Make A Lang

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...

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...