How to go about presenting a conlang

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Tyhoeciyh
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How to go about presenting a conlang

Post by Tyhoeciyh »

How does one go about presenting a conlang on the forum? What are the essential elements to be included?
Trailsend
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Re: How to go about presenting a conlang

Post by Trailsend »

There are a couple of different ways to go about it. However, one of the most important pieces of information you should include when you put up your conlang is your design goals. Why are you making this language? What do you hope to do with it? This is important, because it helps the rest of us know what sorts of comments we should give you. For example, if one of your goals is to make a "naturalistic" language that is supposed to look like it could have naturally evolved, then people may point out features of your language that seem artificial or unrealistic. But if your language isn't supposed to be naturalistic, then that kind of feedback doesn't make sense.


The most typical sketch looks like this:

Phonemic inventory and orthography

This is a list of the sounds your language uses (the "phonemic inventory"), and the letters you use to represent each sound (the "orthography"). You should use the International Phonetic Alphabet to represent your phonemic inventory; check out Ossicone's nifty IPA tutorial.

For a ton of examples of phonemic inventories and orthographies, check out this thread.


Phonotactics and allophony

This is a description of the kinds of syllables allowed in your language (phonotactics), and the minor changes that sounds go through depending on their environment (allophony).

Phonotactic rules are the reason that "dobble" looks like it might be an English word (even though it isn't), but "ngibr" doesn't look at all like English. "Ngibr" breaks English's phonotactic rules, but "dobble" doesn't.

Allophony has to do with the way that speakers differentiate between certain sounds but not others. For example, the "p" sound in pot is pronounced with a small puff of air (called aspiration), but the "p" sound in spot isn't. English speakers don't really notice this difference, though, and still consider both the aspirated p and the unaspirated p to be "the 'p' sound."

(This section is a little more advanced, so a lot of people skip it when they first put up their conlang.)


Basic Morphosyntax

This is a description of the structure of different kinds of words and different kind of phrases in your language. For example, if you conjugate your verbs, in this section you talk about how the conjugation works, what things you conjugate for, etc. You'll also want to talk about how you put words together to make sentences--what kinds of things determine word order? Do you put subjects before your verbs and objects after, like in English? Do you put both subjects and objects before the verb, like in Japanese? What other interesting things does the language do?

For some examples of ideas people are considering for their language's morphosyntax, check out this thread.


Ethnography

If your language is spoken by a fictional group of people, what are these people like? Where do they live, what sorts of societies do they form? What is their culture like?


That'll give you a basic sketch, although keep in mind that different people have different interests and so not everybody includes the same information. (For example, I'm more interested in cool morphosyntax than in phonology, so if I do include a phonotactics/allophony section, it's usually pretty bare. Some people design languages for themselves, not for a fictional group of people, so an Ethnography section wouldn't make sense.) You can also browse around the other threads people have put up about their languages to get ideas. Good luck!
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