What are /r/conlangs' favorite Products & Services?

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Describing Morphosyntax is a book, not a youtube channel, and was written for linguists doing fieldwork on real-world languages, not conlangs. But it has long been a classic among conlangers anyway, it's very good!

The Swadesh List is a good way to get started. But if you're interested in making a fully fledged lexicon, I'd recommend The Conlanger's Lexipedia, by Mark Rosenfelder.

By the way, if you don't know him yet, take a look at his works. He has a great material to give you the basics about conlanging.

First, a misconception: LaTeX isn’t an app. It’s a typesetting language, something between markdown (the formatting stuff you use on reddit) and a full-blown programming language¹. You write it in plaintext with various commands that then get converted into a pdf by a compiler. There are various ways you can do that, most beginner-fiendly is overleaf, which doesn’t require you to install anything.

You’ll have to learn how to use it, and a dictionary is a very difficult thing to get started with — but also very rewarding once you figure out exactly how to lay it out. I would recommend going through a few tutorials and getting the hang of it first. Bear in mind also that a LaTeX dictionary may not even be at all what you’re looking for. If you want a pretty pdf dictionary that you could eventually print out as a real book, it’s the right choice. If you want a nice, easily searchable, perhaps even interactive thing? Look elsewhere.

¹I’m aware it actually is a full-blown programming language but you’re insane if you use it that way.

If your Mac came with Pages, try to open it in Pages and see if you have better luck there. Also try opening it in TextEdit.

If that doesn't work, it's a long shot, but you might try downloading LibreOffice — a free alternative office suite — and seeing if you can open it using that app.

In all these cases, you may end up seeing a lot of gobbledygook near the top of the document, but if you scroll past that, most of the actual content may be intact.

I guess you haven't been backing up to Time Machine frequently? Thought that was worth mentioning, just in case it had slipped your mind. If this happened to me, I'd probably just restore yesterday's copy. You might try this anyway. Macs sometimes keep hourly backups locally. Try going into Time Machine, and if it's turned on, you may be able to find a version from before the corruption took place.

Just a side note, but "lorem ipsum" was not made up and it's overstating things to call it "false Latin". Granted it is a bit mangled, but the text is identifiably Cicero.

Using QGIS and Pixelmator. The fonts used are Paneuropa Highway and Cardo; several shapefiles (files containing geographic information for use in a GIS) were used. I might do a more in-depth making-of/tutorial later if there's enough demand.

I use multi ling O https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kl.ime.oh

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It has layouts or plugins for most natural languages, IPA, and some other things. A slight learning curve but once you get used to it it's pretty quick.

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The discussion in this thread is pretty uninformed and unnecessarily dismissive of this research, and I think part of the problem is that the Ars Technica article is terrible. It doesn't do a good job of explaining the purposes and claims of the project, and in fact puts words in the authors' mouths, making it seem like they're claiming something they're not.

Through /r/badlinguistics, I found that the principle author actually has commented on the Ars Technica coverage.

Badlinguistics thread.

The forum thread where the author says they have had no contact with the Ars Technica writers.

I would encourage everyone to read more deeply before saying they don't buy it, the research is crap, the authors didn't think of x, y, or z, etc. As far as I can tell, this is decently designed research into statistical tendencies. It can be really tempting to write off research when it seems like the authors are overstating their claims, but (a) a lot of that is the press coverage, and (b) it is really more complicated than a quick reading will allow you to judge. Importantly: the existence of some sentences in some languages that are exceptions to this generalization does not disprove the authors' hypothesis!

Like others have said, it's most likely tlhIngan Hol.

While there's probably not that many people who are fluent, there's millions and millions of people who know at least a couple of phrases.

There's a Klingon Language Institute, multiple commercial books on learning it, and Hamlet, Gilgamesh, Much Ado About Nothing, and the Tao Te Ching are all available commercially in Klingon. Plus, just about every Star Trek movie, series, game, book, etc. since Star Trek III has used it whenever Klingons have been featured.

