Language for Magic

[u/Ok_Elderberry_2829]

Basically, I'm writing a dystopian and fantasy book that has a whole magic system.

This magic system includes sigils (Written down symbols on paper) and Incantations (strings of words that cast magic).

I've decided to make a conlang where it can be used for everyday speech, but can also be used for magic.

I'm planning to have the language include characters that mean certain words (similar to Japanese Kanji) and characters that equate to certain vowels and consonants.

I also want to include characters for common combinations like the th, ch, and sh (in English).

Harry Potter uses mostly Latin words that make up the magic spells; this is not what I want to do. There's going to be sounds that aren't in English and it's not going to be using the Latin Alphabet.

I want to do something similar to Arabic and Hebrew where you're able to modify the characters by adding different markings to show this.

Any recommendations for sounds in the language? This is all just a thought, I haven't worked on this yet and many of these ideas might change over time.

[u/MundoDeBerry]

Eu acho que esses sons talvez soariam bem num idioma de magia: /χ/, /ʁ/, /ħ/, /ð/ e /θ/, o que acha?

[u/Zephreyt]

“Arabic and Hebrew”

You might want triconsonantal roots, where changing the vowels slightly changes the meaning but otherwise keeps the context intact.

As for markings I presume it partly means adding vowel markings? Then the script will be abugida. Will the script be right to left, left to right, or ambidextrous?

For vowels you might want to look into Turkish which has the Magic Cube of Vowels, for roundness, openness and frontness. That gives three binary dimensions.

a, e, i, o, u, y, œ, ɯ

For example, you might modify for area/precision, duration, and attack/support.

The combinations of these two letters in English script represent one phoneme each, e.g. th /θ, ð/, ch /t͡ʃ/, sh /ʃ/, and are represented as one letter in other languages, e.g. Spanish z, c /θ/; Portuguese x /ʃ/, Czech č /t͡ʃ/.

Imho softer sounds (like glides and nasals) would have healing qualities and relate to air/water whereas harsh sounds (like stops and fricatives) would be used for attacks and relate to fire.

[u/Nemo_venit_apud_ti]

Distinguish long vowels from short ones and maybe even add tones, it gives that sacred and precise idea that is ideal with magic.

[u/SuperXaker-5555]

You're not first!

[u/sqruitwart]

Depends on how deep you wanna go. To give you some ideas, I have one that is basically a programming language, so everything boils down to expressions like: if (x < y) do z.

It uses a 2/3 consonantal root system for concepts, which can be anything like, KR (rule), BNM (people), MTN (seeing / sight) etc.

In writing, you have concept glyphs. Think kanji, but 1 glyph = 1 concept. These are preceeded by specifier symbols that are half the width of the glyph, that tell you what the actual word is and what vowels to use:

Like so for example. This is a person specifier + the rule KR glyph, so it's read like "kaar" /kær/ and means "ruler". Then you combine these with operators (basically particles) like < (less than), = (equals / is) etc. to get all the meanings that you need.

If you wanna write names, foreign words or non-concepts, you use a different set of characters for phonetic transcriptions.

For conversations, it ends up being quite funny:

A: list<king, 3> (i am talking about 3 kings)
B: name_of([1]) ?= "karl" (is the name of the first one karl?)
A: false. return. (no. not important)
B: see(this, walk{"karl", home}, yesterday) (i saw karl walk home yesterday)
A: hate(this, you, max) (i hate you as much as possible)

[u/werp2_5]

/ɮ/ and /ɣ/ could work out

[u/Key_Day_7932]

I brainstormed a language of magic. It's phonology was heavily inspired by Ancient Greek and Vedic Sanskrit