- The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder
- The Art of Language Invention by David J Peterson (also his book with the same title)
- Biblaridion’s How To Make A Language series
- And of course, my old friend wikipedia.org
If you don’t know about/want to research conlanging, that’s great, and there will still be some stuff in here that might be of interest. I’ll be translating some important texts for the constructed cultures that speak these languages and making a writing system which hopefully at least looks pretty. Right now, I’m firmly in the charts & jargon phase of the process.
Context
If you’ve been following my worldbuilding project, you may be thinking: “Why on earth are you doing a conlang now? You’ve barely even got a map!” This is reasonable, but I’m impatient, and I got to work on this conlang family before I forgot all my ideas for it.
Because of this, some of the historical elements won’t be coming into play yet. For now, I won’t be dealing with creoles or imported words, and my lexicon will be mostly pretty fundamental. That being said, I have a rough idea of the people who are going to speak these languages, which will influence some decisions I make. Importantly, this language family originated among humans, and the language family was primarily spoken by humans until present day. This is important because it means that I won’t be dealing with nonhuman mouth shapes, and thus my phonology needs to be naturalistic for a human language.
The Origins of this Project
This language family is loosely based off of my first completed conlang, Yiksighe, which I started in early 2021. For a first full language, it was honestly not bad, but there were definitely some things that could have been done better. I felt that some of the ideas in it were good enough that I wanted to give them a second chance, applying some of the lessons I learned while creating it to make a better final product.
I will also be posting some stuff about Yiksighe itself, because it’s probably the most polished of my conlangs right now. However, the posts will be much less polished and detailed than the ones about the languages currently under construction; I’ve reached the point with that project where it pains me to look at it, and I just want it out of my hair.
The Plan & Terminology
I’m not yet at the point in this process where I can give these languages endonyms, and I don’t have enough worldbuilding around them to give them exonyms either. As such, I’ll be referring to them like this:
I’ll be starting off by examining the Lang 1 branch of the family tree, going back and doing some reconstruction of Lang 0 as necessary. Later on I’ll also look at the Lang 2 branch.
Another quick note: As with most of the worldbuilding things on this blog, subsequent posts on this will be backdated significantly. This is to make the timeline consistent with when I first finalized the topic in my notes. Part of my goal here is to show the process, and I believe the time frame is an important part of that. I’m not always able to get stuff up on the blog as soon as I add it to my notes; in fact, I already had the complete phonology (and a fair bit of the morphology) for two of the languages drafted out several months ago, far before I even got around to making the blog.
Hopefully that’s all the introduction you need to this part of the project. Next time, I’ll actually get into the conlanging.