Supposedly Duolingo is even working on a course that should go live later this year (currently Esperanto is the only conlang they support).

me singing :P

Unne yort At om ploiann genei plot Ot

Ab traj tor U, ler tsa pul doj Ok ver traj yort At,

Ji plot ä ji van, A ji rel am ponescher,

Ton am krred na jacc Uit pon tsa pul ji kärv sui semär

becoming slept you in my car, alltime drove

But good it is, the holes I will-avoid so good you sleep

Driving and sitting I cursing my government

because my money not use they for filling holes with cement

I posted this the other day, but the Conlang Syntax Test Cases have a wide variety of sentence structures and are intended to be sufficiently general that they could work with any conculture.

I had to use a different site, but here ya go

It's a reading (that I kinda mucked up in places - I'm a bad speaker) of the long paragraph I posted yesterday

Just finished glossing and polishing up my formatting after transferring from working in Microsoft Word to Latex. Could I perhaps get some feedback and critique on what I have so far? I definitely still need to add more sections, but I'm trying to get each section polished and nice before I move on.

Thanks!

Overleaf: A Grammar of Proto-Kapuriyan

I used TypeLight to make my abugida. Honestly, I just spent hours upon hours playing with it and adjusting the measurements. I really don't know how to explain it except for "move the green line to the 0 and plot your diacritics to the left of the 0 so that when you type your diacritics, they appear over the glyph before them." (If there's another redditor out there who can explain that better, please do.)

All I know for certain is that it's possible. I know because I've done it.

Best of luck. :)

So I can't help you with Fontforge, I ran in to similar problems and found it far too complicated for me. However, I made a font for my conscript that I'm pretty darn happy with (all things considered, though it's not as perfect as it is on paper) with the following two methods:

First, creating basic letter patters in Fontstruct. Fontstruct is really, really easy to use and makes a great base/template. The only problem is it is So limited. So I wasn't done there. After I made the base, I downloaded my font from there and put it into Typelight.

Typelight is free software that is harder to use than Fontstruct, but still fairly intuitive. It's main problem seems to be creating things from scratch (which can be a pain). So Instead, I used it to augment my letters from Fontstruct. The result was a pretty good font. :)

So in short: I used fontstruct for base, then did touch-up and other edits in Typelight.

The Tirina script has gone through a lot of variations... it's sort of broadly been a three step process.

First, lots of playing around with shapes until I identified some that I liked. I did some of this with just ballpoint pens, some with a brush and paint because I imagine that's what the original medium was. (I'm no great calligrapher, this was just with a cheap plastic paintbrush and some watercolors, just to give me an idea of what sorts of lines and shapes are even possible.)

Second, I pulled together all of the shapes that I liked, and tried to find some unifying characteristics. I made up "rules" at this point. For example, I determined I didn't want any circles, and I didn't want any disconnected bits (no dots above or below, no macrons, nothing).

Third, I matched up the characters I'd come up with, with my alphabet/phoneme inventory. Some characters had to be altered to fit my new "rules", some I ended up discarding because I didn't need them. This matching up process was mostly random, to be honest, but sometimes I deliberately made similar phonemes have similar characteristics... the vowels mostly have crossbars, for example.

You could also add step four, which is when I actually put together the Tirina font. (I used FontStruct, which can be a little intimidating to get into, but works well enough for me.) I'm not very good with making fonts, but a big thing I tried to do was reuse elements, as much as possible. So I copy and pasted crossbars from one character to the next, for example, or little curves here and there. The idea was to make it look cohesive, like all of the characters really did come from the same alphabet.

Anyway, here's an example. I know I said no disconnected bits--well, there aren't in regular characters, but there is one diacritic, used to mark glottal stops. That's the little curve over the letter toward the end of the first line.

You could try FontForge, recommended by David Peterson. It's free and fairly straightforward, but I find it sort of hard to use. I'm no designer, though.

Then there's My Script Font, which is pretty easy to use: you handwrite a script on a piece of paper and then scan it, and it makes the font for you (there are very easy-to-follow directions on the site). It's also free. This one is okay, but I you may have to do it a few times to get the look right, and pay attention to the sizing. You can always edit the scanned image in Paint or something similar, though.

Plaintext is forever, so I know a lot of people who use regular word processors plus markup or rtfs. Word docs and Google docs are also both very versatile.

Like you said images aren't easily editable, so it's better to include an occasional image in the body of a document.

