Making a conlang.

Chagen

It takes a massive amount of work.

You have to do quite a few things, and each one cannot be skipped:

>Determine the phonology for the lang
>Decide if it's using the Latin alphabet or not
>If it is, decide if sounds that can't be represented by the normal 26 letters are going to be digraphs, diacritics or whole new letters
>If it isn't, come up with a whole new alphabet
>Decide what pairs of letters are illegal (like "mt" won't ever happen in a native English word)

>Decide grammar
>Decide is the language is fusional/synthetic/agglutinative/something else
>Determine if the language has articles
>Determine if the language has gender, and if it does, how many genders? Two, Three, Eight, 17? (yes, some real languages have that many genders)
>Determine shit like head-order, adjective/noun/adverb inflection, whether or not verbs get marked to indicate tense, aspect, modality, and other various things
>Decide if the language has numbers/a way of counting (some real life Tribal languages do not have numbers or way of counting)
>Decide if the language has case marking, and if so, how much
>Decide if the language has grammatical number
>Some other stuff I can't remember

>Make words
>Lots of them
>Determine what their meanings are

I have only finished verb marking, case declension, gender, numerals, and phonology/orthhagraphy.

I tried making words. I got somewhat good progress with verbs, but nouns are hell, and I have no idea why.

Also, verbs can be hell to come up with, because I'll be on a roll and then I'll realize that my language has no word for "to party", or "to draw" (not sure why Demons would need to draw, though....).

And then we have prepositions. I was five days through this when I realized that my language has no word for "by", or "over", or "through", or anything like that.

Just you wait, Demonos (language spoken by the Demons of the Full Auto universe)! I'll finish you one day!

.....And then I'll have to start on Angelos (The language of Angels in Full Auto)...


 

Alkthash

See the whole conlang for your fantasy verse never struck me as a productive use of time. You could be better spend it writing the actual story or learning a language you can use to talk to real people with.

Chagen

But it's fun to linguistic fags like me.

FrodoGoofballCoTV

IJAM: An entire site site devoted to describing all the conlangs created by J.R.R. Tolkein.

Alkthash

But what's the point? Any other work of art you can show of to other people and at least some of them will understand it. With a conlang you might as well just be masturbating.

Chagen

Some people do try to learn conlangs. There's even several movements for that purpose.

Also, we like to compare/contrast our various conlangs.

IanExMachina

>Decide what pairs of letters are illegal (like "mt" won't ever happen in a native English word)

Dreamt.

Chagen

Well, "mt" cannot occur in the middle or beginning (I think).

By the way, I have a small amount written up for this conlang. I'll post it later today.

Gelzo

"See the whole conlang for your fantasy verse never struck me as a productive use of time. You could be better spend it writing the actual story or learning a language you can use to talk to real people with."

This.

And that's coming from a ling major.

Chagen

It's just a hobby.

Tolkien did it, and look at how good his stories were anyway. People do strange things for fun.

Why do people learn Latin? What good could it ever be in anythig besides scientific contexts.

IanExMachina

^

Time travel.

Law degrees.

Etc

ClockworkUniverse

Learning Latin improves your vocabulary in several languages.

MillerCross

Tolkien did it, and look at how good his stories were anyway

Tolien was good at world building. I think everyone agrees that his stories really could use some editing.

Chagen

"Learning Latin improves your vocabulary in several languages."

In what way?

(by the way, I'm planning on taking Latin as an elective next year anyway. I want to try my hand at a fusional language and I love its sound)

ClockworkUniverse

A crapload of words, even a lot of obscure ones, are Latin-derived.

Chagen

Oh. Well I knew that already.

Maybe I'll major in lingustics. I think I may have finally found my calling...my passion. I wonder what kind of linguist I'd be, though.

BlackHumor

I want to try my hand at a fusional language

English is already fusional though.

I wonder what kind of linguist I'd be, though.

...a cunning one? XD

Gelzo

Well if you're serious enough about linguistics to study it in college, or you're at least still interested in the same sort of thing, syntax is probably going to be your best bet.

The people who study it are called syntacticians, by the way.

Chagen

It's not as fusional or synthetic as Latin, though.

Latin is an article-less language that uses a complex case system to indicate what each word in a sentence does.

Strangely enough, three of the four main langauges descended from Latin--Spanish, Italian, and French--have very complicated article systems and no case. That's....quite a change, similar to English losing all of its gender, case system, and verb system, and having its syntax heavily altered from all the other Germanic languages.

Alkthash

You said you were taking German right? Its a better idea to work up fluency in your second language first before adding another one and making up a bunch of pointless conlangs.

nohaynicklibre

Latin sucks. I just had an exam of it and I probably failed. Clearly it's Latin's fault

Chagen

"You said you were taking German right? Its a better idea to work up
fluency in your second language first before adding another one and
making up a bunch of pointless conlangs."

I am moderately good in German already. Nowherenear Fluency, but I am very odd--I learn languages with barely any difficulty. Learning German was so easy that it was like I was kid learning his native language(s). I just seem to gain a grasp of the grammar and syntax at a rate that's abnormally fast.

While my peers in German 2 are haven't even done past tense or cases, I have basically learned past tense completely (that is, I know the stem endings for weak verbs, and I learn the irregular ones nearly as fast), the perfect ("I have had/I will have had/etc.) and I nearly completely understand the case system.

I also know how to do future tense and the conditional (though, it's nearly the same as in English--use "werden" the same as English uses "will" for future tense, and the conditional is simply "würden" like how English uses "would").

That's German 3 AP and German 4 AP level stuff. I'm in German 2 P-AP. And I got a lot of this stuff by the end of German 1 by reading ahead in the book and looking at the German 2 and 3 books.

I can learn Latin alongside German.

Alkthash

That's all great, but could you use it to carry a conversation? Not a few sentences of German, an actual conversation.

Chagen

No, but that's because now I must do the arduous but rewarding task of learning vocabulary. But grammar always matters. It's like the skeleton of a building: if you know just the grammar, you have the supports, but the building is ugly and useless. If you know just the vocab but not much about the grammar, you have a beautiful building--that has no supports/flimsy supports and will simply crumble. If you know both, then your building is not only useful, but also strong and stable.

It's also far easier to build a skeleton and then add the exterior than it is to build the exterior and then add the skelton.

As for learning vocab--I like to translate my favorite songs into German. As I come across words I don't know, I use my dictionary to find them, therefore increasing my lexicon.

Icalasari

I'm working on a conlang too, but it is one of the least concentrated parts of my game (more or less if I coke across a case where I would like to use it, and lack a word/grammar rule, I fix that)

...Mind you, I still don't prioritize well myself (Concentrating too much on mythology and plants)