Make A Lang

After the 2nd LCC, there were two large steps that helped my proto-language for Fauleethik fall into place. The first was I began working on a conlang card game. The Glossotechnia game made my mind race. What could make language experimentation more accessible to your friends and family than a card game? Heck, what could make it more accessible to ME? I knew I needed to wrap my head around linguistic concepts better in order to experiment more and get the results I wanted. Plus, I might get some friends and family involved in my secret vice. Plus, I had an additional idea: what if this could be an easier way to codify and explain your conlang to others? Instead of having to write out a lengthy description with phonology, morphology, syntax, grammer, etc., what if you could just give a code or list of card numbers or something and they can have an almost instant picture of what your conlang is? All these ideas really got me excited to work on this. Now, a language is a fairly...

With it being the holiday season, I've been pretty busy, so I'm sorry about the lack of posts recently. But wow, I got a lot of response to the card game post, so I wanted to post more about it! I thought that today I would write some more about the additional functionality I am building into the game. I am designing the game to be playable with a group but also for solo play. With solo play, I figured you could use it to generate a random language, or you could put up the cards that would mostly describe your own conlang, and then be able to play around with the language by substituting, adding, or taking away some of the cards. Also, you could more easily understand other conlangs by putting up the cards that create that conlang. After doing this a few times, you would sense patterns between the cards for how certain languages sound and behave. If you an amateur linguist (like me), developing a recognition for these patterns could be really helpful to wrapping your head ...

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...

The Second Language Creation Conference was coming and I was feeling pretty good about the progress of my language over the past year. I had a phonology, a rough morphology, and a few grammer rules, but it really wasn't very detailed at all. But my runic script and font, aha, now there was something people could actually look at! I actually submitted a page for the LCC program for my conlang (page 55), which at this point was called Fauleethik, which literally meant sound-tongue. The original name, Peetik, I had given up shortly after the 1st LCC. I had originally chosen Peetik because I loved how the runic Futhark alphabet was so named because F, U, Th, A, R, & K are the first six letters of that alphabet, and it just happened to make a cool sounding name. P, Ee, T, I, & K were supposed to be the first five letters of my conlang alphabet, but I realized I didn't like arranging my alphabet that way after all, and the name didn't sound right. "Fauleethik" ...

He doesn't want dem apples. I got some cool ideas last week from Tim Ferriss . For any readers who haven't heard of him, look him up - he is an amazing guy who likes to find ways to beat the game, rather than play the game. I was watching this video and I wondered if I could apply any of his ideas to conlanging. Hestarts talking at the 6:35 mark about learning languages and he mentioned that using the following phrases helped one better understand the grammar and mechanics of a language (10:02 mark): The apple is red. It is John's apple. I give John the apple. We want to give him the apple. He gives it to John. She gives it to him. I thought that it makes sense that the reverse must be true as well - that you should be able to use these as a way of testing out/creating the grammar and mechanics of your conlang! I wanted to try this out in a couple of simple ways to illustrate the concept, but we'll just do one per post. First, let's use the ...

Hello! I'm still alive. And I'm still conlanging. A brief summary of the decade-long hiatus: we moved from California to Texas at the beginning of 2013, and I was really busy with work and starting a lightsaber group, cosplaying, gaming and other geeky things after the move. I wasn't sure what else I had to add to the conlanging space while all these movies and TV shows with amazing conlangs were dropping left and right. In 2009, we got Avatar with the Na'avi conlang by Paul Frommer. In 2011, we got Game of Thrones with Dothraki fleshed out by the very awesome David Peterson. In 2013 we got Defiance, Syfy's TV series with multiple conlangs by the still very awesome David Peterson. Maybe I wanted to sit back and let the pros teach me for awhile, but I kept playing with conlanging here and there. Whenever I thought about MakeALAng, I couldn't get into the same headspace and come up with anything that I thought would be of broad interest.  In 2022, I was amazed to...

I stated in a previous post that there were two main things I did after the second LCC that helped me really firm up my first conlang. The first was digging into the conlang card game. The second was I decided to try and make things REALLY simple. I thought, " I don't really want it to be this simple, but I'm just going to experiment and see what happens ." Here's a few other things that lead me in the direction I took: I had previously found this page on Huttese , the language of Jabba the Hutt and Tatooine from Star Wars. I liked the sound of it. I wondered how I might make my conlang sound more like it, but with my phonology (the one that had TONS of phonemes, remember?). I realized after studying it for a week or two that what I really liked about it was the open syllable structure. "Tolpa da ponki nu puti cha naga." It just sounded right; it sounded good to my ears. So I started pulling out phonemes and making sure that I had mostly open s...