Other ways you could document your conlang are on a personal wiki (a lot of conlangers use frathwiki or miraheze), directly in a LaTeX document, in an Excel or Google spreadsheet (tbh I don't recommend this since it's not very versatile), or directly in a notebook, old-fashioned style.

I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for, but it would do a lot to type it up in LaTeX, and make it into a pdf.

You could also change the formatting (reducing white space, and putting the phonology and vocabulary into a more compact table) and writing style a bit. Additionally, it might not be obvious, for example, what numbers your nouns inflect for, so you could add information like that before beginning that section. Example changes:

• Initial: If a living gender should die (ex. a dead pig) one should add “en” at the end of the word in order to show that it's dead. It makes it so that one often doesn't need to add the adjective “dead” (öurd) to the sentence.
  

• Change: Death is denoted with the suffix -en, as in lueornen, dead bear. This can change the gender of an animate noun to inanimate without the need for the word öurd, death.

• Initial: In plural you should add “ka” at the end of the noun, it should be before the possessive Z and the apostrophe if there. Example: The girls' food = Akhladgakaz frysth.

• Change: Luthnaek nouns have two numbers: singular and plural. The singular is unmarked, while the plural is denoted with the affix -ka-, which is inserted before the possessive affix, -z-, and the accusative apostrophe, as in the example yrg thalthe akhladgaskaz' frysth, he ate the girls' food.

To categorise it a bit more, you could follow the structure in this comment, by /u/simen, adapted from Describing Morphosyntax.

Heya, just got on. It's true, I've been messing around with making a musical conlang—specifically a polytonic one, where either multiple instruments must be playing at the same time, or it has to be on an instrument like the piano. It's still very early on in the works, and I haven't been able to devote as much time to it as I have with my other conlangs, but it's definitely an ongoing project of mine.

The idea around it is kind of similar to yours, in that it's the gaps between the notes that matter, not the exact pitch of the notes themselves. In addition to rhythms and things, that is. I took it kind of further and made it so the pitches depend on the current chord, which would carry meaning as well. You could think of it as "allophony" in a way, so like the word /1 2 3/ would be expressed as [C D E] during a C major chord, but during an F major chord it'd be [F G A]. This helps keep things sounding musical, rather than just a giant mishmash of random notes.

Here's an example, with the sheets and gloss here. It's a translation of the first line of the North Wind and Sun story: The North Wind and the Sun were disputing which was the stronger of the two.

<strong>Sora. Wo /u/lanerdofchristian o wo cip sovn Naretsovvó odonórehi.</strong>

[](#n)

>|||||||||| -|-|-|-|-|-|-|-|- sora|wo|u/lanerdofchristian|o|wo|ci-p|sovn|Naretsov-vó|odo-n-ó-rehi so̞ʁɐ̞|wo̞||o̞|wo̞|tʃip|so̞vn|nɐ̞ʁɛtso̞vːɘ|o̞do̞nɘʁɛxi hello|be[prs]|u/lanerdofchristian|and|be[prs]|1s.casual-poss|language|Naretsov-part|hear-nmz-cont-example

It was made using a plug-in for Reddit called RES. This allows you to add tags for people to identidy them anywhere you see them. This is only client side and only you can then see it

Reddit Enhancement Suite

I've started a Wolo-English dictionary in LaTeX recently, found here!

I'm thinking of adding etymology links to it once I figure out how to incorporate referencing smoothly. Right now, the majority of the words relate to agriculture/bread because I'm working on a worldbuilding thing with that.

Also, the northern Wolo dialect (Wolots) has recently developed some person marking!! The other ones are fuctionally clitics.

Persons:

k^(h)- (3rd person object known) m- (3rd person object unknown)

Iku cha k^(h)awabwits^(i) he

Iku=cha kh -awabwi -ts=he Iku=erg 3known-plant.grain-ST=already "Iku planted that grain already"

tan na waasi mpulits^(i) be ye

tan na =waasi m -puli -ts=tu =be =ye 3.erg plant=eroded 3.unknown-plant-ST=ben=again=FOC "He's annoying somebody again" (lit: He's planting worn out plants for somebody again)

Moses is a program that can build up systems for statistical machine translation if you put in a lot of translated text. If you don't have enough data for statistical machine translation (which is likelyー it takes quantities on the order of millions of words at least) you could try Apertium, which is a rule-based machine translation system that's designed not to require specialized linguistic or computer knowledge to make language pairs for it.

