type? Where does the split occur? Is there a pattern? (E.g., head-marked clauses and dependent-marked noun phrases in Bantu.)

Is your language synthetic?

Does your language have derivational morphology, but no inflectional morphology?

Do morphemes tack on to each other like legos, one after the other, in linear order? Or not?

Does it have portmanteau morphemes?

Does it have non-concatenating morphology?

Does it have templatic morphology (e.g., Semitic triliteral roots)

Is there a limit to the number of morphemes you can tack onto a root?

Do the morphemes occur in a fixed order, or can you change the order, say to indicate scope?

Do you allow multiple roots in one word form, or does each complex word have only one root, no matter how many derivations and inflections you apply to it?

Can verbs incorporate multiple verb roots?

Can verbs incorporate nouns?

If a verb incorporates a possessed noun, does the possessor get marked on its person-marking

How many different arguments are indexed in your verbs’ person-marking? None? Only subject? Subject and object? Indirect objects too? Non-core arguments?

How do you construct comparatives?

Do you use a case form or adposition, or a particle like ‘than’?

Do you have ‘exceed’ comparatives, positive-negative comparatives, or topical comparatives?

Are motion events verb-framing or satellite-framing?

For satellite-framing languages, are the motion verbs manner-conflating or figure-conflating? Or even ground-conflating?

Do you mark evidentiality?

Do you distinguish alienable and inalienable possession?

Does your language have a copula? Multiple copulas? Does it have a separate existential verb? Does it have a ‘have’ verb?