Dixi wrote: ↑19 Nov 2019 16:53
I'm new to conlanging. I recently learned what is all about and I'm thrilled about making my first conlang. I already selected a phonology for my conlang, created a handful of root words and a fixed syllable structure. However, not having knowledge about linguistics, I have no idea about what is next, you could say I am suffering from "conlanger's block". Could I have some ideas about how the next step would be and some help overall? Thanks.
A handy start for me was Mark Rosenfelder's
Language Construction Kit (which he eventually wrote up as a book, but I haven't read that yet), which is specific to conlanging, of course, but also looking into what real-world languages do (for example, look at the grammars of languages like Japanese, Navajo, Latin, or whatever you can get your hands on), and even trawl through Wikipedia articles (for example, start with articles on phonology, morphology, grammatical category, and syntax, and just read and click).
I tend to say this a lot, but, honestly, nothing solves "conlanger's block" like a good bit of reading. For example, I knew I wanted Proto-Sirdic to have grammatical gender, but I didn't want to use the same sort of masculine/feminine/neuter systems seen in Indo-European languages. So, I sat down, Googled "grammatical gender" and just got to reading until I stumbled across a language that had a system that made me go "woah, cool, that could work", and got to making it work.
Another thing a fair chunk of conlangers do is create a culture/world that the conlang can exist within. As you flesh out the culture and the word, you might find that there are parts of your language, especially the vocabulary, that might also need fleshing out.
Another aspect some conlangers look into, which sometimes plays into conworlding (the creation of constructed worlds), is historical linguistics (again, reading being a thing worth diving into here). This can lend a hand in creating "quirks" within the language (like morphophonology, grammatical irregularities, suppletion, and you can also use it as a sort of "handwave" for lexical borrowings, i.e. there are a handful of borrowings in English that come from Hindi, and you want to do something similar you can either come up with a whole language and then borrow from it, or just create a quick sketch of a language, cobble together a few words and say "these words were borrowed into X from Y" and call it a day).
Definitely reading though. Start out with what you know, and expand from there. And, of course, never be afraid to ask questions