Make A Lang

After reading Rick Morneau 's wonderful summary of morphology for the umpteenth time, I thought I should write a post, in my words, about the relationship between phonology and morphology, or phonotactics. I think once this relationship is understood better, it makes your conlanging more enjoyable and quicker. A quick and dirty definition of phonology is that it is the sounds permitted in your conlang. Anything not in your phonology, speakers of that language would have a hard time saying (kind of like how Japanese are famous for speaking Ls like Rs). Lets break down the phonemes of your language into a few categories: consonants, clusters, vowels and semi-vowels. Just these four categories, for now. In fact, lets make up a phonology for the purposes of this post. P, t, k, f, th, s, sh, m, n, r and l for consonants. Ee, ei, au, oo, and o for vowels. 11 consonants, 5 vowels. Now, phonotactics. Lets keep explanations, and these phonotactic rules, simple. The phonology shoul...

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...

So Phonology is what sounds are included or allowed in a language. For example, larple could be an English word, but zhangkonn doesn't look like an English word by a long shot (maybe more of a Chinese/German hybrid word?). Phonotactics is also related to this, because the morphology of your language dictates how the sounds can be put together. CVC, consonant-vowel-consonant, could be one way to make a simple word. This would be a "closed syllable," meaning there is a consonant on each end of the vowel sound. In the morphology of your language, do you want to allow consonant clusters? (CC) St, sht, lmthk? Or maybe you want to allow clusters at the end of words or syllables, but never at the beginning? Will your morphology allow for vowel sounds to be put together? (CVVC) Lion, poet, joey? Or do you want lots of open syllables? Once you step into morphology there is a LOT to consider. The thing that made it simple for me again though was simply reflecting on what ...

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...