Writing a Foreign Tongue

So throughout book two of the Knight's Journey I have been introducing a lot of new characters. With Rowan travelling to Lauratrea, many of these characters are Lauratrean. I'm having a blast with it because I can play with the new characters and give them strange cultural mannerisms and stuff. I can also make them speak in another language.

Now this was really fun at first. I got to make up a way of speaking and create new words that sound cool. I made my own curses too (obviously that was the first thing I did). But it got really difficult really fast, and not just in the obvious ways. Yes it is difficult to create a new language with its own sentence structure, words, and all the other wordy meat that makes up a language. I cheated and used English as a base and just changed the words and sentence structure. Not to hard. It's basically like writing pig-latin where you mess with the words, but can still sort of tell what was being said originally. But even so, it's really annoying to stop in the middle of typing normally and then start slowly typing a single sentence, creating about half of the words as I go.

I suppose I could just highlight those sentences as I go and translate them later, but no. I won't do that. I like to have things done as I do them so I don't have to come back later. Besides, there's the annoying hassle of having some characters who speak both languages and switch back and forth. They even do it mid-conversation sometimes. I'm actually starting to hate them for it, because they make my life difficult.

So here's the kicker: I've got like three chapters where Rowan is travelling with a group (all Lauratrean) and he doesn't know the language.

Now obviously Rowan is going to need to learn the Lauratrean language. Otherwise I am going to have an entire book with him interacting only by gesturing and drawing crude pictures (Rowan can't draw to save his life). So yeah, he needs to learn Lauratrean. It'll make his life easier and my life easier (I care more about mine than his though). Also, once he learns the language I can write dialogue that is in the language without translating it because he will understand the words (most of them at least).

But I still have a bunch of scenes where people are talking and arguing and none of it will make much sense to the reader. So I guess I'll have to do something about that.

At least now I can curse in my own language.

tch'ek