Lady @Lady@cat.family

@alyssa yes totally fine; not sure it will actually get published to the web at this point if it isn’t a .djot but that's something we can work on if needed

@alyssa i’ve been meaning to get back into conlanging as well and have some tooling i’m working on for doing it but it’s probably going to be Makefile-based and not really ready yet for actual usage

@alyssa here is a format i used to use and wrote a viewer for, if you’re curious https://github.com/langdev-project/standards/blob/master/DP/0002.txt

@alyssa
• it can be tempting to make words with similar meanings sound similar, but it’s more useful to make them sound very different. it’s fine that beech and beach sound the same, but not beech and ash, maple, oak, pine, fir…

• when developing the initial corpus, one useful approach is to come up not with words but with a number of semantic “roots” which can be combined to form words. that will give you your basic sound inventory and an idea of how words in the language might be derived from each other.

• come up with rules, but don’t adhere too closely to them; language is messy. choose aesthetically appealing choices over more cumbersome “correct” ones; people have a tendency to change the pronunciation of words they don’t like the pronunciation of

• i find it helpful to define some broad categories of words like “body parts”, “people and occupations”, “plants”, “animals”, “food and drink”, “geography”, “substances and materials”, “emotions”, “sensations”, “actions”, “grammatical words”… to make it easier to browse conceptually-similar words

• the most important thing regarding dictionary/lexicon formats is that it be really really easy to read and edit. i’m a big fan of record-jar: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-phillips-record-jar-01 (ignore the CRLF line-ending requirement)

i’ve built conlang dictionary viewers/tools before but i’ll save that conversation until you have enough words to where you start needing to use one :P

• for notes, i’ve always just done markdown or a similar lightweight markup language. you could always stick them on the wiki ;)

@coriander it’s 3AM here (the state of Delaware)

@alyssa let me know if you need Technology

@coriander if there aren’t any riffs, what do you headbang to?

@coriander the thing about games and power fantasies is that games are inanimate objects; power fantasies can only be had by players