I’ve been playing with ChatGPT lately to see what it can do. I’ve used it at work to write bits of code for projects or had it create character descriptions and write outlines for stories. Today I decided to ask it for recipe ideas.
When using ChatGPT, I’ve found that the more specific the question, the better the answer. I guess it’s a lot like Deep Thought from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Chat:
MT: I have some frozen squid. What can I make with it in a mediterranean style?
ChatGPT: With frozen squid, you can create a delicious Mediterranean-style dish. One popular option is to make stuffed squid with a flavorful filling and cook it in a tomato-based sauce. Here’s a recipe to guide you:
Mediterranean Stuffed Squid with Tomato Sauce:
Ingredients:
1 pound frozen squid, thawed
1/2 cup breadcrumbs
1/4 cup grated Parmesan cheese
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 small onion, finely chopped
2 tablespoons olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste
For the Tomato Sauce:
1 can (14 ounces) crushed tomatoes
2 tablespoons tomato paste
2 garlic cloves, minced
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano
1/2 teaspoon dried basil
1/4 teaspoon red pepper flakes (optional)
Salt and pepper to taste
Instructions:
Preheat the oven to 375°F (190°C).
Start by cleaning the squid: Remove the tentacles and set them aside. Rinse the squid bodies under cold water, removing any innards. Pat them dry with a paper towel.
In a bowl, combine the breadcrumbs, grated Parmesan cheese, chopped parsley, minced garlic, chopped onion, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Mix well until all the ingredients are evenly combined.
Stuff each squid body with the breadcrumb mixture, leaving a little room at the top to secure the filling. Close the squid bodies using toothpicks or small skewers.
In a baking dish, combine the crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, minced garlic, dried oregano, dried basil, red pepper flakes (if using), salt, and pepper. Stir well to combine the ingredients.
Place the stuffed squid in the tomato sauce in the baking dish. Add the tentacles to the dish as well.
Cover the baking dish with foil and bake in the preheated oven for about 25-30 minutes or until the squid is cooked through and tender.
Remove the foil and cook for an additional 10 minutes to allow the squid to brown slightly.
Once cooked, remove the toothpicks or skewers from the squid bodies before serving.
Serve the stuffed squid with the tomato sauce, either as a main dish or over cooked pasta or rice.
Enjoy your delicious Mediterranean-style stuffed squid with tomato sauce!
Tell me more!
MT: Where did you find this recipe?
ChatGPT: As an AI language model, I don’t have direct access to the internet or specific recipe databases. However, I have been trained on a diverse range of data, including recipes from various cuisines, so I can generate recipes based on that knowledge. The recipe I provided is a common method for preparing stuffed squid with a Mediterranean twist, incorporating typical ingredients and flavors found in Mediterranean cuisine.
Servings
MT: How many servings does this recipe make?
ChatGPT: The given recipe for Mediterranean Stuffed Squid with Tomato Sauce can typically serve about 4 servings, depending on the size of the squid and the appetites of the individuals. Adjustments can be made based on your specific needs or the number of people you are serving.
Nutrition
MT: What is the nutritional values of the recipe?
ChatGPT: Here’s an approximate nutritional breakdown for the Mediterranean Stuffed Squid with Tomato Sauce recipe, per serving:
Please note that these values are estimates and can vary based on the specific brands and quantities of ingredients used. It’s always a good idea to double-check the nutritional information for the specific ingredients you use, especially if you have specific dietary needs or restrictions.
Shopping List
MT: Can you create a shopping list based on this recipe?
ChatGPT: Certainly! Here’s a shopping list based on the Mediterranean Stuffed Squid with Tomato Sauce recipe:
1 pound frozen squid
Breadcrumbs
Grated Parmesan cheese
Fresh parsley
Garlic cloves
Small onion
Olive oil
Salt
Pepper
Crushed tomatoes (1 can, 14 ounces)
Tomato paste
Dried oregano
Dried basil
Red pepper flakes (optional)
Toothpicks or small skewers
You may already have some of these ingredients in your pantry, so be sure to check your supplies before heading to the store. Enjoy your cooking!
Does it work?
I spot checked the recipe against other recipes I found online like it. It should work well. I plan on trying it at home this week. I’ll let you know how it turns out.
I recently read Redshirts by John Scalzi. Though it won the Hugo award in 2013, I just got around to reading it now. It made me love John Scalzi’s writing.
<<<SPOILERS>>>
The characters are inside a science fiction narrative that is not very well written, though the book itself is very well written, with compelling and witty characters. In the story, the fictional characters are real people living out a narrative that intrudes on their “real world”
The story is a spoof of Star Trek-like tv shows. The story is set on a starship, the Universal Union Capital Ship Intrepid, flagship of the Universal Union. This is a thinly veiled copy of the United Federation of Planets Starship Enterprise.
I loved the self awareness of the characters in the story. The entire point is that the characters realize they are characters in a narrative. I enjoy self referential stories. It reminded me of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. Recursion and self reference are the main theme of that book.
This book pokes fun at bad science fiction writing. It particularly singles out the use of “Plot armor”. I.e. main characters survive episode after episode, but minor characters die off regularly to create a sense of danger. The title of this book references this phenomenon. On Star Trek, the security officers wearing red shirts were often the first to die. This was mainly because, as security officers, they were in the way of danger. Consequently, a newly-introduce character who died in one episode came to be called a “red shirt“.
This is why Game of Thrones was so shocking when G.R.R. Martin killed off Ned Stark at the end of the first book and at the end of the first season on TV. Most readers thought he was a main character. The fact that he was killed came as a shock to readers and viewers alike.
Plot Synopsis
There are multiple layers to the story in Redshirts. First is the characters figuring out what is wrong. Once they figure out what is happening, they have to solve the problem. This requires going up one level in the narrative. Again, this reminds me of the Little Harmonic Labyrinth of Gödel, Escher, Bach.
The smart and sarcastic Ensign Andrew Dahl is one of the titular red shirts. Dahl is assigned to a lab where the crew disappears every time one of the Bridge Crew arrives, usually Science Officer Q’eeng.
Dahl and his fellow Redshirts meet Jenkins, who went into hiding years before. He lets them in on the fact that something is wrong with the Bridge Crew.
The Narrative
The Bridge Crew acts differently in moments of High Drama. Their actions often create that drama, though they are unaware of it. High Drama occurs when the Bridge Crew shows up in the “Narrative”. There are lots of coincidences involving the main redshirts. You get the sense they are growing plot armor.
“Every battle is designed for maximum drama,” says Jenkins. “This is what happens when the Narrative takes over. Things quit making sense. The laws of physics take a coffee break. People stop thinking logically and start thinking dramatically.”
Dahl senses it when the lab uses The Box to discover a solution to a problem in the nick of time. Again High Drama resolves the crisis with no scientific explanation (Deus Ex Machina). The Redshirts have multiple adventures, usually with High Drama when bridge crew are involved. Again, each situation is resolved with unscientific neatness. In the process, many other Redshirts die.
The main characters discover the “Effect” and figure out a way to fix it. They have to go back in time (also a Star Trek trope) and find the writers of the show they are living in and convince them to write better. This is meta. It’s not just time travel to fix the past, but convincing the writers that wrote them to save their lives. Add to the fact that a writer is writing this and it becomes more meta. See Little Harmonic Labyrinth.
The characters meet the actors that play their characters in the series. They use this information to help the show’s producer and convince him to improve the writing.
There are three Codas at the end of the book that emphasize the point. They aren’t central to the story, but if you like the theme of it, the Codas are pretty cool.
When worldbuilding, politics and government are fundamental aspects of the world you create. How does your character interact with government agents? Are there government agents? Does your protagonist or antagonist have a political view? It’s hard given the state of politics in the United States today to think anyone wouldn’t. As a result, perhaps your characters maintain opposing political views. This might give them the motivation for their actions, thereby creating the drama for your story.
When writing speculative fiction, it is easy to forget about the politics of your world. Lazy writers will default to clichés. Too frequently, mediocre writers set their fantasy story in medieval feudalism. Similarly, futuristic science fiction relies on some form of fascism or universal democracy. Don’t fall into this trap.
History of Politics
Politics has been a feature of human society since the beginning. Therefore, one must imagine politics and government came long before civilization. Other primates also have forms of social organization. Similar to their primate cousins, paleolithic humans lived with their families in band societies as hunter-gatherers. See Worldbuilding 102 – Caste, Class, and Clan in Fantasy Societies.
The earliest evidence of prehistoric warfare is during the Mesolithic era approximately fourteen thousand years ago. Moreover, with war comes diplomacy. The first evidence of diplomacy was well into the Bronze Age in Egypt. On the other hand, we must imagine some form of formalized contact between tribal bands before that.
Tribal social organization first emerged in the agricultural revolution, in about the eighth or ninth millennium BCE. The development of agriculture led to higher populations. As a result, denser societies grew in inequality, developing political and social hierarchies.
The first small city-states appeared at the beginning of the Bronze Age about five thousand years ago. Subsequently, by the third to second millennium BCE, some of these had developed into larger kingdoms and empires. See Worldbuilding 102 – Creating Cities in a Fantasy Society.
Some societies created governments based on the tribal structure they grew out of. For example, Rome formalized the tribes that made up Roman society. The words tribune and tribute derive from the Latin word for tribe.
When worldbuilding politics and government, think about the range of possible governmental systems. After all, political scientists since the time of Plato have classified governments into various types. The most familiar are monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy. A monarchy is rule by a single individual. This group includes kingdoms, dictatorships, and tyrannies.
Oligarchy is rule by an elite minority. For example there are the aristocracy, plutocracy, and rule by a racial minority.
Democracy is rule by the people as a whole either through direct or representative democracy. Direct democracy usually involves initiative or referendum. Representative democracy includes republics and parliamentary systems.
On the other hand, anthropologists classify political systems differently.
Tribes are generally larger. They usually consist of many families. Typically, tribes have more complex social institutions, including chiefs or councils of elders. In addition, they are generally more permanent than bands. Often, tribes are sub-divided into bands.
Men of the Shkreli tribe at the feast of Saint Nicholas at Bzheta in Shkreli territory, Albania, 1908. Edith Durham, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Chiefdoms are more complex than tribes or band, though they are less complex than a state or empire. Centralized authority is the main feature of a chiefdom. People living in tribes and bands are more or less on the same footing. On the other hand, those living in chiefdoms face inequality. Consequently, a single family of an elite class rules the chiefdom. In addition, complex chiefdoms can have multiple levels of political hierarchy. Small kingdoms, duchies, or other feudal units fall into this category.
