25
votes
Anyone here into conlanging?
I've been creating new languages for a few years now. I like to do it in my spare time, which becomes smaller and smaller each year, mostly from proto-languages that already exist. I'm currently working on a Slavic language in Belarus and Ukraine for fun. Anyone else into this stuff or wanna know more about conlanging in general?
You don’t need a formal linguistics degree, but it doesn’t hurt to have some background in it. People who are into the hobby tend to eventually acquire an amateur’s understanding of at least the basics that you’d learn in your first couple years of studying it formally. This is a good starting point. Eventually, if you get seriously into it, you might want to start reading actual papers and textbooks on linguistics. A lot of people including me like this book for something more intermediate.
There’s some good forums like r/conlangs, incatena.org and https://cbb.aveneca.com/ out there. They are all fairly friendly, but the tolerance for low-effort posts is ... variable, so lurk a bit and see if you can’t find an answer to basic questions on your own before posting and you’ll be fine. R/conlangs is probably the most noob-friendly of the three.
it certainly helps, but ultimately not at all. i have no formal linguistics education, for example, and honestly i'm nowhere near as sophisticated as some other people are with theirs, but just looking stuff up when you don't understand it and skimming through grammars and stuff of that nature gets you pretty far. there are also a lot of resources for it now, from zompist's classic language construction kit to channels like biblaridion and artifexian, which require pretty much no linguistic knowledge at all that are great places to start with.
I'm actually leaving CC to go study linguistics at university in no small part due to conlanging. It really stirred something up in me (along with Anglish and when I was studying a foreign language). As of now, with no formal linguistics training, I've made about 4 "full" conlangs and what I've shared has been really well received in online communities where people DO have formal linguistics education.
As for recommendations on getting started, I can recommend this YouTube playlist and most importantly just going on Wikipedia and clicking blue links. Like search up a language that you're interested in and any time you're unclear about something, click the blue link or search for it on the internet. It's basically how I got started. There are also TONS of pages all over the internet on conlanging and linguistics in general. Also, learn the IPA; linguistics forums can get irritated if you go into ask a question or post about your conlang like "it's pronounced like A as in 'bath.'" when people pronounce "bath" differently across dialects (I use /æ/, but Brits tend towards /ɑ/).
yep. i have a few which i work on-and-off on; none of them are particularly far along, but since i'm not exactly on a time crunch to work on them it's not a big deal. eventually my hope is to have around 10 of them fully fleshed out, and i have one gigantic coordinating document to deal with that + countless spreadsheets. it's kind of a mess, but c'est la vie. i'll probably share one of them on here when i get farther along with it, to be honest.
Definitely @ me when you do. I'd love to get a ~conlangs on this site; it'll be a lot more refreshing not to see the same ten goddamn things on /r/conlangs. Also, let me know if I can help or anything. I've always wondered what it would be like to collab on a conlang like this absolute unit of a post.
I'm a fan, and have created a few conlangs myself. Personally I enjoy conlangs that attempt to do something weird or implement a really "out there" feature. Also, recently I have become more interested in neography (essentially, conscripts). One roadblock I've found is that creating vocabulary/large scripts (like a logography) takes forever. It's possible to automate it, but it usually turns out kinda generic and bad. I've been considering experimenting with services like Amazon's mechanical turk for this sort of thing, as it seems like a great way to generate a realistic sounding vocabulary/logography for relatively cheap.
I'm the total opposite; I tend to go for conlangs (and find interest in conlangs) that are realistic and have a sort of believable history to them (i.e., I made a Frisian language native to France and explained how they got there and how the language was influenced by French). That being said, I've seen some great conlangs that go against this trend and have been fascinated by them.
As for logographies, I would highlight an interesting development from Mandarin Chinese characters (I don't know if this works in the other dialects, so Mandarin is the only one I know this generally works for). Most common characters are split up into two sections, a semantic feature (the determinative) and a phonetic one (the rebus), which together form a phonosemantic compound. So if we look at a character like 淋 lín [lin˧˥] "to pour," we can split it into two parts: the determinative 氵 (full form: 水 shuǐ [ʂweɪ̯˨˩˦]) which means that it's gonna have something to do with water or liquid, and the rebus 林 lín [lin˧˥], which has the pronunciation aspect to it. This pieces together the character and if I were going for a logography, I would aim here.
Sorry if this is something you already know, but I figure, hey, maybe someone else will see it and find it helpful. Good conlanging! :)
Yeah, I've been studying Mandarin for a while, and it and standard written Chinese in general still have hundreds of radicals with tons of variations, so while you wouldn't need to create each characters individually (as in, completely separately), it would still take a long time to write out your own. This could be fun for some people though. I've seen people with thousands of hours spent on steam games, so I'm sure if someone was dedicated they could spend thousands of minutes drawing up new radicals and characters for their own logography. I would be more interested in spending like 50$ on MTurk and getting a finished result for like 500 characters/radicals near instantaneously.
Personally I've become more invested in writing systems like Hangul, which are something like a syllabary, but arranged in ways that look more like Chinese characters (as in, full-width, one or two characters per word). I've been working on a system like that for English, and the result looks something like this, although it could certainly use more work.
I’ve never given it a try since I like to be able to type my work out while I’m doing it, but maybe I will soon; I’ve always found the radical system tremendously interesting.
Hangul is a really cool featural system, but I think it’s difficult to create something like that without looking totally derivative or overly complicated. Like one of the great things about alphabets is that their characters aren't complicated. For example, your system looks great, but quick writing will probably make it illegible and that’s really a bummer cause it looks pretty cool.
Well, illegible is certainly relative. Quick/cursive Chinese handwriting can be nearly illegible to second language learners, and it's a challenge for computers as well. But I bet if someone used a writing system like mine for years, they'd have a much easier time identifying sloppier/quicker handwriting. Even something written really ambiguously can be read by someone with the proper experience, which can be impressive if you've ever tried to read Russian cursive.
That’s actually a really good point. I hadn’t thought of it like that!
meta note: i don't know why this was moved to ~humanities since conlanging definitely fits the definition of a hobby and it as a thing people do has very little to do with the humanities beyond being based on language, but i'm going to move it back to ~hobbies. aside from the aforementioned point, ~hobbies needs some love because it's probably one of the least active sections of the site.
Six to one, half dozen to the other. This site is so small right now that it almost doesn't matter haha. When it gets bigger it'll be more of an issue. But hopefully by then, we'll have ~conlangs.
I am definitely into conlanging, and I prefer ad hoc conlangs, especially Klingon.
I am also fascinated by Tolkien's conlangs, notably by the Elvish conlang family.
Not unlike other commenters here, I have some work in progress, but time is a limiting factor.
How do you mean? Like you have a project deadline or just no time to work on it?