Make A Lang

The second day started off with Jeff Burke. Now, Jeff Burke was supposed to talk at the 1st LCC, and I was really excited about his talk, but an accident befell him and he wasn't able to show! Jeff has done a lot of research on Native American languages, specifically Algonquian and Iroquoian, and has created his own conlang based on his favorite parts called Noyahtowa. He gave a talk about evolutions and changes of pronominal prefixes within some native American languages and why they were interesting for a conlanger. Good stuff! Next was John Clifford, who spoke last year about aUi and Toki Pona; conlangs with a degree of popularity. John has a Masters in Lingusitics and a PhD in Philosophy abd has been a college professor, so he knows how to teach and he's pretty fun to talk to. This year he spoke about the problems of success with your conlang; success meaning more and more people discussing and speaking your language. The main problem he spoke of was losing control o...

Alrighty, I pulled out my conlang binder and looked up the random Language Kits I found and printed up over the years. Unfortunately, the only one that I have a link for is the Zompist Language Construction Kit , but it is one of the best. I might scan the others and post a PDF file or something later. Initially, none of these did me much good, because I didn't really know how to experiment with language fully. I mostly played with word generators, plugging in slightly different sets of phonemes, giving different morpheme rules, to see what I got. You can do this yourself very quickly at the Fantasist link in the corner up there. But because I didn't push forward I really limited my own progress. All I was doing was looking at words. Once I had a phonology and morphology, I should have tried grammer, developing cases and so on. I was stuck! BUT, something got me unstuck and catapulted me ahead in ways I wouldn't even guess. One time while I was visiting Langmaker.com , I sa...