A sovereign state has a permanent population, a defined territory, and a centralized government. Also, they have the capacity to enter into relations with other sovereign states. Certainly, this form of government is the most recognized in the modern era, though it was less common in medieval Europe.
Empires are widespread states ruled by a single person. They can consist of multiple kingdoms or other polities. Some empires included democratic features. Their wealth often allowed them to build city infrastructures. Similarly, their political control maintained order among diverse communities. Such political control often required complex governmental structures.
Leagues are international alliances of states with a common purpose. Often, leagues form under military or economic pressures. Often, representatives of all involved nations meet in a neutral location. For instance, the European Union in modern times or the Delian League of ancient Greece are both leagues.
These large categories mask a complex set of governmental types too numerous to list here. Click this link for a list of various types of governments.
Political Divisions in Fantasy Societies
The main benefit of worldbuilding politics and government is having clearly defined political divisions. These divisions are a vast resource to mine for dramatic conflict. Above all, divisions arise from differing views on how best to govern a society. Often, such divisions are ideological. Other times, factions might simply be jockeying for control of resources. Also, reasons for political division overlap. Factions with non-competing views might form larger factions, such as the Republican or Democratic parties in the United States.
In short, to find the political divisions in your worldbuilding, examine the societies you have created so far. Look to economic, class, or religious differences.
Economics and Class
In Worldbuilding 102 – Economics in Fantasy Societies Part 1, I asked whether we need to define economics to write a fantasy story. Certainly, worldbuilding politics and government is where it pays off. Economics is about providing people with the resources to survive or thrive. Consequently, the debate over allocation of resources creates conflict. In the context of a political system, that conflict creates factions.
The Bazaar of Athens by Edward Dodwell, 1821. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In Worldbuilding 102 – Caste, Class, and Clan in Fantasy Societies, I wrote that social structures divide people into groups and define a person’s position in society. As a result, these groups tend to share common interests in advancing or maintaining social status. Often, this can be the basis of a political faction.
A symbolic image of three orders of feudal society in Europe prior to the French Revolution. M. P., Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Religion and Philosophy
In addition, religion and philosophy are basically explanations for how the world works. These world views provide rallying points for political factions you can use in worldbuilding politics and government. For more, see Worldbuilding 102 – Religion and Philosophy
After all, ideology is a powerful political motivator. Anyone growing up in the 20th century recognizes the power of political ideology in the conflict between communism and capitalism. Similarly, in ancient times rulers claimed authority from the will of god or the gods. This was true in pagan Rome, Christian Byzantium, China, Egypt, and most other ancient civilizations.
In Rules for Rulers, CGP Grey laid out the actual mechanism through which rulers apply political power. Rulers gain power and maintain it by balancing the needs of key supporters, no matter the type of government. Grey used an argument fromThe Dictator’s Handbook. The ruler achieves political balance by implementing three basic rules. 1. Get key supporters on your side, 2. Control the treasure, and 3. Minimize key supporters.
“No matter how bright the rays of any sun king: No man rules alone. A king can’t build roads alone, can’t enforce laws alone, can’t defend the nation or himself, alone. The power of a king is not to act, but to get others to act on his behalf, using the treasure in his vaults. A king needs an army, and someone to run it. Treasure and someone to collect it. Law and someone to enforce it. The individuals needed to make the necessary things happen are the king’s keys to power. All the changes you wish to make are but thoughts in your head if the keys will not follow your commands.” CGP Grey.
The application of these rules in a given situation could form the basis of a good political thriller, whether modern, historical, or fantasy.
As I have said many times, the core of a good story is the drama created by conflict between characters. Politics is a gold mine for conflict and drama, especially the politics of personal relationships.
I have laid out a number of potential political conflicts within a society that might lead to political factions. Now comes the time in worldbuilding your politics and government to decide how to apply them.
The source of magic among the Töpfumaar Daaškhōhu is human sacrifice. Consequently, the central feature of their society is human sacrifice and slavery. They might take slaves from among their own people. More often, they will go to war or raid the Silvans to capture slaves. In addition, Hillfolk will trade slaves for grain or other goods.
Töpfumaar Daaškhōhu cultural area of Pancirclea. Image by Michael Tedin.
Social Divisions in Töpfumaar Daaškhōhu
In Worldbuilding 102 – Caste, Class, and Clan in Fantasy Societies, I chose a caste system for the Töpfumaar Daaškhōhu. There are four castes: warriors and rulers, scholars and priests, merchants, and peasants. Religious rules and sacred texts govern relations between the castes. In addition, there is a large underclass of slaves made up mainly of Silvans. This underclass exists outside the caste system. Only the top two castes of warrior rulers and scholar priests may own slaves and only their owners may interact with them.
Powerful banking and trading clans are members of the merchant caste. These clans profit from the slave trade. In addition, the warrior and ruler caste borrows from banking clans to finance their wars.
The scholar and priest caste supports the entire system by enforcing religious rules. These rules govern the class and caste divisions of their society. This caste includes mages and priests. Both need slaves and ritual sacrifice to cast spells to maintain their power and the power of the ruling elite.
Now that we have an idea of the social groupings, we can begin worldbuilding politics and government. The outline of the social structure shows a clear conflict between the upper castes and slaves. Being outside the caste system, slaves have no official political power. That power is held solely by the warrior and ruler caste.
That does not mean other groups have no political influence. After all, political influence is often exercised by the application of other types of power. For example, merchants can use the power of the purse to cut off finance from the rulers. Priests can interpret religious rules in the rulers’ favor or not. Slaves and peasants have few political levers other than the potential for revolt and revolution.
Čönkög̲ōn is central and among the oldest of cities. Furthermore, it is the site of the main temple of the religion. The temple is similar to an Aztec pyramid, with an altar at the top for the gathered crowds to view the ritual slayings.
Political rulers need to be near the base of the religion. After all, the source of their political authority derives from sacred texts maintained by the caste of priests. Čönkög̲ōn therefore is the central and most powerful city of the region.
As a result, the king of Čönkög̲ōn has extended his political control over neighboring cities, creating the Töpfumaar Empire. He conquered Köbaškhōmör and Anzoreẖu in war. In addition, he subjugated Reẖuzoẖu in a one-sided alliance. Furthermore, ambitious members of the warrior and ruler caste gravitated to the imperial court from these cities. Over time, this caste created a byzantine and ruthless bureacracy.
Qaaqdeẖuškhōmör and Gōndoreẖu maintain independent kingdoms due to the wealth and power derived from their slave trade. However, the political elites of all neighboring cities struggle to maintain their political autonomy in the face of the power of the imperial court in Čönkög̲ōn.
States of the Töpfumaar Cultural Zone in Körung̲ung̲éẖu (Pancirclea). Image by Michael Tedin.
Potential Political Conflicts
In laying out the social structures of Körung̲ung̲éẖu (Pancirlea), I identified numerous conflicts that could serve as the basis of a dramatic conflict. All you have to do is place your characters in one or more of the groupings defined. Doing so should provide plenty of opportunity to define dramatic conflict either internally or with or among other characters.
There is the conflict between slaves and their masters. Also, there is the conflict between the various castes of Töpfumaar Daaškhōhu. Mages and priests rely on merchants and warriors for a supply of slaves for human sacrifice. Merchants might oppose war because it disrupts trade while warriors and bankers might support it because it the source of their wealth. The differing views of the merchants and rulers or rulers and priests create constant political conflict.
The Prophet Nathan rebukes King David. Eugène Siberdt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In addition, there are the social divisions of culture and demographics. Most slaves come from the Silvan culture. There are traders and merchants from the Hillfolk who share a similar but separate caste system.
You can use any or more of these ideas from worldbuilding politics and government as the basis of your story. Use them as a central conflict or as background. I recommend making your world as complex as you can. This will result in more complex characters. See Writer’s Digest (May/June 2021) for a great article on The Russian Nested Doll Theory of Motivation.
As you can see, fleshing out the social structure of your world creates a gold mine for for political and personal conflict. This adds depth to your world. As a result, your readers gain the opportunity to explore a world outside their own, whether to investigate the structure of their own world or as an escape from it.
List of Society Worldbuilding Topics
For reference to previous society worldbuilding topics, use these links.
Conflict is the essence of drama. There’s no better way to introduce drama into a story than to add religion and philosophy when worldbuilding. Humans have fought innumerable wars and conflicts over how different people view the world.
After all, religion and philosophy are basically explanations for how the world works. For many people they provide the fundamental assumptions, truths, and axioms that they build their worldviews on.
The School of Athens Raphael, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Religion has played a major role in the daily lives of people since long before civilization and writing. Some of the first writings and the longest lasting were religious texts. According to some thinkers, most historical religions came about during the Axial Age, from the fourth through the sixth centuries BCE.
Religion and philosophy are different but related ideas. Religion is a combination of belief and practice along with some social organization. The beliefs and practices might include gods and rituals and they might not.
To be clear, the definition of philosophy I am using is a person or organization’s guiding principles for behavior. As such, one cannot separate religion and philosophy. The guiding principles of a religion comprise that religion’s philosophy.
When worldbuilding a society’s backstory, remember that religion and philosophy change over time. The Roman Empire changed from a pagan worshipping society to a Christian society over the course of centuries. The competition between these two worldviews created conflict among the various factions within the empire. Naturally, competing views provide fertile ground for stories both fictional and non-fictional.
As a writer, you can use the characters’ religion or philosophy as the theme of your story. When worldbuilding, your characters’ religion and philosophical beliefs should drive their actions, not just be window dressing. For most religious people, their beliefs give meaning to their lives.
The philosophy that underpins a religion makes up a religion’s core beliefs. That philosophy defines how people think about their religion, what it means to them, and what they believe it should mean to others. Over time a religion might stay the same but the philosophy that underpins it might change, even while staying true to the original belief.
The two main areas of belief in religion are the religion’s mythology and how followers should worship the gods.
The Chariot of Zeus from the 1879 Stories from the Greek Tragedians by Alfred Church. Wikimedia
Mythologies
By mythology, I mean the stories about the gods or heroes of a particular culture. Most people define mythology as a fictional story. In a religion, what is relevant is that the story gives meaning to people’s lives. It provides a guide to how they should act and what decisions are best. Whether the story is factually true is irrelevant.
