Codes 2

Before leaving codes I feel like I should mention something that will be a theme throughout.

Keep track of what you've done.

There is nothing like the feeling of going back a year later, rereading a passage of a story you've written, coming to the point where you inserted your snippet of your own language and suddenly realizing you don't know what it means because you forgot to put some sort of explanation in the text or you thought it would be perfectly obvious when it was not. You must either write in a translation or write in a response by someone in the story which will make what you said obvious. This is particularly important with simple codes because you absolutely will not remember, unless you've used the same words over and over through your story.

When studying linguistics we were told over and over that real language is spoken language. This was partly because written language sometimes will give you a false impression of the current spoken language, partly because there is far more to make a linguistic study of in spoken language than in written, But on the other hand lasting language is written language. We have better ways of preserving spoken language than ever before. But the things we'd really like to preserve from ourselves are those we've thought about for a while and written down. Oral epics like the Odyssey and the Kalevala are grand. But they are extremely rare, and they don't tell us a thing about all the stories of ancient Greece and Finland that have been lost over ages. Hittite and Tocharian exist today because people took the time to write things down.

In creating your own language you must write things down. You must save things you will never possibly remember more than a few days.

If your only alien word in your story is a cry of anguish, then you had better let your reader know that's what it is. And better yet, use it more than once so that your reader will remember it for the rest of the story.