Building a Conlang

For Wednesday/Counsel we’re going to dive a bit into linguistics. @etcetera has been working on developing a language as part of some massive world building he’s doing. This has led to some conversations around the house about how languages work. We decided to jump into learning to use real linguistics principles to build our own language(s).

As I started my research, I found this article (with audio) about a popular course at MIT on “Conlangs.” Colangs are constructed languages ranging from those engineered for a technological application to those developed for use in works of fiction. In the article, it broke down three main subjects that are necessary to build a language:

• phonetics: making sounds
• morphology: forming words
• syntax: developing phrases

You can actually download the lecture notes and activity assignments from the course page, so that may be an interesting place to start our exploration of the topic.

Also, a brief search on Youtube for “conlang” brings up tons of videos.

Let’s start with exploring there. Read the article. Look over the course material. Then we’ll build a plan of how we’re going to break down the content and explore the topic. @etcetera: please lead off by gathering your thoughts, listing beginning resources, and outlining a basic plan in the comments.