On Making Up Words and Languages

When it comes to writing the sort of weird fantasy fiction I write, I need to come up with a lot of fake words. One of the major things about the Phoviverse is that humans practically don’t exist in the main universe. In fact, humans haven’t properly existed since the MK3 Phoviverse, where they did exist and they did live near some of the larger races (mostly the Temthan and Kronospast empires) but in MK4, humans were reduced to a handful of references as a single race that lived on a single planet deep within Kronospast territories, where the Kronospasts intentionally kept them isolated because the two other human colonies they had nuked each other. The only other reference to humans is in fact a reference to elves, as there was a team of anti-cult specialists in the Space Between Universes that would help destroy Voidborn-based slaver religions. And in the MK5 Phoviverse? There are no humans at all. The closest thing to humans in MK5 are the Lanex, who are humanoid, but they’re basically masked, humanoid versions of the Panthreanic races, the Rethavok and the Skyavok, who breed differently and coat their skin and natural armour in a special metal when they become adults and stop growing.

Anyway, from all that spiel about there lacking humans, you may have noticed that I threw in a LOT of made up words. Granted, all words are made up in a way, but in human-less fiction, you need to make up more words. And, occasionally, languages.

With words, I can create some cool-sounding things pretty easily. A lot of the time, I brutally twist Greek words into something vaguely cool. That’s how I came up with the term Thantophor, a sort of fucked up mess of the words “Θανατος” and “φέρω” or ‘Death” and the verb “ro bring”. Kinda ended up reusing the term later on as Deathbringer. However a lot of words are also kinda just, well, made up. Why are the lone humanoid-race Lanex called the Lanex? No real idea, it just sounded cool. The Rethavok however? The original MK1/MK2 Rethavok existed alongside a bunch of other races: the Threavok (which still exist today as Skyavok), the Hertavok, the Ethravok, the Athrevok (which technically only exist in name only) and the Trehavok. All of them are named after an anagram of the word ‘earth’ and the word ‘vok’ which I made up. No one’s ever noticed though, because why would they?

Now, technically, there are also languages in the Phoviverse. And, technically, one of them is actually a real language. However, I cheat. A lot. I’m actually bilingual, I speak English and Greek, I’ve done enough French and Spanish to know how the language kinda works, and I know a handful of Turkish words too. And I cheat in-universe too. Because deities are 100% a thing in the Phoviverse, current canon is that the female deities gave languages to most of the Phoviverse’s races, and that language is basically English. At the same time, a super common power that most god-like beings have is the ability to auto-translate most languages.

However, for LORE reasons, there are languages used by other beings. Both Life Goddesses and Voidborns are a type of deity that have their own languages that are utterly incomprehensible to beings that aren’t Life Goddesses or Voidborns. The Xa Thimiouyalagi is the Language of the Zontania (the technical name for Life Goddesses) and, when spoken, is a bit like the audible version of casually glancing at an Elder Scroll. Kainic, the language of the Voidborns, just appears blank or silent when you attempt to view or see it. In the mean time, the Theoglossa is a somewhat readable off-shoot of Xa Thimiouyalagi made by a stupidly powerful (and now undead) Life Goddess by the name of Kinisis, and was adapted by the four true deities she created.

In all honesty, Theoglossa is mostly just Greek written in English/Latin characters, and the corrupted version spoken by Kinisis is Greek but with a ton of extra syllables thrown in. There are also two mortal languages based on the Theoglossa (which one of the deities admits he made for a joke to piss off the other gods), and one of them is Greek but super-heavily truncated, and the other is Greek written backwards. Which, although, it does look cool, the majority of words end up starting with the same handful of letters, mostly S and O.

Still, even if the languages aren’t real (or are just real languages), having just the idea of a language does a lot to flesh things out. I mean, just look at Bionicle. Yes, I know I go on about it a lot (the Phoviverse did start off as awkward Bionicle fan fiction) but look at the cool Bionicle alphabet! It’s weird and alien and confusing, even if it’s literally just English with different characters. It makes things more realistic. Because these are fantasy worlds, and expecting everyone to speak normal English is kinda weird.

Although, admittedly, I should make my own language. But making your own language is super hard. And borrowing from other languages is fine. Real languages borrow from each other all the time, so fake languages can borrow from each other too. I have to believe that borrowing from other languages is fine, because I speak English, which does nothing but borrow to and borrow from other languages…