RealityIsUnrealistic, as TVtropes would say.

Or as Tom Clancy is quoted saying "The difference between fiction and reality is that fiction has to make sense." Link

Well, how about we make this a translation challenge? (from Wikiquote)

[Darth Vader has just cut off Luke's right hand, which has his lightsaber]

Darth Vader: There is no escape! Don't make me destroy you. Luke, you do not yet realize your importance. You've only begun to discover your power! Join me, and I will complete your training! With our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict, and bring order to the galaxy.

Luke Skywalker: [angrily] I'll never join you!

Vader: If only you knew the power of the Dark Side. Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.

Luke: He told me enough! He told me you killed him!

Vader: No, I am your father.

Luke: [shocked] No. No! That's not true! That's impossible!

Vader: Search your feelings; you know it to be true!

Luke: NOOOOOOO! NOOOOOOOO!!!

Vader: Luke, you can destroy the Emperor. He has foreseen this. It is your destiny! Join me, and together, we can rule the galaxy as father and son! Come with me. It is the only way. [Luke lets go of the projection and falls into the shaft]

I don't think you'll ever find an "optimum". Just go with something that makes sense to you.

Also, claims about "not being able to see all the colors" are blatantly false. It's not that people that merge blue and green can't see them, it's just that their culture isn't used to thinking of that distinction as an important one so they won't be able to identify tiny distinctions quite as quickly. By tiny distinctions, I mean ones on the level of this game. Similarly, they'll probably be able to make other distinctions faster if the two colors happen to tend to fall under separate color words.

I use this keyboard app, which is very customizable. The word prediciton and auto-correct functions are not the greatest though (but you can individually turn them on or off for different languages).

Siwa is kind of the golden standard. (I'm not sure if that's the most recent version of the grammar, but it certainly should be enough to get you started.)

I've also found that skimming grammars for natlangs--I look them up on Google Books, search for "<language> reference grammar"--is a great way to see how real linguists describe natlangs. Not only do you have a massive variety to choose from, but you can find everything from multi-volume series to quick sketches just a few pages long. Try looking up grammars for languages with similar structures to yours, that could give you some ideas. (so if you're describing a polysynthetic language, you could look up one of the Yupik languages)

Additionally, I figured I'd translate the North Wind and the Sun for an interesting comparison between idiolects; since there's no perfectly codified English <-> viossa translation, plenty of differences in translation exist.

Nordluft au Sol https://clyp.it/djxdaq1i

Nordluft au Sol krig dan tsuite dare hèkara pluszhang dan, de en shkoidjin nne vapanen storklè tulla dan. Uslóva dan ka, eins hèkara dare deki mah mies keshite f'sore storklè, pluszhang haissa mirai.

Nu, Nordluft mahdan all vint ka f'sore zhang dekidan antaa, men tak haaste luft bli dan, tak haaste mies klèdan f'sore storklè; de alltuo, nne owari Nordluft mussdan yamete iskat.

Tuo kara, Sol antaa dan tolka plus kirkas, de uttn vent, mies keshitedan f'sore storklè.

Nu sit Nordluft mussdan antaa, ka Sol dan pluszhang nij kara.

You might use a chatbot platform, like Alice, https://sourceforge.net/projects/alicebot/

You would need to construct a lexicon of stimulus/response pairs entirely from your conlang, or possibly run a script to convert English aiml files, and then tweak by hand until you get an acceptable result. This would provide a feedback mechanism, taking you out of an absolute vacuum of interaction.

I've been interested in something like this, as I find different languages can give you a different headspace - I can sometimes solve a problem more easily by coding it in Lua, over writing it out in English first. I imagine the same principle would apply to any language, constructed or otherwise. The experiences you have direct the synaptic growth of cortical networks in the brain, so a conlang could be designed and learned in a way to expand mental capacity in a targeted way.

I've no idea if it would produce positive results, or any at all, but studies show positive mental health benefits in the multilingual population. Maybe you can capitalize on it - neat thinking!