As an example, the story of Abraham in the book of Genesis is a cautionary tale. Rather than Abraham being a role-model, he goes through a number of episodes where he makes the wrong decision. He lied about his wife being his sister and was banished. He had a child with his wife’s handmaiden who was later banished. He followed Yahweh’s order and started to sacrifice Isaac, only for Yahweh to tell him at the last minute not to.
Each of these stories is instructive: Don’t lie. Don’t marry your sister. Don’t sleep with servants. Don’t practice human sacrifice.
The patriarch Abraham József Molnár, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Religion and its underlying philosophy often provides a set of rules for ordering society and forms the basis of law. For example, the western world has the story of the ten commandments. The rules on their face make sense as fundamental rules for how to act within a society. Because the story says Yahweh gave them to the Jews, they now have divine force.
In the same way, the story of Jesus’s teachings and death on the cross might not have as much impact without the exclamation point of his resurrection at the end.
Practice
Worship of the Divine/Gods
Most people think of religious practice as the commemoration or veneration of deities or saints through meditation or prayer.
Many religions have a belief in divine beings or powers, or sacred things or teachings. One God (monotheism): Christianity, Islam, Judaism Multiple Gods (polytheism): Greece, Rome, Hinduism No gods (nontheism or naturalism): Taoism, Buddhism, Shamanism, Ancestor veneration
While worldbuilding, it may be necessary to develop a religion’s practices, depending on the needs of your story. If a character is in the middle of a ritual, it might help to know what is going on in that ritual.
Otherwise, how religious practice presents itself in the society you are creating depends on how pervasive that religion is in the society. For example, in the United States, people make few public religious pronouncements. On the other hand, in a theocracy such as Iran or a society such as Europe in the Middle Ages, religion controls most aspects of life. As such, one would expect to see public displays of religion. In fact, the United States and modern Europe are unique in history in not having many overt displays of religious belief or ritual.
Rath Yatra festival in Puri, Orissa, India. I, G-u-t, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Organization
Religions are organized in many different ways, from the strict hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church to the individualist practice of shamans. A religion might splinter into sects with competing hierarchies, often with competing philosophies. One example of this is the various sects of Christianity based on often hair-splitting interpretations of holy scripture. Different castes or classes might follow different religions.
A religion’s organization or lack thereof can make a difference in your worldbuilding. Do any of your characters follow a religion or philosophy? If so, that religion’s philosophy might inform the character’s arc and personal growth. Religious people will give deference to a priest, cleric, shaman, or other religious figure. With religion a major part of people’s everyday lives, decision makers want to know if their decisions are correct.
Is your character a cleric or do you have some who are? That person might have a superior giving direction based on the needs of the church. Churches have their own agendas. The needs of a church organization creates a myriad of possibilities for conflict. A religion or religious superior might be corrupt or telling character to do something the character doesn’t think is right. A church might be one player in a political or social conflict.
If your characters engage in the politics of your world, then they will undoubtedly encounter religious figures. In most societies in human history, church and state were inextricably linked. Even in modern secular societies, if the church and state are separate, religion and politics are not.
Throughout history, priests and clerics have acted as advisors to kings and rulers. Even the elders and chiefs of tribal societies might look to religious people or rituals for guidance in decision making. If a leader is a religious person, then they might want to confer with a higher power when making a decision that will impact their followers. In some cases, religious advisors might act based on the needs of politics while the ruler struggles with the urge to do the right thing.
Worldbuilding philosophy and religion into your story adds depth and variety. Any time you add an additional perspective to a situation, you increase the potential for conflict. In a political story, the needs of politics might conflict with the philosophical guidance of religion, either within an individual or between characters. The conflict between the needs of politics and the urge to do the right thing is an ages-old drama.
The language was suppressed in the native schools in the first half of the 20th century. It was still spoken in homes, but by 2000, there were only about 500 native speakers. There has been an effort to revitalize the language, including making it an official language of Alaska. In 2013, the University of Alaska Southeast began classes taught by X̱ʼunei Lance Twitchell. I have been watching the videos recording of classes from 2014 on YouTube.
The most difficult part so far is pronouncing the consonants. There are thirty-nine or forty-seven consonants, depending on which linguist you ask. The classes I am watching list thirty-nine.
Thirty-nine consonants are enough, considering English has only twenty-four. Add to the fact that Lingit has no labial consonants. That is, they don’t use p, b, f, or v. Some dialects use ‘m’, but not in Alaska.
Consonants in the popular orthography are given in the following table, with IPA equivalents in brackets. Marginal or historical phonemes are given in parentheses. Source: Wikipedia: Tlingit Language Consonants
Uvular Consonants in the Tlingit Language
Many of the remaining consonants are difficult for an native English speaker. Many of them are pronounced deep in the throat (uvular consonants). The basic forms are ḵ, g̱, and x̱ (qʰ, ɢ, and χ in IPA). The underlines in the letters indicate the uvular pronunciation. In some orthographies, the underline is replaced by ‘h’ (kh, gh, and xh). The sounds are similar to the velar k, g, and x (kʰ, ɡ, and x in IPA), but pronounced deeper in the throat. (Underlines in the IPA letters indicate a link to a wikipedia article.)
Practicing uvular consonants can be difficult for a speaker of a language that doesn’t use them, i.e. English. Arabic speakers use the g̱ as in the q in Qatar. Germans and Dutch use χ for /ch/ in some situation and /r/ in some dialects. Practicing it can be hard on the throat if the speaker isn’t used to uvular consonants. In the class I watched on YouTube, the teacher said that practicing can cause a sore throat for new students.
Labialization in the Tlingit Language
Adding to the complexity, the velar (k, g, and x) and uvular (ḵ, g̱, and x̱) consonants and their ejective counterparts (k’, x’, ḵ’, and x̱’) also have labialized versions. These consonants are pronounced like their non-labialized versions, but the lips are rounded when the sound is made. In English, it is the difference between ‘height’ and ‘white’, ‘hut’ and ‘what’.
Ejective Consonants
In addition, the Tlingit language uses ejectives, which is a small puff of air created in the throat rather than in the lungs. It is not common in English, but some speakers, especially British, use an ejective on a consonant at the end of a word to emphasize that word.
Lingit speakers use ejectives on almost all consonants (t’, ts’, tl’, ch’, k’, k’w, ḵ’, ḵ’w, s’, l’, x’, x̱’ and x̱’w). They are not used on voiced consonants (d, dl, dz, g, g̱, and the glottal stop) and h, j, n, sh, and w. Ejective consonants will change the meaning of a word. For example, the verb root X̱EEN (fall) is different from the noun x̱’éen (wall screen).
Again, ejective consonants are difficult for an English speaker to learn without hearing and practicing them. This is especially true when the ejective is combined with the uvular consonants (ḵ’ and x̱’). I’ve been practicing at home. At one point, my wife heard me and asked if I was OK. She thought I was choking on something when I was simply practicing x̱’. It literally sounds like clearing the throat.
More evocative are the letters g̱ and x̱. They sound like the caw of a raven, which is appropriate for a culture that identifies so closely with the raven. G̱áa! X̱áa!
Before I get into fantasy architecture, let’s take a look at what defines a culture. When writing a fantasy novel, one of the best ways to set yourself apart from the run of the mill story is to create a setting with a unique culture. There are two main aspects of culture, the culture of ideas and material culture.
A culture spreads ideas through literature and the arts. The culture of ideas includes such things as language, which we already covered in articles on how language sounds and creating words. I’ll write about other aspects of the culture of ideas in later articles, including the perennial favorites of politics and religion, philosophy.
Material culture is made up of the artifacts of daily life and artifacts that persist beyond. These artifacts also carry culture not just to new geographical areas, but through time as well. The culture of daily life includes things such as technology, tools, and in a fantasy world, magic. Other important aspects of daily life include clothing and food.
The realm of “high culture” includes architecture and art, both as painting, sculpture, and other visual arts. In this article, I want to focus on fantasy architecture.
City of Brass by Mark Tedin
Architecture Defined
Architecture is buildings. Buildings are enclosed constructions with roofs, both public and private. That is to say, architecture isn’t just fancy decorations or styles of buildings, it’s how buildings are built.
It also implies that there is a way of thinking about how to construct a building. A building is typically built for a specific need, whether as shelter, security, worship, or some other function. How it is built is constrained by available materials and the skills of those building it.
For example, I can build a small shed because I have some carpentry skills and a ready supply of lumber from my local building supply store. I can’t build a castle or gothic cathedral because I don’t have anything but the most basic masonry skills and because I don’t have a ready supply of stone to build with.
Travertine Quarry, Serre di Rapolano, Italy. Photo by Michael Tedin
Theory of Architecture
There have been many treatises on architecture throughout history. One of the first was by Vitruvius, a Roman architect most famous for being the inspiration for Leonardo da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man.
This drawing relates to the last of the three attributes Vitruvius said that all buildings should have: strength, utility, and beauty.
Durability in Architecture
Rather than focus on the strength of a building, I’d rather think about its durability and structural integrity. That is, a building should be solid and remain in good condition.
Stone and wooden beams make for sturdy buildings. Cultures without those materials readily available used technology to create bundled reeds, such as in Egypt, or mud and straw bricks, such as in Mesopotamia.
A building also has to be resilient. That is, it needs to withstand the environment and wear and tear over time. Available materials determine and constrain how a building weathers its environment. The environment also determines those resources. Therefore, your fantasy architecture should take its biome and climate into consideration.
Rain and wind weather a building differently from sun, sand, and wind. Different materials will resist weathering in different ways as well. For example, the wood-based cultures of the Pacific Northwest leave few artifacts after a few generations. The wooden buildings and totem poles either rot in the wet environment or burn down when a fire gets out of control.
By contrast, in dry areas where stone building is more common, such as Greece, Rome, or the Middle East, buildings might endure for thousands of years, having a ripple effect on culture over the entire time.
Totem poles, Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve and Haida Heritage Site, Haida Gwaii
Architectural Styles in Early History
Some examples of how different earthly cultures adapted their architecture to their environment include Neolithic builders using dolmens and megaliths to create trilithons. These structures evoke the later post and lintel structure of classical architecture.
Egyptian columns resembled bundled reeds. The style is thought to resemble vernacular reed-built shrines. Due to the scarcity of wood, the two other main materials ancient Egyptians used were sun-baked mud brick and stone, including limestone, sandstone, and granite.
Minoans used wood in their vernacular style, so their stone columns resembled tree trunks. Greek, Roman, and Persians adopted the column from the Minoans and Egyptians. Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans decorated the capitals of their columns with floral and plant shapes. The Persians decorated theirs with horses.
