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 Posted: Fri Oct 19, 2007 1:21 pm
All righty.
I realize that many, many people have probably asked the exact same question over and over again...but I'll try to be specific.
I have never attempted conlanging before.
That's right; I have no idea where to start.
I looked at the zompist.com kit, and it's a very useful resource, but it cofuses me. A lot.
For example: In the first sections, it starts talking about the places in one's mouth which vowels and consonants and vowels are formed. And it shows a grid containing that stuff...am I supposed to form a grid of this? How? and if so...what do I use it for?
Another problem: HLLL HLHL? What?
Next: I see a lot of you using these terms like "VOS S VVC CVC" or something like that. Where can I find out what these mean? You all seem to know them already. ANd there are so many resources to sift through...
Help? Please. heart
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Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 2:54 pm
I really do need some help..if anyone's free...
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Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 8:50 am
NanaoThrowsPetals All righty. I realize that many, many people have probably asked the exact same question over and over again...but I'll try to be specific. I have never attempted conlanging before. That's right; I have no idea where to start. I looked at the zompist.com kit, and it's a very useful resource, but it cofuses me. A lot. For example: In the first sections, it starts talking about the places in one's mouth which vowels and consonants and vowels are formed. And it shows a grid containing that stuff...am I supposed to form a grid of this? How? and if so...what do I use it for? Another problem: HLLL HLHL? What? Next: I see a lot of you using these terms like "VOS S VVC CVC" or something like that. Where can I find out what these mean? You all seem to know them already. ANd there are so many resources to sift through... Help? Please. heart The first section...I think it just gives you a system for determining what vowels and constnants you want to use. Like, if you wanted to add a new vowel, you can use take a long 'i' and add roundedness or something it suggested. HLLL, HLHL...that's high-low-low-low. The pitch of the syllables. CVC? I think that means the sylables can only be forms of constonant-vowel-constontant or simpler. VOS, my guess, is verb-object-subject, for grammr structure. "He went there", with the subject-verb-object structure, becomes "went there he" or something. I managed to puzzle ot the first page, but I'm getting boggled by the second. @.@ I got gender and tense down, but isolating, aggluginating...wha? Examples, please? Some systems so I can figure out something for my conlang?
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Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 8:41 pm
I never really liked the Zompist's "langauge construction kit." I don't like how he does things, and I generally disagree with most of what he says. Conlanging is a personal thing... You really can't break it down into a "kit" where you can basically fill in the blanks and voila~ You also don't need to worry about places of articulation. As long as you can produce the sound consistently, try to learn the IPA (it's not perfect, but it's the best there is, if you ask me) and define your sounds based on that system. So for example, if your conlang will use the same sound as the English B, that's called "bilabial plosive." I still don't understand places of articulation completely, and I've been conlanging for about 4 years or more. The HLLL HLHL stuff is arbitrary. I never bother with it, and I just make a note of where to put stress on each new word I create. The CVC stuff is used to define the common structure of syllables (or words, depending on how your language works). A word like Book might be CVC (or CVVC if you count the letters rather than sounds). You don't have to bother with this either, but if you ever figure it out, it will probably help you keep your words varied yet compatible. V - Verb O - Object S - Subject (Just like Kazyan said) It describes the word order in a regular sentence. This isn't really 'optional' since you do need some kind of consistent grammar, but it may be unimportant depending on the specifics (see all these "depends on" situations? That's why a Kit is useless!). I've been flinging this around for a while, but it seems to be relevant a lot: Xeigrich My strategy basically goes like this... 1. Come up with the basic sound of the language. 2. Pick specific sounds (such as from an IPA chart) that work well together and provide variety. 3. Make some basic words. 4. Create the grammar, including word order, and parts of speech. 5. Flesh out the lexicon. If you can do that, you can make a conlang. It really can be that simple, but if you want to make a GOOD conlang, it will take a LOT of trial and error, frustration, and experimentation. Don't expect your first attempt at a conlang to be your primary, most well developed conlang you'll ever make. Also, don't be afraid to check out free tutorials for foreign languages. Often, you'll stumble upon a gem that just explains some grammatical structure or obscure term in perfectly sensible wording. --- And now the part a lot of people around here would probably prefer over reading my wall of text XD... I'd be more than happy to offer live tips, feedback, etc on Yahoo! IM or MSN (aka Windows Live Messenger) or even Skype (though I rarely have my mic at hand, the keyboard is always here!). MSN: tonyjones17 (at) yahoo (dot) com Yahoo: retro_jones17 Skype: Xeigrich Keep in mind, though, I'm not some genius or language guru, so I might not be able to help everyone. I'm usually on throughout the day, but if I'm on and I don't respond, I'm not ignoring you... I probably went off and forgot about being signed in. sweatdrop
