thinking about getting into conlanging

@alyssa let me know if you need Technology

@Lady hm. i don’t think i do currently? probably going to start out by putting together one or more languages for names and inscriptions within the Great Labyrinth in my rpg campaign. if you’ve got advice for good formats in which to keep basic notes and a lexicon for easy editing and reference that would be helpful. or honestly just advice in general hehe.

@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 ;)

@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

@Lady i've looked at that (LREC) before. :3 perhaps i will put my notes on the wiki indeed :)