Make A Lang

I was thinking about my conlanging today, and specifically about how Yes and No are said in Reformed Pitak and Old Fauleethik, which is simply Sa and Ne, or Sau and Nei (or Saw and Nay to make pronunciation a little more clear). Now the interesting thing I was reflecting on was that I came up with these words a LONG time ago, way before I knew much about phonology, morphology, grammer, etc. But these words have survived through the various iterations and changes I've made over the years. I thought it might be interesting to recount to myself and for you how I've continually made changes and how these words have managed to remain unchanged. First of all, my phonology has never changed to a point where these sounds would not be allowed, but if it had, I could have just changed a vowel or a consonant and moved on. Second, as I began developing my morphology for words, I had decided that, in Pitak, words ending in -a are generally verbs in the present tense. But, verbs usually...

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...

For a few years, my conlanging stumbled around in a big dark room. The only thing that kept me going on my conlang were a Middle Earth Encyclopedia book I had, that got me excited about language creating whenever I leafed through it and looked at the interesting names Tolkien had created for various things through out Middle Earth. Occasionally I would look up stuff on other languages, to get ideas for stuff I might integrate into my language, but it wasn't much help. The first resources I found that started me going in any direction some sort of a semblance of a direction, were the Ardalambion and Langmaker websites. I was able to learn a great deal about Quenya, Sindarin, and Tolkien's other languages, and I was able to start playing around with creating words out of sounds using the langmaker word generator. Here is an online version to play with. Something that I loved and really got me moving in the right directions, were these newsletters I found on langmaker.com....