Welcome to Gaia! ::

Since I'm bored and far too lazy to write the intro to my paper, and since I notice that many people are very technical about how the approach conlanging, I'm gonna babble at you about how I make conlangs.

1) Speak strangely anyway.
I make up all these really weird sounds in my every day conversation. I pick up random quirks of the tongue.
Example: For a while I'd go "zaovantorfe" at people I didn t like. It became "zao vantor fe", the old Kintaran sentence "you disgust me". (It's amazing how much it's changed...)

2) Pick a few words that you like and make them mean something that they "Sound like"
see above + words like "sva", whcih to me sound more like question words than the spanish que' y co'mo, but I think w still sounds like a question word sound...

3) start defining your soundset.
Take those words and figure out their sounds, then limit yourself to those and ones that you think "match" in terms of mouth movement.
As you speak other languages, you'll often find that you realize you use other parts of your mouth in attempt to follow the accent. Spanish, to me, seems to be very frontal, while English is middle, French is front/nasal, Russian is all over, etc.
Kintaran is front/middle, mainly, with some throat sounds. So I use those.

4) start making up words~!
Remember your sound list, modify if there's a sound you REALLY want.
Use words that already exist as models. Ie, the word for fire created the word for want and for weapon.

5) figure out where you want to put all those words--that's right, grammar! sometiems I pick this early (ie, for Schwa, a language my roommate and I have been working on together as a "us talk" thing, which we decided to be OSV befor we even knew many words)
I'm so used to SVO that I tend to stick with it, but flexibly. I like wiggly structure.

6) Post it here (optional)

7) Get feedback, add, etc. (NA if you didn't do step 6 or show people around you)

Some random stuff:
-in no particular order, you should come up with a writing system. I did around step 5.

-I reccommend keeping your wordlist and notes in a notebook and/or in excel or similar program.

-I like to make font for writing system. I did that biggrin So yay.

Umm.. comments/questions? Anybody care?

Blarghlsmarkch.
Have a nice evening.

I'll use this techniquie for Grutian and Yoane

Cool! For me, I made a table and on the top put all of my consonants. Then on the left put all of my vowels, then where a consonant column and a vowel row intersect, I wrote the difinition!

I've come up with a few words that way, though they tend to be interjections more than anything else. xd Though I've got a few words floating around in my brain that I can't think of meanings for ("qualkin", for one)

I've got a VSO conlang. Go look at Madoshk; but then, Madoshk is weird.

They work, though.

It means "this language." Nothing special.

My primary conlang, Anzer Pex, is VSO with no exceptions.

i'x mo-i kon. means "I'm OK." Literally, though it's "(to be) (I) (good)."

Adverbs come first, then adjectives, then the noun or verb or whatever. The basic principle is that anything that modifies the meaning or context of a word comes before it, and anything that modifies the function or purpose of the word comes after it. Anzer Pex has a system of particles and function words that change verb tense, word part of speech, etc.

It basically goes like this...

(sentence modifier)(adverb)(adjective)(verb)(tense particle) and then
(adverb)(adjective)(noun subject)(direct object phrase)(indirect object phrase).

... if that makes any sense to you XD. Also, adverb order is Place-Manner-Time. I didn't use a grammatical case system, so I had to create a special "subject end marker" to separate the subject from the objects so that there wasn't any room for ambiguity there.