Make A Lang

Sound changes are when an established sound in a language shifts into another sound or sounds. This is, in my opinion, a fun part of conlanging, and a great way to lend some pseudo-reality or aging into your conlang. However, as my mantra has always been to SIMPLIFY, I need to say up front that this is also a great way to make your conlang much more complicated, so experiment and play with this but use with caution . No language is ever truly static, but is constantly changing and shifting as new cultural influences rise, new celebrities make new things cool (or uncool), and create new vocabulary or import words from other languages, possibly bringing new sounds into the language. In this article by Jeff Henning he mentions sound changes and shows a table of common sound changes (look for a 10 X 9 table). Sound changes can be something that happen over time in a language, or in a region (New England vs. Southern vs. California dude accents) and/or something grammatical. I wanted to s...

This is Part One, Part Two , Part Three The idea of making up my own alphabet was probably the first thing that attracted me to conlanging. After I learned Bulgarian, I made up a code that was based on Cirth and Bulgarian . I sent my brother the code and would mail him letters using it, just for fun. I started thinking about developing a new alphabet later, when I was playing the Myst games, and I saw the flowing script of D'Ni  (D'Ni is a conlang Cyan/Richard Watson developed for their games and books). First things to consider as you start developing your alphabet - What do you want? a phonetic alphabet a non-phonetic alphabet (like English) or a syllable-based alphabet (meaning one character per syllable, like po, kee, ot, or kel, would be represented by one character/Tibetan is syllabic) or an abjad, which would be a consonant-only-alphabet, and all vowels would be represented by diacritic marks (Hebrew and Arabic are examples) A little research on Omniglot will...

If you don't know a second language, please don't learn one just for the sake of creating your own language, unless you are a genius like that guy Jared in The Pretender . But do learn one to enrich your mind, broaden your understanding of another culture, and to stave off dementia. I happen to speak pretty fluent Bulgarian and it has definitely helped me with Conlanging in a few ways. 'Pretty fluent' because i lived there for a couple years and spoke it well, but haven't had many opportunities since I've been back to speak it. Can't remember all the vocabulary words so well anymore. But being able to think in another language and knowing the grammer can free up your thinking as to what is possible for your conlang. It could be argued that knowing a language or two might also limit your vision as to what you will and won't attempt, but my experience has taught me that this is NOT a bad thing. When I was reading through conlang websites, I was bombar...

Phonology is basically the inventory of sounds that can exist in your language. All the conlanging resources I found said that you need to start by developing a phonology for your conlang first. When I began, I just made a complete list of the sounds in English and Bulgarian, the two languages I speak, and came up with something like this: p b m, f v th d l s z sh zh t d, k g r. I didn't yet realize there is a voiced th and an unvoiced th, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to include a trilled r or not. I grouped them into vague classes of front of the mouth, middle of mouth, and back of the mouth. I also included ten vowel sounds that I thought were important and not diphthongs (i as in bit, e as in bet, a as in bat, u as in butt, o as in boat, ey as in beet, ay as in bait, iy as in bite, aw as in bought, oo as in boot). Yeah, in retrospect, iy is pretty much a diphthong of aw and ey, but I liked the vowel and I didn't know better yet. I kind of started playing a...