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Posted: Mon Oct 22, 2007 9:44 pm
Kazyan NanaoThrowsPetals All righty. I realize that many, many people have probably asked the exact same question over and over again...but I'll try to be specific. I have never attempted conlanging before. That's right; I have no idea where to start. I looked at the zompist.com kit, and it's a very useful resource, but it cofuses me. A lot. For example: In the first sections, it starts talking about the places in one's mouth which vowels and consonants and vowels are formed. And it shows a grid containing that stuff...am I supposed to form a grid of this? How? and if so...what do I use it for? Another problem: HLLL HLHL? What? Next: I see a lot of you using these terms like "VOS S VVC CVC" or something like that. Where can I find out what these mean? You all seem to know them already. ANd there are so many resources to sift through... Help? Please. heart The first section...I think it just gives you a system for determining what vowels and constnants you want to use. Like, if you wanted to add a new vowel, you can use take a long 'i' and add roundedness or something it suggested. HLLL, HLHL...that's high-low-low-low. The pitch of the syllables. CVC? I think that means the sylables can only be forms of constonant-vowel-constontant or simpler. VOS, my guess, is verb-object-subject, for grammr structure. "He went there", with the subject-verb-object structure, becomes "went there he" or something. I managed to puzzle ot the first page, but I'm getting boggled by the second. @.@ I got gender and tense down, but isolating, aggluginating...wha? Examples, please? Some systems so I can figure out something for my conlang? Well, an agglutinating language is one similar to mine, where you add suffixes and prefixes to a word to change its meaning or make it more specific, etc. Isolating languages are tlanguages that use particles rather that word order to make sentences (I think, though I might be getting confused with a synthetic language. Wikipedia helps a lot for these things, in my opinion)
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Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 5:32 am
Thanks, Xeigrich! That really did help a lot!
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Posted: Tue Oct 23, 2007 2:20 pm
Glad I could help. XD
And now a little more (to the best of my abilities):
Agglutinating is when you string actual morphemes (words, basically) together to create huge, complex words. It's like making a really big compound noun, without the spaces in-between, and then only having two or three of these huge 'words' in a sentence. Basically, all the adjectives, pronouns, etc are stuck onto the word in a specific way, rather than sitting out in the sentence by themselves. An English noun phrase such as "the young boy who is in the other room" might become a single large word in an agglutinative language. I'm not a big fan of agglutinating languages, and I don't know much about them.
Synthetic is a different type of category, but just means that each whole "word" has a lot of different morphemes (meaningful units) in it. I think Wikipedia defines this as a "high morpheme-to-word ratio." Agglutination is more of a sub-category of Synthetic, so when you hear/see "agglutinative" it's probably safe to assume the language is synthetic. Fusional is the other sub-category of synthetic.
If a synthetic language isn't agglutinative, it's probably "fusional." Most Romance languages are fusional, because of the way their verbs are conjugated by adding meaningful suffixes. I may be wrong, but Germanic languages with noun declensions for different cases might fall into the same category.
Isolating is when words are kept individual and to create new meanings. It's the opposite of agglutinating AND synthetic. Isolating languages generally rely on word order, prepositions, and particles. A sentence will generally consist of many small words, with each word having a low number of morphemes (like "eating" where "eat" and "ing" are morphemes that contain information).
English is actually a sort of hybrid between synthetic and isolating.
Chinese (Mandarin, at least) is an "analytical" language because none of the words really change or combine (except for 2-4 syllable compound nouns :b ), and even verb tenses are often denoted by adverbs of time like "tomorrow" or "now." Don't get me started on this one, since I still can't tell "analytical" from "isolating."
---
I prefer isolating/analytical, myself.
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