Fantasy Architecture Depends on your Fantasy World’s Environment
Back in my early posts on worldbuilding, I wrote about plate tectonics, climate, biomes, and erosion creating sedimentary rocks. This is where these topics become important in determining culture. Plate tectonics and erosion determine available stone, types of stone, mud, sand, and lime. The biomes you choose for your fantasy world will determine available plant-based materials such as wood, reeds, or paper.
If you have a certain culture and architecture in mind for a story, you have two choices. You can look at the environment you created and place your story where it fits best. If you want a culture with stone buildings dating back thousands of years, you would want to place it in a dry location with lots of available stone.
On the other hand, you don’t have to be constrained by decisions you made in step one of mapping out your continents. You can reverse engineer your world so it makes sense. If you want a dry environment culture mixing with a moist forest environment culture, you can put them next to each other. If you do so, you should go back to step one of mapping your world to take into account how those very different environments came together on the same map.
Pancirclea plate tectonics. Map by Michael Tedin.
Utility in Architecture
Utility is a basic principle of architecture. That is, a building should be suitable for the purpose for which it is used. Louis Sullivan interpreted the concept of usefulness in architecture with his famous statement, “Form follows function.”
In my post on designing cities, I wrote about how cities grow up around major features such as the palace or citadel; market or bazaar; or temple, cathedral, or church. Each of these features has its own utility, so needs to be designed to meet its unique needs.
You wouldn’t want to celebrate a religious ritual in an office cubicle farm. You could do it if necessary, but it is not the best space for it, nor is it the best use of the space. The best place to celebrate a religious ritual is a larger space. The congregants need to be able to see the celebrant or celebrants or the entire congregation needs to be able to participate.
Office spaces usually have individual spaces for private work as well as one or a few meeting rooms. Even those meeting rooms don’t work well for religious rituals. The large table in the middle is better for working with paper or computers. It is not an altar.
Modern office meeting room
Architecture and Technology
The usefulness of a building often depends on available technology. Does the society have the technology to create large spaces such as basilicas, cathedrals, or castles? Building such large edifices requires a certain level of technology as well as the skill to use it. Greek culture didn’t have the technology to create arches, vaults, or domes until Roman architects and engineers invented them.
The utility of a space also depends on more mundane features such as light, air, water, and sewage. A religious space or library needs more light than a prison or castle. A living space needs water and sewage whereas a public space might not if it is not regularly occupied. In ancient Rome, baths and latrines were public facilities. Individual homes didn’t have their own bathrooms.
Think also about ingress and egress. Palaces and temples have different needs than a castle or fortress. A temple might need as much access as possible whereas a castle must limit access to an easily defended point. Modern architects think about access in terms of easy evacuation in case of fire or other disaster.
Utility in Fantasy Architecture
For the most part, fantasy architecture follows real life architecture. I’ve mentioned palaces, temples, and castles, all of which are standard in most fantasy literature. On the othe rhand, what other settings might your story require? There are the mundane aspects of living spaces, shops, bazaars, and offices. What about a magician’s study or a stable for dragon mounts?
Do you have non-human beings in your story? How would the architecture of your world reflect their needs? Would dwarves or hobbits build a city neighborhood at a smaller scale than the human neighborhoods? In The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, hobbits live in holes in the ground. Would rich hobbits live in holes above the ground?
Bag End in Hobbiton, New Zealand. Photo by Michael Tedin
Magic in Fantasy Architecture
Does magic play a part in the technology of architecture in your world? A society that has readily available magic might use it to build architecture beyond the ability of a society without. Why use cranes or scaffolding when a builder could use magic to move materials? In fact, why depend on the durability of the materials if magic could hold a building together. Think of the shapes an architect could design if unconstrained by gravity or material strength. Remember, before you break the rules of architecture, be sure you understand them.
Other principles of architecture might affect how your story is written. How does ingress and egress constrain a character’s choices? If a character can’t get into a building, they might make different choices, ones that cause them more difficulty than they expected. On the other hand, if they can’t get out, that might lead to different choices.
Even mundane aspects such as light, air, water, and sewage might have an effect on character choices. If a character is in a space with no light, how do they know what is there? If they have no air, the urgency of a situation increases. The same goes for no water, though the need is over a much longer timeline.
Beauty in Architecture
I saved the topic of beauty for last, though it is the attribute that most people think of when they think of architecture. Its impact on your writing will be mainly in the setting. How does your world feel?
The principle of beauty in architecture is that it should be aesthetically pleasing. Architecture is considered to be a form of art. This does not mean that all architecture is beautiful. Often, a particular building might be very controversial because of this very topic.
Experience Music Project, Seattle, WA. Designed by Frank Gehry. Image from en.wikiarquitectura.com
Le Corbusier wrote: “You employ stone, wood, and concrete, and with these materials you build houses and palaces: that is construction. Ingenuity is at work. But suddenly you touch my heart, you do me good. I am happy and I say: This is beautiful. That is Architecture”.
A good architect takes into account scale and proportion when designing a building. The scale of a design must be appropriate in size to its intended use. The proportion of a design must relate the separate parts to each other and the whole of the building to create a harmonious composition.
Classical architecture focused on symmetry. Much post-modern and contemporary architecture does not, though it still must maintain the principle of balance.
Decoration is a fundamental aspect of architectural design, often in its absence, such as the modern architecture of the 20th century. The opposite of the modern sensibility might be the late Baroque Rococo design of 18th century Europe.
Decoration often depends on the materials available. For example, stone can be not only structural, but also decorative. Think of the marble facings or floors on the inside and outside of Italian churches. Minoans used blue–greenschist to pave floors of streets and courtyards. Woodcarvers can create a variety of shapes from their chosen material.
Fantasy Architecture Design
If you design a fantasy architecture for your fantasy world, you probably don’t need to go into great detail or description. Occasional references to design and decoration might be all you need to give a feeling for it.
If you have an artistic bent, go ahead and sketch out some design parameters for the various cultures of your world. If not, you are free to borrow from real world analogies. Just be aware that using real world designs will locate your fantasy culture in those real-world cultures. You might want to mix and match designs from different cultures if you don’t want people to think your fantasy culture is medieval European or ancient Greek, for example.
It might be late in this article to think about the need for a well-designed fantasy architecture. The beauty of the architecture can only be reflected in your characters’ reaction to it. It might be a necessary story element or it might not.
In any case, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as the old saying goes. By beholder, I don’t mean the D&D monster, but your characters.
What this means for the writer is that you can choose to describe the architecture of your world or not, depending on how your characters interact with it. If the character has an eye for it, it can create a richer experience for your reader. If not, they probably wouldn’t miss it, but it leaves your world a little poorer.
Now that we have the basic feel for what a constructed language sounds like and how to write it for an English speaking reader, we can focus on creating words that actually mean something.
There are a few things to consider when creating words in your constructed language: Basic Words – Basics for fantasy fiction Morphology – How are words constructed? Phonotactics – What sounds can go next to one another? Semantics – What do words mean?
Basic Words in a Constructed Language for Fiction
When creating a constructed language for your story, you don’t have to be able to write entire sentences with a full grammar. After all, you aren’t writing your book in the constructed language. That is, unless you want to. If you do, you are unlikely to find any readers. There are no subtitles in books.
In the rough draft of my first novel, The Statue of the Mad Caliph, I wrote full sentences spoken by Ushidian characters. I thought I was being clever and showing how the POV character couldn’t understand the language. My beta readers rebelled. It just confused them. I now limit words in my constructed language to a few things.
It makes sense to create foreign words for these things, but not much else: Names Places Unique objects Idioms Swear Words
Really? Swear words? In a constructed language?
Yes, the first thing most people learn in a foreign language are the swear words. That and how to count. I personally can swear in at least six languages. Of course, most of them are variations on the Romance word merda, mierda, or merde, but you get the point.
If you do want to go through the trouble of constructing a language in detail, I recommend checking out the The Language Construction Kit or the Conlang Wikibook, Both of these have resources and instruction on constructed languages.
Names and Places
Of course, for a writer, names and places are key to creating characters and a setting. Ideally, you want to create names that sound culturally appropriate and actually mean something. You can do this by following the rules of the constructed language and following the guidelines for semantics below.
Objects and Idioms
Having names for unique objects is also a tricky thing. It is very easy to over do this. What is the definition of a unique object? When does a dress or robe become a gunna or rokota? I was trying to distinguish the gunna style dress of one culture from the stola style of another. It probably wasn’t necessary.
Having too many unique items can clutter your writing and confuse your readers. I created words for wizard and sorcerer (maholos and alutsa) and use them frequently. Because the words are foreign, they are supposed to be italicized. Now I’ve got italicized foreign words all throughout all my books, making it harder to read.
If you really want to add flavor to your characters, create some idioms and swear words they use frequently. Idioms are phrases whose meaning cannot be figured out from the parts of the phrase. They are tricky to do and probably won’t be understood by anyone not versed in the language. My favorite when I was looking for German ones was “Ich verstehe nur Bahnhof.” It means I only understand Bahnhof (train station). Basically, it’s like saying “It’s all Greek to me,” which is an English idiom.
The one thing I did do is to put all the magic spells in constructed languages. It adds a bit a magic and mystery to the story while still satisfies my urge to write full sentences in my constructed language.
Morphology
Morphology describes how to construct words in a language. The basic building block of a word is a morpheme. Analytic languages have little to no morphology, like Mandarin Chinese and to some extent, English. That is, they only have morphemes as words. These often have ideographic writing systems as well.
Many other languages add morphemes as prefixes, suffixes, and affixes to a root to create new words. The two types are inflectional or fusional and agglutinative.
Most Indo-European languages are inflectional or fusional. That is inflectional morphemes are “fused” together. For example, the English word ‘language’ itself is made up of the morpheme ‘lang-‘, which derives from Latin for ‘tongue’, and the suffix ‘-age’, which also derives from Latin for ‘that which is associated with or characterized by.’ The extra ‘u’ is added to make a hard ‘g’.
Often, changes in meaning of a word will also change the pronunciation. This is common in German, where the main vowels in plurals will become more closed. E.g. gans becomes gänse (pr. gense with a hard ‘g’). This is the same in English for the same word. Goose becomes geese. What confuses non-English speakers is that moose does not become meese. English!
Agglutinative languages have many easily separable morphemes. Finnish, Turkish, Japanese, and Tlingit fall in this category. The difference between agglutinative and fusional languages is subtle. In fusional languages, one changes morphemes to inflect meaning of the word. In agglutinative languages, one appends prefixes and suffixes to add meaning, leaving the stem intact.