Only on the team plan :) Taken from their website: "Can I use Notion for free? Absolutely! Notion is free to use indefinitely.

The Personal Plan is completely free for individual use. The Team Plan has a free trial with a 1,000 block limit, more than enough to try out Notion with your team before upgrading."

https://www.notion.so/pricing

I'm sure many conlangers here write their own fiction in which conlangs are involved. If so it would be cool to read those stories. Conlangs are a prominent feature in my stories, I'll link two stories I wrote which feature my conlangs (I hope this doesn't look like I'm advertising them..)

Discovery of Malomanan An early explorer tries to decipher the language of the newly discovered Sumric people

A Brief History of Lem Pars Not so much a story but a history, skip to pages 11 then 16 for information on languages

I have reformatted the grammar document for Foriab

https://www.scribd.com/doc/277062302/Foriab-An-Essential-Dictionary

The major changes are in tables, fonts etc but I think that display plays a large role in documenting conlangs.

Here's my lang spoken kinda badly by me.

I get an A+ for phoning it in.

2 Different dialects of the same language, by the way.

A good program that you can download to your computer is TypeLight. It takes a couple of hours to learn and get used to, but once you get the hang of it, it works pretty well. It's what I use for all of my conscripts.

Depends on the writing system and what program you're typing in. One of the easiest ways is to create a font and map it to existing characters. Fontforge isn't the simplest program out there, but it's free.

Dialogue is good for translation. Not only do you get to work out all the things people say but never write down, there tend to be fewer long, convoluted sentences in speech. Find a movie/show/YouTube video you like. Subtitle files (.srt) in English are often not hard to come by, and can be translated in a text editor, or you could use something like Subtitle Edit (http://www.nikse.dk/subtitleedit).

The Dark Crystal is fun movie to translate. Not much this-world-specific vocabulary, and the language is pretty simple throughout.

For "Once upon a time" Kardii speakers say "Chara dan a, rehe velta kin lay tava a" (long ago, east of the fire and west of the gods - or, basically, east of where the sun rises and west of where it sets).

Rrae haci de peenje töci vemeinen.

rra -e haci de pe<e>n -je tö -ci v<em>ei -nen love-PRES 1[s] OBJ make<PRES>-SUBR artificial-ADJ language<PL>-NMZ.PL > /ʁa.e̞ ˈxa.t̻͡s̻i d̻ʲe̞ ˈpe̞ːn.d̻᷂᷂͡z̻ʲe̞ ˈt̻ø.t̻͡s̻i ve̞mˈe͡i.ɳe̞n/

Lit. ~"love I make-that artificial-like languages"
Roughly "I love making artificial languages." or "I love to Conlang."

Rrae haci de töci vemeinenov hapeenne.

rra -e haci de tö -ci v<em>ei -nen -ov ha- pe<e>n -ne love-PRES 1[s] OBJ artificial-ADJ language<pl>-NMZ.PL-POSS INF-make<PRES>-CIRC > /ʁa.e̞ ˈxa.t̻͡s̻i d̻ʲe̞ ˈt̻ø.t̻͡s̻i ve̞mˈe͡i.ɳe̞n.ov xaˈpe̞ːn.ɳe̞/

Lit. ~"love I articial-like languages' to make."
Roughly "I love the making of artificial languages." or "I love the act of Conlanging."

wen väcixö nien te nie orio yan de ol nien.
/ɥe̞n væt̻͡s̻iχø nie̞n t̻e̞ nie ˈoɾio yan d̻e̞ ol nie̞n/

w<e>n vä -ci -xö ni-e -n te ni-e orio yan de ol ni-e -n be<PRES> one-ADJ-SUPL do-PRES-NMZ REL do-PRES normal person OBJ zero do-PRES-NMZ

The very first thing a normal person does is no thing.

äneäwen povonna ne de rroyci.
/ˌæ.ne̞æˈɥe̞n povˈonːa ɳɛ dɛ ˈʁoj.t̻͡s̻i/

äneä-w<e>n p<ov>onna ne de rroy -ci. POT- be<pres> fruit<pl> PASS.NOM OBJ clean-adj.

Fruit may be clean.
(The)^1 fruits may be clean.

^1 : Plurals are by default definite unless otherwise specified in context or with another number.

