Make A Lang

Today I want to start talking about morphology , which means how words are structured. If you've been reading MakeALang for awhile, I posted last year about phonotactics a little. Phonotactics = phon ( sound) + tact (touch). Phonotactics is about what sounds can touch other sounds in a language. Example: in English, s and r cannot be next to each other. Sri Lanka is obviously a foreign name to us because we just know that s and r aren't supposed to be together. Morphology is different. Morphology is not about the sounds that make up words, but about the structure of words. Its about what a word is in your conlang, and how it works to convey meaning. This is actually a huge subject (for me, at least) and I've been struggling for MONTHS to try and break it down to a point where its digestible. Well that, and my wife and I had a baby boy end of September. :D I won't be covering all morphology concepts in this post, but there will probably be a Morphology 202 po...

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...