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  1. - Top - End - #1
    Titan in the Playground
    Join Date
    Feb 2011

    Default Resources for Building A Conlang?

    Has anyone hereabouts done work with constructed languages, and if so could you recommend the resources you’ve found most useful?

    I’ve come across mentions of a couple of books, Rosenfelder’s Language Construction Kit and Petersen’s Art of Language Invention, but I’d like to get a sense of what else might be out there. I’ve worked professionally in several languages, and have an interest in language diversity and evolution—but I’m not a research linguist myself, so something pitched more for the beginning conlanger would be most helpful. Any suggestions come to mind?

  2. - Top - End - #2
    Titan in the Playground
     
    Aedilred's Avatar

    Join Date
    Apr 2006
    Location
    Bristol
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    Male

    Default Re: Resources for Building A Conlang?

    I attempted this a couple of years ago. The exercise essentially involves learning quite a lot of linguistic theory. If you already speak multiple languages, that's helpful, because you won't be encountering everything for the first time but there's still a lot of ground to cover. In particular, you need to have a fairly solid grasp of phonetics. I think the standard text there (and certainly the one I used) is Catford's Practical Introduction to Phonetics. Other books I would recommend for a relative beginner are Arika Okrent's In the World of Invented Languages (not a technical book, more an intro to the world of conlanging), Lakoff/Johnson's Metaphors We Live By (promoting insight into the way language is actually used, beyond the formal grammar) and Trask's Historical Linguistics which is a fairly high-level guide to language development and evolution.

    But the Rosenfelder book is probably the best place to start for conlanging overall. While it does assume a fairly low level of initial understanding (thus leading to some to say it's a bit basic) it does provide a really useful reference for almost everything you need to know to get started. He provides some useful practical advice drawing on years of experience and observation about how to go about it (the administrative process of actually recording the language, lexicon, etc.) and some pitfalls to avoid. He also provides a useful bibliography for other relevant books, specifying how advanced the relevant concepts are.

    If you haven't already found them, the websites conlang.org and zompist.com are very helpful. The latter is Rosenfelder's website and includes some content in the books (so you can get a bit of a preview of them) but more importantly, generators, one where you can just plug in the acceptable sound combinations in your language and it will spit out words, and one which auto-applies sound changes so you can "evolve" your language. These are incredibly useful when you need to come up with a lot of words in one go or come up with new dialects and the like.

    For my part I have two pieces of advice to offer: firstly, think about what the society that speaks this language is like and where it comes from: do its people live in deserts, steppe, rainforests, etc? What kind of landscapes, flora and fauna are they familiar with? What is their society like, what are its values? How much contact has it had with speakers of other languages? Has it traditionally dominated its neighbours or has it been repeatedly conquered? All of this will affect their vocabulary and often new ideas are referred back to old ones in order to make sense of them, as well as what proportion of loanwords they use and for what concepts. (You may find yourself having to construct multiple more basic lexicons in addition to your primary in order to have a source for these loanwords!)
    Secondly, coming up with word lists is very boring, so while you will definitely need to come up with several dozen words in isolation to begin with, put the language to use as soon as possible. Try to write organically in the language: dialogues, letters, and so on, and generate words as needed to express the concepts as they arise. Doing this will also give you an early clue as to how cumbersome the language is to use and whether you need to apply some changes, or whether some of the awkwardness (for instance difficulty in expressing certain syntactical forms) are to be features of the language that you want to develop.

    Good luck!
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  3. - Top - End - #3
    Titan in the Playground
    Join Date
    Feb 2011

    Default Re: Resources for Building A Conlang?

    Superbly helpful and excellent in all respects, thank you.

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