I recently found the site ikindalikelanguages.com, where I've checked a bit of the Esperanto and Latin courses. I think that sites pedagogy is interesting (inspired by the socratic method, or what was it?), the Latin course is probably a good example.

Likewise, learn.esperanto.com, based on the Zagreb method, seems to be good/very promising.

Such a search engine would be a pretty stunning work of NLP, and if it exists, I would very much like to look at how it works! The chief difficulty with that is that, where you might search for "instrument of multiple moving parts", someone else might look for "machine with bits that move together" and expect to find the same result. It's just incredibly complex to program something that can take every possible input that you can imagine and return a finite list like you're looking for.

I'm not saying it's impossible - this is the kind of technology that things like Google and Apple's Siri are based on, and that robotics are using more and more to develop more "intelligently responsive" AIs.

Your best bet, unless someone else can offer a solution, is to get on a site like this one and just input the head nouns or main words and seeing what kind of possibilities it throws back at you. You might not always find the perfect word, but you might find something that will get your brain thinking in some direction that might land you with what you want. Like, for the example, you could enter "machine", "instrument", "complex", "device" and see what it gives - potentially something might look right to you.

I am starting to transfer Kaju into it's own dictionary (as opposed to Conworkshop's), and I would love some feedback on it!

It's here

*sigh*

> What's google sheets?

Google Sheets is a spreadsheet programme provided by Google for use on the Google Drive. Microsoft Excel is by far the most popular spreadsheet application used. Here is a link to a page about Google Sheets, and here is the Wiki page for MS Excel.

Excellent resource. I actually bought The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots from Amazon last week. It's basically the same list, but it also has English words derived from the roots. Highly recommended.

I've been using this app to write IPA texts on my phone, but I'm having problems with the app. More specifically, here's my review of the app:

> I've had a lot of problems with the long-press menus being cropped and not being able to type certain letters on the menus or exit them. Additionally, the app hasn't been updated in a year and a half, and the email provided in developer information is broken (I got an auto-reply "Your message couldn't be delivered to because the remote server is misconfigured"). If I knew where I could get another IPA keyboard that is language-agnostic (lets me type phonemes not found in English) or that draws over the current app instead of requiring me to exit said app (I use the IPA on Reddit and Google Docs frequently), I would switch.

Does anyone else know of a better solution?

Honestly? The conlanging flag is a nice design and all but I find all the purple a little bit jarring. In addition, these buttons should match up to the color scheme.

I like this idea, but it has actually been done before (not by me; I would never think of something like this): https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/225260615 k-ah-ch-b t-ph-k-ts [k'.ʔh.tʃ.ʙ t'.pɸ.k'.ts]

I'm not accusing you of copying anyone, just putting it out there as another example of a 'blang'.

My terrible conlang, or "jokelang", is ɳììʑjār. There are 1,971,920 possible CVC syllables, but all roots (without affixes) are two syllables. I did this by using 80 vowels and 157 consonants. That makes a language crazy, ridiculous, and maybe even terrible. Here's a link to it: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/432276662/

Sure! I would love to! Indogermanic is at this link: https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/470170809/ There are a few mistakes: the rule t, d -> {t, ʈ}, {d, ɖ} should be one line earlier, and I forgot to specify where k became q, but it was really fun to make.

I've started on this using a Hebrew interlinear Bible with Young's Literal Translation and New International Version as references. I don't expect to finish in the next decade.

Efej suna kele, zupha loizdir

You while are, happy always.be

Efa lil losofadir pra manathu

You not always.suffer for things

Čan erma sin.

Life short is

Shomeka Oubuja djaman

Time takes tax

• script (sorry for potato quality) https://imgur.com/8jH7gfp

I use /ɒ/ for wh*a*t though, that might be one too.. Even though this spelling is irregular and I'm sure it doesn't appear anywhere else

Yep, called it: it's /wɒt/

Yes, heterorganic affricates do exist. They are relatively rare, however. Wikipedia has a short section on them, and I was able to find a table of common ones in a book here. (the book is Comprehensive Articulatory Phonetics and if you search for "heterorganic affricates" in the book, it has a section with advice on how to pronounce various affricates!)

