Welcome to Gaia! ::

I suppose this belongs MORE in the writers forum than anywhere else, and besides I'm most interested in artlanging as a facet of conworlding as a facet of writing u3u Do we have any other conlangers in the house? Or anybody interested in learning more about it? What are you guys working on? Tell me about your language(s) and projects~~

If anyone is curious, and doesn't know what I'm talking about, a conlang is a constructed language, and an artlang (artistic language) is like Sindarin, Klingon, Dothraki or Na'vi, a language you make up for fun, to explore how beautiful sounds and syntax are, or for use by a fictional culture! David J. Peterson and Mark Rosenfelder have a lot of interesting stuff on their respective sites. It's way more than just making up sounds to replace English words or words in other natural languages (natlangs, in the jargon)-- conlanging entails generating your own sounds, grammar, and vocabulary, as if it were a completely different foreign language. u3u

Somebody tell me if there's a better place for this D: i wanna talk about my obscure internet hobby with otherssss

Maybe I'll go look for this guild of which you speak....kinda dead is better than completely dead, I guess ;D Is that a /w/ in Yiwoyuwa? I love its name it's so melodious @____@. What're some of its features?

I've finally managed to divert myself into actually writing...anything...but my best-developed language is Shiari, which is ergative and agglutinative and has like eight honorificity levels uwu It's supposed to be a ""sociolinguistic language"" like Arabic with a ton of almost mutually unintelligible dialects and caste differences and stuff, buuuuut I'm lazy so really there's just the eastern noble dialect rn because that's what the character speaks |D

If your dictionary ever starts getting unwieldy in Excel, I've been looking around for a dictionary software and have found SIL Toolbox pretty handy P: Of course now I have to actually like, transfer over several thousand words. sigh

No worries, my IPA is mediocre at best, but I believe we're talking about the same sound...unless you happen to pronounce it "hwat" ;D Phonology is one of the last things I got into-- I'm more excited about it now, but I used to haaaate phonology @____@ I still like basically everything better u3u

I tried to transfer over to Excel when I first started revamping Shiari, but I've never used Excel for aaanything so I was pretty hopeless eheheh

Is Yiwoyuwa your only lang? It seems like most people either have one language they work all the time on, or keep accidentally stumbling into new ones that distract them, like me |D

Yeah, I tend towards complicated dictionaries |D I just like weird little words I'm never going to be able to use, and since I do a lot of my vocabulary building by translation...I end up with situations where, when I started rebooting Shiari, I had a word for the inside of the mouth but not one for the number seven |D SEVEN JUST...NEVER HAPPENED TO COME UP...

These days, I don't mind anything about it-- when I started I pretty well just cribbed my sounds from natlangs, even more so than every other mistake I used to make P: But I still think semantics and usage is my favorite part! One reason I translate with texts is I get to make up a lot of slang and idioms [/SIGHS HAPPILY]

That's what I keep telling myself...it's all okay...|D It was an especially awkward process when I got excited about putting together an actual grammar pdf with an example text, only to realize that my most productive example tests were all dirty top 10 pop songs because that was all this character wanted translated. OOPS

Or words I just know I'm only ever going to use in one extremely specific context, like...I have a word for "snappiness when you're tired" that I don't think I've EVER used, but I like it so much P:

One thing I still have a LOT of trouble with is language evolution and language families...ever since I read The Language Construction Kit (which I highly recommend) I've been kind of trying to get into it, but man, it's not easy stuff for me! With Shiari and the other languages in that world it was way easier since they were all superpowers on seperate continents and they didn't need to be descended from anything the same, but now that I'm looking at Estyeki, Kzhamiran, and Yulduzi--which are all in the same geographical area-- I know it's going to be a lot easier if I have a mother lang since they're all so close together @___@