Chapter 1: How to design a language?

The importance of the alien language: looking at the alien languages designed for movies help us to
understand how the human language works. All these languages were based on the same technique upon which
human language works. They were designed using vocals or sounds, but to make them sound alien, they used
sequences of sounds which are not familiar to us or not used in the English language such as a sequence of aeo
as in Navi language, or a sequence of guttural sounds kg. They also used a different word order than that used in
the English language.
All human languages used vocal signals or sounds, except sign language which uses gestures instead of
sounds. However, sounds do not have meaning of their own. They have to be combined together to form words
and these words carry the meaning.
Thats the first dual structure : sounds and words: meaning that sounds are combined to create words that have
meaning. This dual structure is important. In other words, the fact that sounds do not have meaning of their own
is important as it explains how humans are able to create millions of words using a limited number of sounds.
There is another dual structure: words and sentences structure
This means that words are combined to form sentences. The meaning of the sentence is not the meaning
of individual words. Rather, a sentence indicates relationships between meanings. For example when we say He
will not be able to come tomorrow., we are actually saying something about his future plans. So, there is a
difference between word meaning and sentence meaning.
Sentences can be true or false but words cannot.
Grammar and meaning are related. The meaning of the sentence is not only the meaning of its words but
the relationship between them. We use word order to convey that relationship. Who did what to whom, what is
affected by something else and so on.
Some languages such as German and some varieties such as Welsh do not depend on word order as
English. This is because they have certain ending to words according to their position the sentence. So if the word
comes in the place of the subject it will have an ending assigned for that and so on for object, possessive..
Old English used to work the same way, having different ending for different positions. The pronoun system still
works the same way (Each pronoun changes according to its position in the sentence)
I >>> subject
Me >>> object
My >>> possessive

Finally, we can analyse language at three levels: sounds, words and sentences and thats what we call phonology,
lexis and grammar.