[Leisha]

Originally Posted by Teresa Edgerton

I did begin to work on an alphabet, but I never got very far. Maybe that's something I will find time to do before the final book comes out. Your alphabet is very pretty, Leisha, and going by the samples you've given, the language itself looks like it would be attractive to the eye and ear as well.

I designed it with that in mind -- to be speakable, workable, and natural-looking. I'm glad someone thinks it worked!

But actually, English has such a wide vocabulary compared to many languages, when a book is translated into one of those languages it can take a lot more words to get across the exact meaning that you can pinpoint with one single word in English.

I'd say you can pinpoint your exact meaning in a multitude of correct single words; English has many synonyms.
As for other languages being longer, yes, I found that too when working on my language. Sometimes my sentences were four or five words longer because I was lacking that one simple one that we have in English... that's annoying, but it's also part of language.

One of my major faults is to make sentences longer than they need to be by qualifying everything. Lots of extra buts, howevers, neverthelesses ...

Ah, we suffer the same ailment! During my second, third, fourth, and fifth re-writes I still have to go through and delete a lot of unnessesary "buts" and "howevers".


One tip which will make designing your alphabet easier: Once you've designed it, convert it to a computer font by using one of the many programs available for download on the net. To make mine, I used a thirty-day trial of FontCreator - The Most Popular Font Editor!
Once you've turned your alphabet into a font, you install it into your C:/Windows/Fonts folder (by copying and pasting your font into this location), then when you open your writing program, e.g. Word, you'll see your font in the dropdown box of installed fonts. Sometimes for fun I'll highlight open documents I'm working on and change the font to one of my made up ones -- suddenly the page looks so much different!