It helps when constructing a language to have a list of common morphemes that you can use to build other words from. For this, you need to think about how morphemes are constructed in a language. Most morphemes are simple syllables.
Constructed Language Syllable Structure
Often, morphemes exist as a simple syllable. Think about syllable structure. Do syllables have to end in a vowel like in Japanese? This might have an impact on how you create a writing system. Some languages don’t allow a syllable to start with a vowel, others require it.
The basic format of a syllable is consonant/vowel/consonant (CVC). Often, a language will omit the beginning or ending consonant or both. Some languages don’t allow consonants at the end of a syllable, such as Japanese. The Hirigana and Katakana scripts are both syllabary scripts.
Syllable components as a directed graph. Crissov, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Non-syllabic Word Structures
In Semitic and other Afroasiatic languages, the roots of verbs and most nouns are based on triliterals rather than syllables. The basic structure is of three consonants (C₁-C₂-C₃). In this system, the speaker inserts vowels, doubles consonants, lengthens vowels, or adds prefixes, suffixes, or infixes to make words.
If you want to go this direction rather than the syllable route, simply set the basic format of a root using consonant/ consonant /consonant (C-C-C). When you get to The step of building words (see below), set your rules based on what vowels, double consonants, and affixes change the meaning of the roots. My recommendation is to get a good feeling for a Semitic language such as Arabic or Hebrew.
From Examples of how the Arabic root and form system works. Qr189 Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Constructed Language: Savannah Speech
When creating morphemes for my constructed language, Savannah Speech, I created a matrix of all the consonants and vowels, leaving a space for an omitted consonant. With 26 phonemes and 12 digraphs, I have 39 beginning or ending consonants or consonant clusters, including a space for no consonant. Taking the square of that (39 beginning times 39 ending consonants) and multiplying by 9 vowels, I would have possible 13,689 syllables.
That was a lot, so I only took ones I thought would be most frequent based on how often I thought a particular consonant or vowel would occur. I ended up with 721 morphemes I decided to use. My next step was to assign meaning to them.
Semantics
Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, phrases, sentences, or text. An individual word can have many meanings. The meaning can be conveyed in the context or by adding affixes or adjectives to clarify.
In a constructed language the creator has full reign to assign meaning to individual words as they wish. Those meanings should be assigned at the level of a morpheme so the language constructor can build words from those morphemes.
When constructing Savannah Speech, I chose a number of semantic categories to choose from, including: Verbs, Verb tenses, Adverbs (again, before, good, bad), Adjectives (big, little, long, short),Numerals, Ordinals, Quantities, Colors, Prepositions (above, across, against, around, in, to), Pronouns (he, she, it), Demonstratives (this, that, etc.), Nouns, Body Parts,Natural Features, Negation (non-, un-)
An example of a semantic network. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Verbs and Verb Tenses
The verb tenses required me to get ahead of myself. That is, I had to think about grammar. I had decided the words would each have a verb embedded in them because many place names are based on somebody doing something either currently or far in the past. I decided on a simple set of verb tenses. perfective (s/he (verbed)) constant imperfective (s/he is always (verbing)) progressive imperfective (s/he is in the process of (verbing)) repetitive imperfective (s/he (verbs) regularly imperfective (s/he is (verbing); s/he (verbs))
My next step was to assign the verbs, tenses, and other meanings to the morphemes I had chosen. To some extent, I assigned them based on the frequency of occurrence of each morpheme and the frequency of occurrence of each meaning. The frequency of each morpheme was somewhat arbitrary based on the frequency of the phoneme.
Building Words in a Constructed Language
There are different ways words are created in a language, such as borrowing, derivation, compounding, or blending, among others. I am going to focus on derivation and compounding. That is, creating new words from existing words by adding prefixes or suffixes or by compounding roots together.
Words begin as simple concepts, with other words or affixes added to them (in agglutinative languages) or to a sentence around them (in analytic languages). Often, this relies heavily on grammar. At this stage, you should have a basic idea of your constructed language’s grammar.
In derivation, a speaker will add an affix to a root. The affix is usually an adjective or adverbial morpheme changing the meaning of the root, like misspell is a derivation of the root spell with the prefix mis-, meaning wrong, added.
Compounded words have two roots combined to create a new word with a different meaning. For example, the English word footpath is a compound of the two nouns foot and path. This is very much like derivation. In this case, foot is like an adjective describing the path, but it is a root unto itself.
Pronouncing New Words
One thing to think about is which syllable in a word or sentence gets an accent. Readers will always want to know how a word, phrase, or sentence is pronounced. It helps to pronounce the word out loud to yourself. If you have a set of rules for pronunciation, sounding the word out can tell you if it fits the rules or not.
Phonotactics
Also, think about phonotactics. Phonotactics are the rules for what sounds can go next to each other. Most languages have rules about this. For example, English doesn’t use ‘ts’ at the beginning of a word, but it is very common in Russian. Russian also has ‘shch’, but most other languages don’t. English uses ‘str’, but few non-Germanic languages use it.
Some sounds are allowed at certain places in a word, but not in others. For example, English allows ‘tl’ in the middle and end of a word (settlement or battle), but not the beginning. ‘Tr’ is allowed at the beginning or middle of a word (transit or contract), but not the end.
A visual demonstration of Italian phonotactics. AnonMoos, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
If certain non-standard sound combinations or placements are in words borrowed from other languages, speakers will often change the sound to fit their own language’s phonotactics. For example, Arabic Arabic al-jabr and al-Khwarizmibecame algebra and algorithm.
Constructed Language: Savannah Speech
When creating words for Savannah Speech, I took a number of real world people and place names and looked up their meaning translated into English. I then took those meanings and translated them into new languages.
For example, take Mesopotamia. It is Greek for “between the rivers”. I thought about how that would be expressed in Savannah Speech. Decciding that a basic root should be a verb, I translated it as “(it) stands between two rivers”. I used the following roots and affixes: čön- (between), kö- (two), g̲ōn- (river), re- (stay, stand), and -ẖu (constant imperfective (s/he is always (verbing))). čön-kö-g̲ōn-re-ẖu
Because the /r/ is pronounced in the back of the throat and the /n/ is pronounced near the front, these two sounds can’t go together, but are pronounced / ng̲ /. Therefore, I end up with čönkög̲ōng̲éẖu between-two-rivers-stands. That’s still a mouthful, so it might be pronounced čönkög̲ōn, or between-two-rivers, with the verb ending implied. I might use that as a city name.
Savannah People: Töpfumaardaaškhōhu
I now need a name for the Savannah people. They might be called People of the Savannah, but what does savannah mean? It comes from the American Taino people. Zabana meant “a tract of low-lying marshy ground. That doesn’t really capture the description of this biome, which is a wide treeless plain. I want this word to be self-descriptive and nobody likes to describe themselves by a negative or what they lack. If I came from that area, I would think of it as a wide grassy plain, so the culture is that of the People of the Wide Grassy Plain.
I haven’t yet assigned any morphemes to any of these semantic meanings except for grass (tö-). I will assign: škhō– (inhabit), pfum– (wide), maar– (plain). My basic word form follows this schema: [ADJ]-[O]-[S]-root-[ADV]-TENSE, or grassy-wide-plain-(they)-inhabit-constant imperfective, or tö- (grass), pfum– (wide), maar– (plain), daa– (they), škhō– (inhabit), –ẖu (constant imperfective). The accent goes on the verb škhō: Töpfumaardaaškhōhu. The word for people or inhabitants would be daaškhōẖu. A traveller from an area would be daaškhōnuš. Someone who used to live there would be daaškhōng̲on.
I will go on to create new names for places. I won’t go through the process, but you can see them on my map of Körung̲ung̲éẖu. Next, I’ll create place names in the Hillfolk and Silvan languages.
Körung̲ung̲éẖu (Pancirlea) with places in the Savannah Speech (Töpfumaardaaškhōhu ). Image by Michael Tedin.
I’ve been looking forward to writing an article about constructed languages for a while. But when it comes down to it, I find it difficult. I love languages and I have studied them for over forty years. I want to write everything there is to know about how to construct a language.
The difficulty for me is to rein it in. The problem is that, when writing fiction, less is more. You want a constructed language to add a fantasy flavor to a fictional world. That is, create words, names, and places unique to your world that sets the scene and creates a feel for the people living there. You don’t need a fully fleshed out grammar or writing system. You don’t want to overdo it and make your story hard to read.
It is a common belief that different cultures have different languages. For the most part, that’s true, though there are some cultures that differ in some ways but share a language that is almost exactly the same. For example, Serbian and Croatian are very similar, but the two cultures are divided by religion. The languages might be mutually intelligible if spoken, but one is written in the Latin script and the other in Cyrillic.
Language is often used as an indicator of group identity. Subtle differences in speech can mark a person as being part of a group or not. Often, it can be used to distinguish class as well. With your constructed languages, think about how different groups within your world use those languages. Do street people have a jargon they use to confuse the elites and avoid authority?
The problem for the fantasy writer is how to convey those differences. Often, you need characters to interact using dialog. If they don’t speak the same language, how do you write dialogue? One solution is to have everybody speak the same language. But if you do that, you lose the opportunity to breed misunderstanding and conflict.
Creating Consistency in a Constructed Language
In addition to showing differences, a language has to sound consistent within the group of speakers. Often, writers make up names and words on the spot, but they sound phony and ad hoc. In order for your world to to ring true to the reader, it helps for the invented words and names to have some consistency. That is, the words and names should sound like they are coming from the same language.
One of the easiest ways to create consistency is to simply use a real-world language as a template. Of course, then you are implying your fantasy world is Earth or some analog. You can copy a real-world language and make a constructed language that is similar, like J.K. Rowling did with spells in Harry Potter. All the words were pseudo-Latin, making the spells sound scholarly.
Whether you copy a real-world language or create one from scratch, it helps to do some basic work in constructing a language in order to get that consistency. One of the first things to think about is what it sounds like.
Sounds and Phonemes
Consonants
Every language uses a limited number of phonemes, or sounds. Some use more than others. For example, Lingit, the language of indigenous peoples of Southeast Alaska, has 47 different consonants, many of which sound similar to a native English speaker’s ears. On the opposite range, native Hawai’ian has only eight consonants. By comparison, English has 24 consonants represented by 21 letters.
The various sounds created by human speech are recorded in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA). No one language uses all of the sounds represented in the IPA.
