Karklak Review

Karklak Review

Word Formation

Karklak words were either invented wholesale or borrowed at retail from etymons of English (the only dictionaries I had at that time were English dictionaries, whereas today I have about 20 dictionaries of different natural languages). For instance, "arrow" is uk but "warlord" is ban, from Serbo-Croatian(!) and present in English as ban, "a unit of currency in Romania", [Romanian, from Serbo-Croatian ban, "warlord", from Turkic bayan, "very rich person": bay, "rich, gentleman" + -an, intensive suffix.]. There were very few compounds, one of which was darkrozzel, "little staff".

Some of the words look like they were invented by Scooby Doo -- rard from "guard", ralk from OE aelk, rarlok from "warlock", ravok from "havoc" and reng from "wing".

Lexical Space

While I'm not pleased with my method of word formation, I am happy with the fact that words often had more detailed meanings than English counterparts. I created specialized words, for the most part centered on the war-like needs of its speakers. I had words like razzen, "to attack or kill with a blade, beak or talon"; kirnen, "to

fight with a sword" (inspired by the archaic sense of English skirmish); and dunor, "thunder, hammer, the God of Thunder". Karklak even had words to distinguish between "to parry with a quarterstaff or pikestaff" (krozzen) and "to parry with a sword" (krazzen).

* Karkrak, The Gnome Tongue -- my first language, which I spent 10 years on

and built up into a lexicon of 1000 words (but no grammar). A hideous, ugly

thing, that I am too embarrassed to publish. When I think back to Karklak, my first conlang, it was actually strongly influenced by Barsoomian, with a weak-tea version of Barsoomian phonology, though I wasn't even aware of it at the time. But the impetus for creating the language was not Tolkien, but an issue of _Dragon_ magazine that talked about language building for D&D campaigns.

After reading The Lord of Rings, it occurred to me that I could have much more complex creations, true model languages. Since I was writing a few stories about gnomes, I decided to create a language for gnomes, Karklak. The words I created seem silly to me nowgronken for to forget, krazzen for to parry with a sword and zax for a hatchetbut I took it very seriously at the time. Unfortunately, I had a tendency to borrow words from everything: grokken (to know, from Robert Heinleins coinage grok), konbad (to battle, from combat) and ban (warlord, adopted straight from Croatianof all things). I invented some languages to use as labels to hide these borrowings in imaginary etymologies: Northic was the label I used for words from Old Norse or from Norman French, Old Alvish was Old English, Founding Alvish was Middle English and so on. I never created an alphabet for Karklak, I just tried to use what I thought of as harsh, dull sounds, inadvertently giving the language a rather flat sound. I worked on Karklak from when I was ten to when I was nineteen, and I eventually got it up to about a thousand words, all set up in a nice computer database, but I never had a full enough grammar to be able to create sentences. The whole thing died when I gave up on a very bad fantasy novel called To Break The Marble Spell, which made some use of the language.

For my first model language, the Gnome Tongue (started when I was 13 or

so), I created the vocabulary simply by making a list of English words I

needed and coming up with what they would look like in the Gnome Tongue.

For me, each Gnome Tongue word meant exactly the same as an English

word. So _brekken_, "to break", had most of the varied senses of

English _break_, including "smash, penetrate, violate, interrupt, tame,

weaken, destroy and collapse".