Where Do I Even Start?

[Monochromosexual]

I'm not sure where to even start! I know, it's ridiculous! How do you get stuck making your own language? I don't even know what to call the languages!

And, for another thing, I'm not sure what the alphabet should look like.

Does anybody have any pointers...?  

[Nanoq]

I started by making up the sounds. Like, trying out what comes naturally to me and/or the language by uttering simple made-up words and sensing patterns in the phonology. Perhaps /p/ and /a/, but not /r/ and so on. From there, I go to making basics words and put them in sentences. The "finer" grammar, for example verb endings by person, comes piece by piece as I develope ways of expressing thoughts and ideas, methinks, but I guess basic features like word order and isolating vs. agglutinating are good to have in mind from the beginning.

I've also designed a writing system and even made a font for it, so I can write it on my computer. Perhaps I should put something of that up in the subforum later on.

Naming? Hmm... Maybe come up with an endonym and then use that for the language, too, which is quite common, I think. For this you'd also need a conculture. The endonym (autonym?) could reflect certain characteristics of the people, like lakȟóta for the Lakota people, meaning "feeling affection, friendly, united, allied", accordning to Wikipedia. The endonym could also reflect the world in which the people live, like 日本/nihon for Japan, meaning "sun's origin" in Japanese, referring to the country's location in Easternmost Asia.

I don't know if this was any help, but it is the way my language came to be. =) Good luck!  

[Monochromosexual]

Navook

I started by making up the sounds. Like, trying out what comes naturally to me and/or the language by uttering simple made-up words and sensing patterns in the phonology. Perhaps /p/ and /a/, but not /r/ and so on. From there, I go to making basics words and put them in sentences. The "finer" grammar, for example verb endings by person, comes piece by piece as I develope ways of expressing thoughts and ideas, methinks, but I guess basic features like word order and isolating vs. agglutinating are good to have in mind from the beginning.

I've also designed a writing system and even made a font for it, so I can write it on my computer. Perhaps I should put something of that up in the subforum later on.

Naming? Hmm... Maybe come up with an endonym and then use that for the language, too, which is quite common, I think. For this you'd also need a conculture. The endonym (autonym?) could reflect certain characteristics of the people, like lakȟóta for the Lakota people, meaning "feeling affection, friendly, united, allied", accordning to Wikipedia. The endonym could also reflect the world in which the people live, like 日本/nihon for Japan, meaning "sun's origin" in Japanese, referring to the country's location in Easternmost Asia.

I don't know if this was any help, but it is the way my language came to be. =) Good luck!

It did help, quite a bit.

I was thinking of naming the languages after their "creators" (fictional charactors in a book I'm writing), but I like the idea of using cultural aspects for naming it. biggrin  

[419scambaiterKoko]

Have you looked at the Language Construction Kit at www.zompist.com yet? That might help you at lot to get started, it certainly has helped me get a good start on what to do. There's also a forum there too.