English speakers are familiar with a fraction of these sounds. Arabic uses retroflex and uvular consonants. The glottal stop has no letter in English, but is common. Think of the Cockney pronunciation of bottle: /bo(‘)l/.
Lingit uses ejectives, which are a class of non-pulmonic consonants. That is, they are created by a push of air from the throat, not from the lungs. The Khoisan languages of south and east African use clicks, which are created by pushes of air in the mouth.
/R/ is pronounced differently in most languages. As a alveolartrill in Finnish, uvular trill in French, German, and Arabic, approximant in American English. English dialects use both postalveolar and retroflex as well as some dialects with the aveolar flap or trill to pronounce /r/.
You will need to choose which sounds you will use to build your constructed language.
Vowels
There are generally far fewer vowels in a language than consonants. The difference between consonants and vowels is like the difference between digital and analog. Consonants are distinct sounds, while vowels exist along a range.
The range of vowel sounds expands along two axes, from the front of the mouth to the back, and from closed to open. Also, vowels are often long or short (tense or lax).
An example of front of the mouth and closed is /i/ as in English ‘bit’. The long version is Spanish /i/ or English ‘ee’ as in ‘beet’. An example of open back of the mouth is /o/ as in English ‘hot’.
Vowels might be different within different dialects of a single language, though they are very similar. Compare an American saying ‘pin’ or ‘pen’ against a New Zealander saying it. The two words are switched in pronunciation. Even within the United States, vowels shifted as people moved from New England to the Midwest in the 19th century.
Nearly all languages have a minimum of three vowels. Few have more than ten, but some have as many as thirteen.
Often, they are combined into diphthongs, such as /ai/, similar to the English long /i/ as in ‘bite’, or /au/ as in the English ‘ow’, ‘au’, or ‘ough’ as in ‘bow’, ‘bauhaus’, or ‘bough’.
Pitch and Tones
In some languages, speakers change the pitch of their voice to convey meaning. That is, the speaker will add a rising or falling pitch. English speakers use this to add a questioning tone to the end of a question, though English is not a tonal language. Sometimes, this lift at the end of a sentence is used in statements when the speaker is looking for the listener to agree with the statement.
Speakers of some languages have multiple pitch changes throughout a sentence, not just at the end. This variation occurs even in various dialects of English. Compare an American speaker of English to someone from India. Americans speak in very flat tones while Indians speak with a variety of rising and falling pitches like ripples on a pond. These pitch changes might be conveying meaning, shifting the mood of the speaker’s meaning. Since I am an American, I speak in flat tones and any possible meaning from these pitch changes are lost on me. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
In tonal languages, tonal changes can be very complex, changing the meaning of words. This is common in east Asian languages such as Vietnamese, Cantonese, or Mandarin. For example, the word ‘ma’ in Mandarin has five different meanings depending on the nature of the tone: mā (媽/妈) ‘mother’ má (麻/麻) ‘hemp’ mǎ (馬/马) ‘horse’ mà (罵/骂) ‘scold’ ma (嗎/吗) (an interrogative particle)
The tone contours of Standard Chinese. Wereon, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons
I don’t use tonal changes in my constructed languages because I am not very familiar with them.
Choosing Sounds for your Constructed Language
When designing your constructed language, think about what it will sound like in the reader’s head. Is it beautiful? Is it harsh? Does it sound like Latin or Greek? Chinese or Japanese? This will have an impact on how your readers approach the culture and your characters.
For example, Tolkien chose many unvoiced sibilants (f, s, l, h, hy) and often used the vowel ‘a’ when constructing elvish because he liked the sounds. Conversely, in the Black Speech and Orcish, he chose many fricatives such as th, s, z, sh, zh, kh, gh. The vowel ‘u’ is more common than in elvish.
It helps to sound out the words and phrases when you create them. You’ll get a better idea of how your your constructed language will sound to your readers.
Example: Savannah Speech
For Savannah culture, I want it to sound more throaty and harsh. The reason is that I intend this culture to be harsh. They are slave traders and the bad guys are the rulers, nobles, and elites of their area. Like Tolkien, I find throaty sounds more harsh and not as pretty as sounds produced in the front of the mouth and glides such as l, y, and wh. Of course, there are some front of mouth sounds that are basic in just about any human language.
The twenty-five consonants (written in IPA) I decided on using for Savannah Speech are: p, ɸ, m, b, β, t, s, n, d, ts, z, t̠ʃ, ʃ, d̠ʒ, ʒ, k, x, ŋ, ɡ, ɣ, q, ɢ, ʀ, ʔ, h, ɦ.
Because the Savannah people use a lot of consonants in the back of the mouth, the vowels follow the same pattern. I chose these four: a, œ, u, and ɒ. We will use the short version of all of them and the long version of a, u, and ɒ. We’ll also use the diphthongs au and ei.
Cultural and Language areas within Pancirclea. Image by Michael Tedin
Constructed Language Orthography
Orthography is how a language is written. There are three basic types of writing systems: logographic – symbols represent words. E.g Chinese syllabic – symbols represent syllables. E.g. Japanese or Korean, and alphabetic – symbols represent phonemes. E.g. Latin, Cyrllic, or Arabic alphabets.
We have been discussing sounds using IPA lettering. In order for an English reader of fiction to understand them, we’ll need to transcribe them. For the most part, this means using letters of the Latin alphabet.
You could design a fully functional script to write your language, but if you are doing it for written fiction, you likely won’t be using it. Even if you do come up with a script, good luck getting a publisher to typeset anything using it. For more information on types of writing systems, check out this Conlang wiki or the Language Construction Kit.
“Tengwar” in the Tengwar script created by J.R.R. Tolkein
For the most part, it make sense to simply write the letters out using their English equivalents. The sounds might not match exactly to the sounds English speakers use for those same letters. This might cause some confusion as to how the words are actually pronounced, but that’s what book appendices and speaker’s forums are for, right?
Accent Marks
Accent marks can indicate differences between pronunciation of English and that of your constructed language. Be careful how you use these. Accent marks mean certain things in different languages. Too often, I see writers use accent marks to make words look foreign with no sense of what those accent marks mean. My own pet peeve is Mötley Crüe. It’s supposed to sound like Mawtley Crew with some “cool” accent marks. I think it reads like Mootly Cryu.
Some examples of accent marks used in different languages are apostrophes (‘), accent grave (è), accent acute (é), tilde (ñ), umlaut or diareses (ä), among others. These accents might mean different things in different languages. For example, the accent acute and accent grave indicates a tonal change in Vietnamese, but a change in pronunciation in French.
Many languages use apostrophes for consonants. The one I see most often is the apostrophe for a glottal stop, as in Hawaiian. For example, Kauai and Hawaii are pronounced with a glottal stop as Kaua’i and Hawai’i, not Kauayi or Hawaiyi.
You can find a list of codes to type out letters with accents at alt-codes.net. If you just want a visual chart without pop-ups, you can find one here.
Phonotactics – Letter Combinations
Accents don’t work for all sounds. Often, we use letter combinations to indicate different sounds. For example, in English, we use a following ‘h’ to indicate a fricative. English doesn’t use þ (thorn) or ð (eth) for the dental fricative like Icelandic. Instead, we add an ‘h’ after a ‘t’, using ‘th’ for both sounds.
Often, English speakers will transcribe sounds in foreign languages the same way. For example, we don’t have letters for IPA x or ɣ. Standard English doesn’t use them, but Russian or Arabic do. We often transcribe them with ‘kh’ or ‘gh’.
One of my favorite letter combinations is the German transcription of tʃ. In English we simply use ‘ch’. In German, they need four letters to write the sound: ‘tsch’.
Another method of transcribing phonemes is by doubling the letter. For example, ‘ll’ in Welsh makes the ɬ lateral fricative sound (like ‘l’ but with air moving on either side of the tongue). The same combination in Spanish makes the ʎ lateral approximant (similar to English ‘y’). The ‘tl’ combination is used in Tlingit. Even IPA has a hard time with this, combining two symbols to represent one sound: ‘tɬ‘
Example: Savannah Speech
With twenty-six consonants, seven short and long vowels, and two diphthongs, it would stand to reason that my constructed language for the Savannah People would need thirty-five letters, but most languages use the same letters for the long and short vowels, so that makes it fewer.
The sounds ɸ, β, ts, t̠ʃ, ʃ, d̠ʒ, ʒ, x, ŋ, ɣ, ɢ, ɦ can be written using letter combinations, such as ‘pf’, ‘bh’, ‘zh’, ‘kh’, ‘ng’, and ‘gh’ for ‘ɸ’, ‘β’, ‘ʒ’, ‘x’, ‘ŋ’, and ‘ɣ’. I’ll add diacritical marks to change the sound of others, like in Czech. Also, ‘č’ and ‘š’ can stand for ‘t̠ʃ’ and ‘ʃ’.
I’ll use ‘dzh’ for ‘d̠ʒ’. I could use ‘j’, but I like the harsher look of ‘dzh’. The ‘ɢ’, and ‘ɦ’ are the voiced versions of ‘q’ and ‘h’, we can use ‘g̲’ and ‘ẖ’. They will only be between vowels or at the beginning of a word. Finally, I’ll use ‘r’ and ‘ for ‘ʀ’ and ‘ʔ’.
For the vowels, we have ‘a’, ‘œ’, ‘u’, and ‘ɒ’. The first three can be spelled with ‘a’, ‘ö’, and ‘u’. I’ll use ‘o’ for ‘ɒ’. The diphthongs ‘au’ and ‘eɪ’ are straightfoward enough, but I’ll use ‘e’ for ‘eɪ ‘. For the long version of ‘a’, I’ll simply double it: ‘aa’. I’ll use accents to distinguish long ‘u’ and ‘ɒ’: ‘ū’ and ‘ō’.
This gives me a set of sounds written with b, bh, p, pf, m, t, s, n, d, ts, z, č , š , dzh, zh, k, kh, ng, g, gh, r, q, q, h, h, a, ö, u, o, aa, ū and ō. The alphabet is much shorter: a, b, č , d, e, f, g, g̲, h, ẖ, k, m, n, o, ö, p, q, r, s, t, u, z, and ‘.
Next, we can start building words and giving them some meaning. Also, we’ll finally get around to naming some places in Pancirclea in their indigenous languages.
Many societies organize themselves along caste, class, or clan. Each of these terms represents a way a society organizes itself, though caste is something of a hybrid between class and clan. I put it first on the list because the list sounds better in that order. Give me a break. I’m a writer, not an academic.