Language building and world building go hand in hand in my opinion. The world, its geography, history, politics, culture, flora and fauna, all and more inspire uniqueness in languages.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0984470034/ref=cm_sw_r_awd_op7Pub04GQYCT

This is a book I got for christmas. It's a fantastic read for conworlding.

Sadly, nothing special. I started out with the phonemes I like a lot (which may be a bad way to conlang) and added other phonemes I wanted to try out, or I thought could be changed in an interesting way.

Originally, the phonology had two clicks originally (this was me trying out clicks) but after realizing I don't like the click sounds too much so I plan on removing it.

Consonants

Vowels

The consonants haven't been revised yet, and I haven't added diphthongs yet (which I plan on doing)

Also, there's a bit of allophony in the vowels to give us more vowels than shown there, but that's shown in a different section in the doc.

Thanks a lot! This isn't even done with Photoshop but with a Paint.NET equivalent of Linux, Pinta :P It's also available for Windows if you want to try it.

As /user/an_fenmere said, take a break!

Go learn to play banjo or something. Learn to read Homer in ancient Greek. Blow your mind by studying Navajo for a while.

Duolingo has free courses in High Valyrian (a conlang created for the Game of Thrones universe), Vietnamese, Swahili, Hebrew, and Hungarian--those are just the non-Indo-European languages! Check them out, it's all free!

Everyday translation:

Buydif bendjad rekyad harwe tcumsar castah cankek?

(Different between remember and feel is what?)

Formal / shorter / more expressive translation:

Cankek cas buydif ben rekyad djad tcumsar tah?

(What is1 different between1 remember between2 feel is2 ?)

https://codepen.io/hchiam/pen/oMbMBB

ah bugger, I made another mistake. shouldn't have made that post so late at night. the 2nd.pl past tense suffix is -ia and the 1st.pl is -wlsa.

here's the whole grammar doc for Pwr to clear up any confusion haha.

Idiosyncratic meanings can be put in under the root entry, the same way you might do idioms. Take a look at the "Compounds" section of this Spanish-English dictionary entry -- it's mostly a lot of idiomatic expressions with unpredictable meanings.

I wouldn't worry so much on the common words front. Someone looking up "to help" will be looking in the English > Conlang section of the dictionary, which should be arranged according to the needs of English.

It’s not iOS, but I posted a similar question a few weeks ago and someone found this app for Android! Haven’t had a chance to try it yet though.

Found them: https://libgen.is/search.php?req=Bingen%27s+Unknown+Language&amp;lg_topic=libgen&amp;open=0&amp;view=simple&amp;res=25&amp;phrase=1&amp;column=def

I'm currently in the process of trying to produce a proper dictionary for my six-year old a priori conlang. I currently have a simple Excel spreadsheet with the native word, English translations, etymology, part of speech, and usage notes. Does anyone know of or use a good method for producing a professional-looking, book-style lexicon that looks a little like this? I can't use that specifically because I want to be able to transfer my current (800+ word) spreadsheet without having to fill in every entry manually, and to insert new entries and automatically alphabetize. Any recommendations? Much appreciated.

I had to do my recording on a different site, because my laptop is determined not to let Vocaroo access my mic., but here it is

"Unn Helläänysge tunga jor vycket heide, ok mine rösjt är stönn"

I just translated the stock phrase...yep

I used FontStruct to create my basis. My final version will probably end up being done using Inkscape, but FontStruct was just a fast way to get something down, and visible, and typeable. See if it helps you out at all.

I found it in Fontspace https://www.fontspace.com/reisen

By the way, please let me know if you can't see my aforementioned comment, so that I can do something about it.

Kinda. I'm not too certain on the specifics, I just know it can be done. If you can edit a text file, the IME part is easy, 'cause IIRC it's just a TSV file of inputs, outputs, and more inputs for the next check through. The most difficult part will probably be making the actual font. For not tying them to letters, you can put them in Unicode's Private Use area, which is there for just such purposes. I'm not up-to-date on any tools for font creation, but FontForge looks promising. A quick search revealed it can trace images, so if you can get scans of your hand-drawn glyphs, the rest should be straightforward.

So this is the traditional Morlagoan script (which is little used these days).
Romanized: Keu (xe*) munjhi Mórlagostër. Xe pil gosa? Fpus vi yüqösletën?

