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Conlanging - Blog Posts
man i want to worldbuildd soooo baddd..... no creativity.....
all my homies hate creating a pleasant sounding phonology and phonotactics this shit sucks how do i do this
she a 10 but she use absolutive-ergative alignment
.uinai why is learning lojban so hard
.i mi pensi lodu'u na kakne lonu cilre lo jbobau .u'inai
If you are a conlanger, a group from the University of Washington is looking for your input as they set about to create some conlanging software! The survey is fairly short (~5 minutes), and please feel free to share!
How do you type laughing in your language or conlang?
English: ha ha ha
Russian: ха ха ха (pronounced: kha kha kha)
I’m actually so curious
Working on flora/cappish, my conlang for my gfs homebrew dnd mushroom race, at like 1 AM and I got so lost in the sauce of verb conjugation that I forgot my sentence order
In case if anyone's interested. I am another person one can interact with about this, and can think of many others. Conlanging is much more than just David J. Peterson. In fact, and I mean this without any disrespect for him, I am a bit annoyed how much Peterson, Paul Frommer, Marc Okrand and Tolkien have become in popular conscience pretty much the only conlangers - and so many of those that do know others only know YouTubers. There's so so many of us, and some of the best work is made by those who are of the community but not particularly famous outside the hobby. And some of the best resources on conlanging come from such circles.
so, i don't really know anyone who might find this as exciting as i did, so i thought i'd share it with you instead, lol. i recently wrote a fic in which i did not properly construct a conlang, but i did get to create a lot of place names and colloquialisms based on linguistic shifts and influences from surrounding languages, and it was just so much FUN? like, getting to examine the patterns of the surrounding (related) languages and determine what would be the most likely shifts for the languages in this fictional spot, and then looking at the history of the place itself and the waves of invaders, and how that affected the place names and people names and general linguistic borrowing of the surrounding areas, etc etc.
anyway, i just had such a good time, and i wanted to share it with someone else who might enjoy it! thank you in advance for letting me drop this in your box. <3
That's wonderful! If you enjoyed it here, you'll probably enjoy doing it just for the sake of it. Something I that I think would behoove fantasy authors is having a fleshed out world in which to set stories, and that includes their languages. If you work on them ahead of time, you can then drop in and write the story you want in whatever part of the world you want and all that work will be there for you to draw from. It'll be more like writing a history than writing a story, and all the places where you usually get hung up (what's this character's name going to be...? What's their family...? What's the name of their home town...?) will be easy, and you can focus on the writing itself.
Anyway, glad you enjoyed it, and I hope you can enjoy more in the future!
Same but I'm terrible at thinking of ways to do this
God i missed you dude but umm, what would you say is your favorite way to add new words to your lexicon? Are you a suffix guy, prefix, infix if you're feeling spicy? Or something else?
For me, the most satisfying coinage is a natural metaphorical extension that I hadn't thought of previously. For example, keligon is "stop" in High Valyrian, and kelinītsos is a pause or a break, but I extended the latter metaphorically to mean "chance" or "opportunity"—a moment when things stop briefly, and you have a chance to do something. Rather than it being your chance, it is your pause: What will you do while things have stopped very briefly, affording you a window of opportunity?
Truth
I've heard High Valyrian has no words for grandparents, is that right? And what word might exist for that role?
It sure didn't—until I created them.
There are four terms:
kekepa "father's father"
mumuña "mother's mother"
kepāzma "mother's father"
muñāzma "father's mother"
In a conlang, there are always words that aren't there because they're supposed to not be there, and words that aren't there because they haven't been created yet. That latter category is always going to be much, much larger than the former.
This point cannot be emphasised enough. I would never have been able to make any grammar at all without doing things this way.
Constraints are an amazing tool that actually make you more creative. Instead of trying to give your language ALL OF THE FEATUREs, try putting more constraints on it.
I’ve never read this book, I only watched the series on YouTube. I must read it at some point. David J. Peterson’s content on linguistics is immaculate.
I FOUND A BOOK
Look what we got from the library!!! Look at it! Look!
Now that we have The Book, there's no stopping us. You will all be drowning in words and grammar and scripts >:D
But seriously. If I had a flappy hands emoji, I'd be using it right now.
Day 31 (1:01 in extended base 30 base 7) of rewriting my conlang.
Poll at the end!
Groups of thirty days are easier to count than pure groups of seven days, so I will now be implementing an extended base 30 where the first digit will go up to 42 (30 in base 10) and the next digit will count in base 12. A complicated way of approximating the number of years:months:weeks-days I've been writing.
Today I remembered that I'm writing my novel and can do what I want, so I added a pretty direct form of foreshadowing by mentioning that Mostijv was going to find a huge lava monster (named Tev) who would help her rebel against the oppressive, Odapir government and form the White Army.
Today, I fleshed out more of the Western Zenestian languages, but I'm not done with sound changes and grammar yet, so be on the lookout for that.
Also,