Putting the Character in a Caste, Class, or Clan
These social structures divide people into groups and define a person’s position in society. Often, these groups place demands on and provide incentives to their members to keep them in their own group and keep outsiders out. These incentives often create conflict between the character’s wants and needs and the demands of his caste, class, or clan. That conflict can provide the drama for your fiction, either as the central drama or as background or subtext.
When writing fiction, the first thing to focus on isn’t plot or setting, but characters. Plot is what happens when your characters want something and something else is in the way. It is the nexus of desire and obstacle. Setting is the world your characters inhabit. One of the most important aspects of your character is where they fit in the society we have been building.
In this series of articles, I am focused on setting, but all along the way, I have tried to keep my eye on the ultimate goal: creating a rich world that informs your character’s decisions.
Class
The modern definition of class is a group sharing the same economic or social status, but we need to think of it in a broader sense. It is an order or ranking of a group of people having certain characteristics in common. The ranking implies a hierarchy within your society, but also people grouped together by certain characteristics.
John Cleese, Ronnie Barker, and Ronnie Corbett as Upper, Middle, and Lower classes.
We think of class as economic, but it doesn’t have to be. Many class systems throughout human history were based on occupation, but some were based on a certain social or legal status.
To tie it to economics, think about who is getting rich. Is it the priestly class? Warrior Class? Merchant Class? Who controls trade, land, or mines? Is it businesses, trading houses, families, clans, tribes, government, religion?
Upper vs Lower Classes
Drama requires conflict. The differences between classes has formed the basis of dramatic conflict throughout history. For example, there’s the Suddenly Suitable Suitor trope of stories like Aladdin. There are a ton of tropes along the lines of the Unable to Support a Wife line.
Princess Jasmine and Aladdin. Copyright, Disney
The upper classes tended to share common interests in advancing or maintaining their privileged status. If your characters, either hero or villain, has that status challenged, it might be a motivation for them to act. An inciting incident that challenges the status quo, such as a monster destroying their kingdom, would be a powerful motivation. E.g. Raya and the Last Dragon.
The converse of who is getting rich is who is staying poor, like peasants and slaves. Often, the poor have had some wealth taken away from them such as a weaker indigenous people without the resources or technology to defend against a stronger invading people.
Many characters from fiction come from the poorer classes. Their poverty often gives them the motivation to change their situation, putting them on a hero’s quest. Find the gold and save the family, only to learn that the family is more important than the gold.
Different Class Systems
When creating a fictional society, don’t be limited by the modern conception of class as a division between rich and poor. Human societies have organized themselves based on a myriad of class systems.
In Neolithic times, occupation determined social class, with farmers and craftsmen at the lower end, and priests and warriors at the higher. People with a surplus of goods (such as food items, textiles, obsidian and stone technology) had greater influence in society because they had what other people wanted. This created leverage and a sense of deference to those who had more.
Development of agrarian societies.
In Bronze age, we saw a greater differentiation in social classes. Priests and warriors grew in power while farmers and craftsmen diminished.
Classical Rome
In ancient Rome, society divided freeborn citizens into the patrician and plebian classes. The distinction was originally a divide between rich and poor, but the distinction eventually became hereditary. In addition to this distinction, later Roman society divided citizen from non-citizen. There was also an equestrian class system based on the amount of property one held. Finally, there was a huge class of slaves doing much of the hard labor of Roman society.
Confucian China recognized four classes based on occupations: shi (gentry scholars and warriors), the nong (peasant farmers), the gong (artisans and craftsmen), and the shang (merchants and traders). These were less a socioeconomic class than an economic classification. This social system extended beyond China to Korea, Japan, and Vietnam as well.
A Song dynasty gentry and his servant. Ma Yuan, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
European Feudalism
Medieval Europe maintained a division between three classes: the nobility, the clergy, and and the peasants. Nobility was a political ruling class, usually just below royalty, not a socioeconomic class. While a noble might have had wealth and power, it was not a defining characteristic. Many nobles lost their wealth, but maintained their social status.
The Third Estate of the peasantry was much more diverse than the description implies. The class included not just agricultural peasants, but also beggars and urban laborers from artisans, shopkeepers, and commercial middle classes to wealthy merchants and bankers.
France maintained this system up to the French revolution, known as the three Estates of the Realm. The United States and Europe maintain a shadow of this system when we refer to the free press as the Fourth Estate.
13th-century French representation of the tripartite social order. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Industrial Revolution
In the 14th century (after the Black Death) urbanization led to a separate class of merchants that became the seed for the Industrial Revolution in the 17th-19th centuries. The Industrial Revolution upended the medieval class system, leading to a search for a new definition of the social order.
In his analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, Karl Marx defined class to be about who owns the “means of production”. The bourgeoisie (merchant class) owned the means of production (capital) and the proletariat (working class) worked for the bourgeoisie, thereby creating more capital.
These two classes grew out of the feudal system, with urban merchants becoming the bourgeoisie. As industrialism took hold, the nobility sold off their land and forced the peasants who had worked it to leave for urban factories. This new class of urban poor became the proletariat.
A Roberts loom in a weaving shed in 1835. Illustrator T. Allom, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
In the Marxist perspective, all the gains of the system accrued to the bourgeoisie, thereby impoverishing the proletariat.
Modern America
In 20th century United States, we had a conceptual division between the upper, middle and lower classes. In this perspective, the upper class were the rich, holding most of the wealth and power. The lower classes were the working class, either unemployed or holding low wage jobs. The middle class included people with typical-everyday jobs that pay above the poverty line. This group made up the bulk of society.
A typical white middle class family in the 1950s.
In the 21st century, we have seen a marked increase in income inequality since the Great Recession of 2008. Now, people are more likely to talk about the 1% vs the 99%. That is, 1% of society controls as much wealth as the bottom 90%. In this view, with such vast differences in wealth, the distinctions below the 1% are meaningless.
Throughout human history, we have seen a wide variety of class systems. Which caste, class, or clan you apply to your world is up to you, but it is likely to make a difference in how your characters view the world.
Is your society hierarchical or egalitarian? Does the surplus of the economy accrue to the elite or is it spread broadly? Is there much social mobility? Is there slavery? These are questions you must ask in order to define your social structure.
Is social class and behavior laid down in law such as the Indian caste system, medieval European guilds, or serfdom?. You might decide that your fantasy society restricts membership in a group by religion, race, ethnicity, or gender as well as wealth. If your society has a racial minority, the dominant race might exclude them from certain more profitable occupations.
On the other hand, social mores might restrict the dominant race or religion from certain occupations. Those occupations might become profitable, in which case the dominant group would have to break custom to participate. As an example, because coal mining is dirty, only the lower classes might mine coal. If industrialization picks up and coal becomes valuable, then that class might be well situated to take advantage of its higher value.
Coal loader in Appalachia. Russell Lee, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Caste – Intermediate between Class and Clan
Caste is a hereditary social class that restricts the occupation of their members and their association with the members of other castes. It is like a clan because it is hereditary, but it is like class because it maintains an economic and social stratification.
Caste is known mainly as a feature of Hindu society, but other, mainly south and southeast Asian, societies also have some form as well. For example, the historic relationship between Blacks and Whites in the United States has been described as a caste system.
Caste is based on occupation. It has a ritual status in a hierarchy, and customary social interaction and exclusion based on cultural notions of purity and pollution.
A page from the manuscript Seventy-two Specimens of Castes in India. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Creating a caste system for your own fantasy world would require much research and work. You would need to define the classes first. Then create the rituals and customs of society that create the rules of interaction between them. You might need to create a religious system before a caste system. One option is to create a class system based on occupation, then figure out the rules of the caste system when you define your religions.
Clans and Tribes
Clan and tribe systems are the most common and universal social structures in human societies. Clans are large groups of families related by kinship, often descended from a single person. E.g. according to legend, the Julii of Rome descended from a mythical person Iulus, the son of Aeneas of Troy. Julius Caesar was its most famous member, but the clan predated him by at least 400 years.
Aeneas, legendary ancestor of the Julii, with the god of the Tiber. Bartolomeo Pinelli, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Most preindustrial societies organized themselves by clan. Later Neolithic and Bronze Age societies organized into small and medium-sized chiefdoms that struggled for dominance between various powerful families.
In societies where institutional structures have broken down, social structures might revert to tribe and clan organization. Post-war Iraq in the 21st century is a good example of this.
Clans might specialize in certain occupations, especially in caste societies. For example, many gangs of organized crime follow family or clan lines, such as the Italian Mafia.
Sometimes there is a class hierarchy within a clan. Sometimes the clans fall out along a class hierarchy. For example, in ancient Rome, a client was a minor member of a his patron’s clan (gens), but each genswas defined as either patrician or plebian.
Clan Organization and Structure
Tribal and clan structures differ from culture to culture. Often, a clan is a smaller part of a larger society such as a tribe or chiefdom. Clans may have an official leader such as a chief, matriarch or patriarch, or a council or elders. In others, people would have to achieve leadership positions.
They might be patrilineal or matrilineal. For example, in Roman society one’s father determined one’s gens. Among the Tlingits of Southeast Alaska, children are born to the mother’s clan and gain their status within her family.
Clans might further break down in smaller families, such as the houses (hít) of the Tlingit or the stirpes of the Romans.
Clans might belong to larger groups within a society, such as patrician or plebian among the Romans or the Eagle, Raven, or Wolf moieties of the Tlingit.
Often times, certain rules or social customs control the relationships between or among clans. These rule most often apply to marriage restrictions. For example, a member of the Eagle moiety in Tlingit culture may only marry a member of the Raven moiety.
In many societies, there is no concept of private property. A clan or a house within a clan owned all the property. This is true of classical Rome, where the pater familias owned all property. The familia was the basic economic and social unit of Roman society.
In Hawaii, the upper caste Ali’i owned all the land, which Ali‘i Nui then split among his followers, similar to European feudalism. Among the Tlingit, each clan owns its own history, songs, crests, and totems.
The variety of class-based or tribe and clan-based social organization allows a writer of fiction wide latitude in creating interesting social structures. While I would not recommend using lengthy exposition to describe the intricate details of social ritual, it would be fun to create a character in your story who is limited by social rules.
One can imagine a Romeo and Juliet story where two lovers can’t see each other because they are from clans in the same moiety or from upper class and lower class clans or castes. I’m sure those stories exist in just about every culture as cautionary tales. It’s a story as old as humanity.
