ParanetOnline
The Dresden Files => DFRPG => Topic started by: DFJunkie on May 07, 2012, 02:40:00 PM
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Do you have any to share? I have used http://www.wordreference.com/ but it’s really only good for languages that use the Latin alphabet, I’ve had trouble finding sources for phonetic Russian (it sounds appropriately rough without being as cognate heavy as German) on the net.
My other source, for my nerdy apprentice, is pop culture, mostly video games. It may be too silly for some tables, but there is a generational group that has very definite ideas about what “Hadouken!” means.
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My wizard casts spells in Creole, I found a couple of halfway decent sites on the internet for Louisiana Creole (I don't have the links handy, I'll find them and post them) but i regularly default to Google Translate's Haitian Creole translator and then say it with a faux southern accent. It is not exact but it works for our game, anyway Google Translate has a lot of languages represented.
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It requires a bit of work, but I made a mini-Conlang for my wizard. After all you won't need to make more than fifty words or so to say stuff like "Water attack" or "Force wall" and really anything else you can do with evocation. If you lack a word for something, just make it up.
Conlang reference links: How to create a language. (http://www.angelfire.com/scifi2/nyh/how__all.html) and The Language Construction Kit (http://www.zompist.com/kit.html)
General tips for making things sound exotic: If you want to avoid making just a word-for-word gloss of English try doing the Yoda thing with the word order. Try eliminating "the" and "a" or having them be affixes in stead of stand-alone words. If you don't want to make up a sound-system, copy one from another language. (It's usually better to cut out sounds rather than adding them; that way you know how to pronounce everything.) And when you do cut, (or add) be systematic rather than random: That is, don't cut out e.g. the "b" sound, the "sh" sound and the "r" sound, that would just sound weird. If you cut, for instance, all the unvoiced fricatives (that's: "f", "s" "sh" (and "ch" if you're Scottish or something)) it sounds natural.
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I find this is one of the best uses of the Google translator. Put something like "force wall" into it, translate it back and forth a couple times, and use the result.
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Ditto Mr. Death's comment
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Like I said, that works fine for languages that use a Latin alphabet, but I really don't know where to start with this: это не имеет смысла
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You need a transliteration site for the alphabet you're using.
Cyrillic I use http://translit.cc/