#magical languages

The Universal Translation Spell, or UTS, is an Inherent Magic that exists within the Magical Dimension. As the name suggests it translates common languages so that communication can occur between the various Planets and Civilisations of the Magical Dimension.

Every World has its own language, and while Planets with similar Thematic purposes might share a common Ancestral Language, each has developed its own unique dialect.

Because the purpose of the UTS is Common Communication it does not translate Dead, Ceremonial, or Magical languages which is why languages which fall out of use require specialist knowledge to interpret.

As languages evolve the UTS will adapt to compensate, but in instances where magic has become null for certain length of time (long enough for a linguistic shift) manual learning may be required.

For instance: When the Earth Fairies became separated from the Earth and magic became scarce, the UTS ceased to function on that Planet and the languages shifted in major ways. Had Roxy and the Winx Club not been present to act as intermediaries, the UTS as it affected the Earth Fairies would have attempted to build an understanding of Modern Earth Language from scratch.

This is because the UTS is technically not a blanket spell which exists everywhere at once, but something that exists within the people of the Magical Dimension, and has a greater flexibility and learning curve in those with stronger magical abilities.

(Everyone in the Magical Dimension has some level of magical ability and can therefore use the UTS, but if someone were to completely run out of magic, or if their magic were required for other things such as healing, they might temporarily lose the ability to use the UTS.)

Common Language often trickles through the populace, someone always knows someone who knows someone who knows a language, and that knowledge transfers with proximity between two people with the spell.

Bloom, as one of the only Fairies on Earth, had no-one to pick up 'language packets' from, and so had to learn any Earth language herself if she wished to speak it. The UTS makes unknown languages easier to understand and learn, but unless it is a well known language it does take time.

When Stella and Bloom first met, they entered 'proximity' to one another and their UTS were both updated with one another's Common Languages. If they had not met, it would have taken Stella several days of intentional learning to pick up the local language, the exact speed depending on how much magical energy Stella could spare for the task.

Some languages have Word Concepts which don't have an exact match in another language, in these instances the UTS will supply the closest matching word or phrase available. Sound thematic Fairies, such as music or language Fae have a unique ability to interact with another person's UTS and 'shuffle' it a little to ensure the best translation possible, even if it makes the sentences incredibly unwieldy.

When Flora declares her Power, Bloom hears 'Fairy of Nature', but what she actually says is a word that has no direct translation and means 'Fairy of -the Aspect of Nature which is all Plants-'.

Look, I get it. You want your conlang/magic script to look mystical, cryptic, special. You want it to look different than any other language while still looking like a language people write in. If you’re a spiritual person or magic-user this may even be a language you’re channeling and that you believe to be ancient in nature or otherwise pre-existing. But 95% of conlangs and magical scripts look totally fake and made-up, and this is not a judgment I’m casting on their actual grammatical structure or language theory or the languages they were based on. The thing that makes a language look like one people ever actually wrote in for hundreds of years, that makes it look like the letters/characters are all from the same language, is that it looks like a language that’s been written in whatever tools you are claiming or feel like it was traditionally written in.

Let’s take cuneiform:

Looks super-neat, right? Man, who’d ever think of having those wedges in an alphabet! It’s totally different than most modern languages out there and very distinctive, and the wedges are consistent across the letters, so it makes them all look like they’re from the same alphabet. This wasn’t just arbitrarily designed as a font style. There is a reason for this!

Cuneiform writing was pressed into wet clay with these shaped bits and that’s why it looks like that. It got stamped with wedges. That’s how (this type of) writing was done at the time. It’s a technological solution and that’s what makes the lettering get that peculiar stylization. You’ll get variants based on craftsmanship and tools, but basically the method is the same across various implementations. Once someone tried to write that in pencil, you could imagine it’d look different, and you’d see evidence of people’s hand-motion between strokes, becoming more of a tilt between letters.

For instance, English looks like it does, even in tumblr’s sans-serif fonts, because it can be constructed with a pen. When it gets fancy with a variable-width pressure-sensitive pen nib, you can get more complex and flowy, but notice the flow and arc still go with the movements natural for a hand to make:

Those little trails between letters exist today because nib pens were drippy and left ink trails. The written language adapted to the tools to incorporate the trails and still make it look legible, and that’s why we have cursive writing at all. This is a simplified history but it’s basically there to make you think about the letter shapes in various traditional ways of writing in English and why it looks like it does instead of like cuneiform.

Which brings me to conlangs. If you want your brand new ancient-looking language to truly look like people have used it for eons, write it out with the tools you think those people would have used, and keep adapting the letters if you find that, say, a brush or nib pen can’t construct the weird arcs and whirls you’ve designed the language to have. Languages by and large are made to be convenient to write. If you don’t know how to write kanji, Chinese words probably look complex and arbitrary to you. But their shapes are logical when you see them written with a brush:

So if you have some arcane-looking swooshy script but it still looks kind of fake, think about where the weight should really be. It should be where the brush presses down heavier and the trailing marks are where the brush lifts up (and usually leaves the paper and ends the stroke). Where the stroke is wide on one end is where the brush initially met the paper. Above, you can see how one swish immediately flows into another, the strokes are like arrows leading across the page when you understand how they’re created. Pick up a brush and figure out an actual stroke order for your symbol. If logically the stroke seems like it’d leave someone’s hand smearing it trying to follow its arc, then logically that symbol would eventually get redesigned if it were in an actual language. Someone would figure out a better way to write it and everyone would adopt that way over time.

So practice writing your language with different tools. Consider a calligraphy course or even just a kit with a guidebook (or youtube training videos!). Written language is a tool that people use, magical as it can be. And if you’re using it for magical purposes such as woodburning it into tools or painting it onto things or writing it onto paper, consider that your symbols will change a bit according to the tools, just like with mundane languages. A wedge-shaped wood burner will get you something a bit closer to cuneiform. A brush will get you something flowy and not super-precise. Pencil will not leave ink trails and will get you something more technical and practical. Your written language logically should shift for that and adapt like a proper tool. And if you do that right, if you really use it, then it will look much more genuine because it will have experienced an actual evolution of form adapting to the physical tools it’s been worked with via.

And if you’re not using it for magic but are just using it for a fantasy setting where people use it for magic in the story, all the above would still apply to them.

Even with just one symbol not meant to be in a greater language, think about the tool you’re creating it with. It’s hard to make a realistic brush-style symbol in pencil. Use the tool that fits the symbol and you’ll produce something much more genuine-looking.