Applying Caste, Class, and Clan in Pancirclea
In my demonstration world of Pancirclea, I have decided on a class system among the Savannah culture, a caste system for the Hillfolk, and a clan system among the Silvans.
Hillfolk
Hillfolk culture divides society among four classes similar to the Hindu Varna: warriors and rulers, scholars and priests, merchants, and peasants. In addition, there is an underclass of slaves.
Unlike the Hindu castes, Hillfolk culture has no ritual restrictions on how they interact with each other. Also, there are no restrictions on mobility between the classes. A person may move between classes, though there may be economic or other barriers to social mobility.
In addition to classes, the Hillfolk have a clan system, though it is less strict than that of the Silvans. These clans specialize in certain occupations, so fall mainly into one or another class. For example, one clan might control the army, so fall in the warrior class. Another clan might fall into the merchant and tradesmen class.
Savannah
The Savannah culture has four castes similar to the four main classes of the Hillfolk culture. In addition, there is a large underclass of slaves made up mainly of Silvans that exists outside the caste system.
The four castes include strict restrictions on who can be a member of a caste as well as how the castes interact. Members of the four main castes may not interact with slaves. Only the top two castes of warrior rulers and scholar priests may own them and only their owners may interact with them with certain exceptions.
Religious rules and sacred texts govern these restrictions. We will explore this more when we discuss religion in a later article.
Silvan culture is more egalitarian. There is no class or caste system though there are richer and poorer members of society. Their culture is divided into tribes, clans, and houses. These family units make up the political organization of the Silvans as well, with councils of clans made up of the leaders of houses and councils of tribes made up of the leaders of clans.
Tribes control large regions within the Silvan territory, though clans within a tribe might exist throughout that tribe’s territory. There are three main groups of clans (phratries) within Silvan society. One may only marry into a clan outside one’s own phratry.
The phratries are Eagle, Panther, and Gorilla in the south, Eagle, Cougar, and Bear in the north.
Create Your Own Social Structures
As you can see, with a little forethought and research, you can create your own caste, class, or clan system for your fantasy world. Whether you have one or more societies, it isn’t difficult to create social structures that give your characters more depth and add more complex and compelling themes to your fiction.
When worldbuilding a fantasy world, money and banking might influence how trade is carried out, but it doesn’t actually have much impact on other aspects of a society. For the most part, creating a money system in a fantasy world is a good way to give the world a certain ambience.
What is Money?
The best definition of money I have found is that is a medium of exchange, a unit of account, a store of value and a method of valuing debts. Most people are familiar with its role as a medium of exchange. Rather than bartering, we put our value in money and use that as a replacement for other valuable items.
A 1914 British gold sovereign. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Prior to developing money, trade was done by barter. The first forms of money were cattle and grain. Mesopotamians commodified trade by pegging it to the weight of a bushel of grain. Farmers would deposit their grain in the temple, which then recorded the deposit on clay tablets. The temple gave the farmer a receipt in the form of a clay token which they could then use to pay fees or other debts. For more on trade, see my article on Fantasy Economics.
Later, when trade with foreigners required a form of money not tied to the local economy, they developed coins that carried value with it. They stamped metal to indicate its value. Metal is durable, portable, and easily divisible.
Conceptually, any money system depends on the value the users place on the marker being used. The original Mesopotamian shekel represented a certain amount of grain, but the value of gold and silver is all in the minds of the people using it.
The rarity of these items keeps their value high, but their prevalence made them useful as commodities for exchange. The important thing is that there be a stable amount of the material in circulation, otherwise, you run the risk of inflation or deflation.
What Kind of Money?
Societies throughout human history have used a variety of materials as money. For most of history, the material money was made from has been commodity based. People have used cowry shells as money for millennia. The Chinese first started using them 3000 years ago. They were also used in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australia, and Pacific Islands, often spread by the slave trade.
At various times in history, people have used salt as money, including the “salarium” of a Roman soldier. Ethiopians used it up through the 20th century.
One unit of salt bar money. Image from salt.org.il
Those of us who played Dungeons and Dragons are familiar with gold, silver, and copper pieces. The first metal money appeared in China in the form of Bronze Knives and spades in China. Though not used as a medium of exchange, the Indians of the Pacific Northwest similarly used large copper plates as symbols of wealth and prestige.
The first coins appeared around the same time in China, India, and the eastern Mediterranean in the 7th century BCE. The Kingdom of Lydia developed the first inscribed coins in the Iron Age. These were of electrum, an alloy of gold and silver. The old school gamers will remember electrum coins from 1st & 2nd Edition Dungeons and Dragons.
Money remained much the same, with various reforms, changes in weight, purity, and denomination for the next two thousand years or so until the invention of paper money.
Paper Money
The first recorded use of paper money occurred in China in the 11th century CE. Its development grew out of commercial transactions where exchanging large quantities of coins became difficult. Merchants would give a credit note from a deposit house in exchange for goods. The seller could then take the credit note to draw the amount from the deposit house.
The idea of the paper promissory note made its way to Europe at the end of the middle ages, where trade was flourishing. A merchant could deposit a sum with a banker in one town. In turn the banker handed out a bill of exchange that the merchant could redeem in another town. Over time, these credit notes became bearer notes, that is, they were written to pay whoever held the note.
At first, banks and deposit houses wrote the notes, but eventually, governments stepped in to control the money supply and set a monopoly on printing bank notes.
Paper money carried the fiction that it represented a certain share of gold or silver until 1971 when the U.S. government de-pegged the dollar from gold. Modern money systems have even unlinked value from a specific physical object to a balance on an account sheet, often merely electronically recorded. In the case of cryptocurrency, the currency itself is divorced from a physical form. Could a highly magical society create something like a cryptocurrency?
Money in Fantasy Societies
The easiest way to deal with money in a fantasy story is to ignore it altogether. For the most part, your readers don’t need or even want to know the price of a loaf of bread or a night in an inn. You can simply say that they rented a room or bought a loaf of bread.
If you have your characters counting out coins and making change, your worldbuilding might be taking over your character development. Character first! Worldbuilding gives your characters a background. You don’t invent characters to live in the beautiful world you created.
On the other hand, it might be a useful pressure point on your characters to not have money. This is a great opportunity to follow the old writing advice to force your characters in a corner and poke them with a stick. Lack of money is one way to force them into a corner. If they don’t have money, their options might be more limited in certain situations.
In my own books, I created the fiction that one character has all the money he needs. When he is around, the characters don’t need to worry about money and I, as an author, don’t need to worry about it either. At least inside the story. In another book, I separated them and the one character’s limited money supply is becoming a point of tension for her.
Fantasy Money (Bitcoin anyone?)
If you want to use money to add depth to your fictional world, the easiest method without developing your own monetary system is to use generic coins of gold, silver, and copper or model it on a real-world monetary system such as the English in the middle ages. Kenneth Hodges at the University of California created a list of medieval prices of various commodities and services. It is based on pounds, shillings, and pennies, but includes a conversion to crowns and marks.
If you really want to develop your own fantasy money system, you can go as far as inventing your own denominations for gold, silver, and copper or add other metals such as platinum, electrum, or bronze. You can also follow some of the other historical systems such as cowrie shells or salt.
If you want something truly fantastic, invent some other commodity that has that balance between widespread and rare. It has to be rare enough that it is hard to duplicate easily but widespread enough that it can be held by a large number of people.
One idea might be a magically infused item. Perhaps gold or silver is non-existent in your world. In order to keep a tight control on the money supply, a king might have his vizier or chief mage manufacture items that display a magical image of his face. These might be as simple as a bronze disk or as fancy as a glass ball. I would imagine a glass ball displaying the king’s face would be more valuable than the bronze disk.
Well, it’s an idea.
Banking and Accounting
Accounting is older than the Bronze Age. It was invented during the late Neolithic as a method of counting agricultural produce. It is closely related to the development of writing. Both arose as a method of counting and recording stores of grain and wealth.
Banking came later, in about the 4th millennium BCE. The history of banking is inextricably linked to the history of money. Temples acted as the first banks in ancient Mesopotamia. People stored their wealth in the temples for a fee. Later, about 1000 BCE, private lending houses arose. The Code of Hammurabi recorded interest-bearing loans.
In Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, Greece, and Rome temples acted as banks. In many areas, such as China and India, merchants formed the first banks. Ancient Egypt developed the first government central banks. We must remember that the relationship between the temple and the king was very close in ancient societies.
The signature development of modern banking in the 16th and 17th centuries CE was the issuance of bank debt that served as a substitute for gold and silver. This debt became the new money that underpins the modern international economy.
14th century Italian counting house. Cocharelli, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Banks in Fantasy Fiction
Whatever form banks might take in your fiction, they can also act as useful villains. The best example I have read recently is in Joe Abercrombie‘s First Law and Age of Madness trilogies. The banking house of Valint and Balk acts as a nebulous antagonist that seems to be behind many of the plots and scheming in the books.
Debt can be a motivator for your characters. Like poverty, the fear of poverty and the obligation to pay debt can put a character in a corner. The banker might come by and poke them with a stick from time to time.
Another nebulous entity putting pressure on characters is the Iron Bank of the Song of Ice and Fire series by George R.R. Martin. This bank lends money to governments and armies, often on different sides of a conflict. Much of the conflict in the series is based on how the players scheme to get the backing of the Iron Bank or have to pay them back.
Stannis Baratheon negotiates with the Iron Bank. Image copyright HBO
Fantasy Banks and Money in Pancirclea
I am going to skip any development of specific coins in Pancirclea, but I want to have a banking system. This will serve two purposes. My characters can store any wealth they have and borrow money if necessary. Additionally, the bank itself can advance the plot. If characters have borrowed money, the bank can be an antagonist. The characters’ need to pay the debt can force them to act when they otherwise wouldn’t.
I would expect every town to have its own bank. Perhaps they would have multiple lending houses. The most powerful banks would have branches in every city, facilitating trade and enabling traders and adventurers to draw on funds when they are traveling.
I would think the bank would be controlled by a clan, rather than a company. I am leaning toward using clans to control major organizations in Pancirclea. Banking clans, trading clans. Clans that permeate the upper levels of government or the military.
Like the Game of Thrones or First Law worlds, I would have one premier bank that can act as the antagonist in the story. If I need another to put pressure on that main banking clan, I would likely mention another.
Trade Routes in Pancirclea. Image by Michael Tedin
In sum (no pun intended), you don’t need money and banking in your fantasy world. You can develop the other features without any detailed development of these features. On the other hand, doing so can enrich the ambient feel of the world and provide some powerful motivations for your characters.
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