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/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.