Building a Conlang (Vek'ta)

[Jendekit]

Okay technically it isn't World Help that I am looking for, but I was hoping for advice regarding a conlang that I started working on for a race in one of my games. The game is over, but the players really enjoyed the snippets of the language that I had developed and kept asking for me to turn it into an actual language.

The major problem with that is that I don't have any experience with linguistics outside of participating in a 'vote up a language' thread here on these forums.

I have already decided on the main sounds I want for the language (named Vek'ta), have a word list of 80 words including the numbers 0-18 (the race that this language was for had a base 6 numbering system), some basic grammar rules, and a few sample sentences.

The language has a sentence structure of Object Subject Verb, for example in Vek'ta the phrase "greetings my friends" would be "my friends I greet".

As far as the rest of the grammar rules that I have are concerned, I have past and future tense (inserting 'v' after the first syllable [k'chekt turns into k'v'chekt] for past and inserting the suffix 'k'ka [k'chekt turns into k'chekt'k'ka] for future), plural form (insert the prefix za [zat turns into zazat]), adjectives (adjective'zk'noun), negating (adding the prefix z' [aktn becomes z'aktn]), and the possessive form (add the suffix 'ka [to say "my __" you would say kt'ka __]).

I apologize if this is an info dump, but I wanted to get this all out and I would like some advice on how to further proceed beyond just adding words to the dictionary that I am building. Any advice of any kind would be helpful, and as a sampling of the language, here are several sentences with the loose English translations spoilered.
Zaitv yex vo?
What are you?

Kt'zk'vran kt gvan.
Greetings my friend.

Uutin yt itv vo?
Why are you here?

Mytaan itv vo'k'ka.
Good night.

[Dusk Raven]

Working on a Conlang myself, I'd say the first piece of advice would be to say the words and phrases a lot to make sure they flow off the tongue nicely. Second, if you have any textbooks from a language course, I'd follow those but translate the words and phrases into your language.

[lsfreak]

A big thing to know before any useful advice can really be given is whether you're concerned with whether the language is naturalistic or not. For example, object-subject-verb word order is fantastically rare IRL as the basic word order. A given word order will have impacts elsewhere in the grammar. A verb-final word order, for example, correlates with:
- Adjective-noun word order
- Possessor-possessed word order
- Aspectual adverbs (frequently, sometimes) appearing before the verb
- Postpositions instead of prepositions (the house to, not to the house)
- Obliques occur before their referent (my brother to I ran or I my brother to ran, not I ran to my brother)
- Subordinators and relativizers occur after the phrase ( more, not more [than I did])
- Wh-in-situ (You watched which movie?) is possible instead of requiring wh-movement (Which movie did you see? or Which did you see movie?)
- Suffixes tend to be more common than prefixes, but...
-- If the verb agrees with both subject and object, object agreement may be a prefix, resulting from object pronouns affixing to the front of the verb
-- Directional prefixes (running [I]out of the house, looking away) may be prefixes) arise from postpositions affixing to the front of the verb
- Case systems more common than with non-verb-final languages

And quite a few others. However, not all of these are as strongly correlated as others, and if you're not interested in ensuring the language is naturalistic then they don't really matter at all.

My two immediate things to try and figure out would be ensuring you have a consistent orthography; e.g. if you use c/g, be aware than the hard-soft alternation is a specific result of English and Romance development (Russian and Hindi have similar alternations, but each pronunciation has its own spelling). Or keeping in mind that the English letters x and q are superfluous, and we lack a simple representation of the sh-sound and the ch-sound, resorting to digraphs (there is nothing innately s+h-ish about the sh-sound, it's just a spelling convention). The other is ensuring you don't have a'pos'trophes' just for fun, but for a specific reason - if you want a lot of them, you could justify it as marking morpheme boundaries, but my personal rule is to use them only with glottalization (uh'oh, Hawai'i).

Three things that might be worth looking into:
The International Phonetic Alphabet (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet), it's a good thing for anyone with any interest in languages to know
Glossing abbreviations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_glossing_abbreviations), for describing word parts. Note that they're not hard rules, and different people will have slightly different glosses. An example in English:

We'll run to the pet stores tomorrow
[wi=l rən tə ðə=pɛt stɔr-z tə'maroʊ]
1P=FUT run to DEF.ART=pet store-PL tomorrow
Here, I just glosses "to" as to, but if it was relevant, I might gloss is as ALL, an allative (movement towards), while in other sentences it might be an INF (infinitive) or a DAT (dative/indirect object) or a few others.

World Atlas of Language Structures (http://wals.info/) is a decent starting point for getting information on the different ways languages structure things, going to Wikipedia to help figure out what different terms are. It's most useful for finding some of those correlations I mentioned before, but starting out it can also be useful to figure out how you can conceptualize things beyond what your native language uses.

[Jendekit]

All of it.

This will be a big help just from the links provided, so thank you in advance. A great deal of the words and various -ixes that I have already decided on do have apostrophes but all of them represent glottal stops. When I was first writing up the language for my game I was trying to think of ways to make it sound unusual to the ears of my players (considering how two of them know Latin, Sindarin, and a smattering of I don't know how many other languages it was more difficult than I was anticipating). I chose to do that through a large number of glottal stops.

In regards to if I want to make it a naturalistic language, I honestly don't know. I could easily justify it either way in regards to the Zat (the name of the people that I made the language for). Stone age society with the ruins of a past civilization around them, it is entirely possible that Vek'ta was originally artificial. I'll need to think on it and discuss it with my gaming group.