Translation: This (is) Morlagoan script. Is it beautiful to you? Have you got any suggestions?

*Wrote too fast, left it out. :P It's the same as the first word of the second sentence.

Grammatical gender is very versatile. Take German for example. The three genders are distinct in Nom and Acc, but them M and N have the same declension in the Dat and Gen, while F changes to the M Nom/Acc form. I'm not familiar with other gender systems in as much detail, but what you have should be perfectly fine.

I started working on courses for Urkobold. Getting grammar into them isn't quite easy, but I think at least on tinycards I kind of managed to get into it.

Here's the course I'm working on on Memrise: https://www.memrise.com/course/2002861/urkobold/

Here's the course on Tinycards: https://tinycards.duolingo.com/decks/8hzn2Uy1/urkobold

I've never found an online word generator that can meet all of my needs. I've started using processing and programming a simple word generator using that. Processing is actually mainly an art program, but it's free, easy to learn, and is perfectly capable of producing .txt files full of words created using the rules you tell it.

These aren't natural languages, but some programming languages (like UNIX shell scripting) start a control block by a certain english word, and end that control block by spelling it backwards. (Examples: if...fi, and case...esac)

It's a static site generator built with on the NodeJS JavaScript platform. Source files go in, website comes out. The advantages of the site being static are it loading much faster and being more secure, both as a result of not having to do any server-side calculations.

If you're looking into Wordpress, take a look at Octopress. It's "similar" (a blogging platform), but in the same vein as Metalsmith, Wintersmith, Docpad, etc, in being static content. I've heard it's rather good, though it does take more effort to set up if you don't have a hosting service that can quickly deploy a Wordpress installation. Another benefit is being able to host your blog on GitHub Pages, which utilises Fastly, one of the fastest Content Delivery Networks in the world (they seriously need to fix their caching rules, though; 10 minutes is a bit ridiculously short).

Sorry if it sounds like I'm trying to sell you something; just pointing out that there are options other than Wordpress that may be checking out.

ETA: Alternative proof: https://keybase.io/saizai

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Yes, reddit account saizai is owned by me, Sai (http://s.ai, LCS founder, etc).

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I know you are asking about computers, but this website is a good online resource that you can make projects on, has LaTeX and XeTeX and I think has some tutorials and maybe downloadable things (not sure on the last one).

Edit: It also lets you use packages such as TIPA without installing them

I use PhraseExpress. It takes some set-up time, but you can add literally anything to it. It works via multi-key combos that you are free to set as whatever. I also use it for diacritics.

I am by no means an expert (I just started using LaTeX 4ish days ago!) But there are some good video tutorials on some basics on Youtube, although my best advice for learning nearly any program is to just download it and poke around in it for a few hours, then look up manuals and such to get a further grasp. I personally am using TeXstudio.

There is a subreddit over at /r/LaTeX which can be useful and I also find http://tex.stackexchange.com/ pretty nice too!

EDIT: btw, LaTeX takes a long time to download so you are forewarned (well it did for me anyway).

Hard to answer without knowing how your language is put together. Do you have features like a dative (The girl gave a book to the boy.) or locative (The boat is moored in the Housatonic.) English now uses prepositions for that, but its ancestors didn't always.

A reference book arranged by syntactic fields, from the Conlanger's Lexipedia, mentioned already, to Roget's Thesaurus, to something like the Oxford Introduction to Proto-Indo-European will get you started in ways that are a bit less daunting than going through a dictionary starting at 'A'. A great deal is contingent on the sort of lives you imagine your speakers to live, what their material culture looks like, and their core beliefs. These suggestions are mostly to help you flesh this out a bit and make some priorities.

Just be certain to include 'estoppel', 'archdiocesan', 'gneiss'. 'prothonotary', 'aardwolf', 'kelson', and 'couthutlaugh'. Those words rock.

If you are in the UK and have Amazon, you can get this paperback version of a scan of Wilkins' essay from EEEBO, &quot;Early English Books Online&quot;, for £32.99. Weirdly, I got the same book for much less than that several months ago, so the price does fluctuate. I put it on my Amazon wish list but didn't buy until there was a special offer. The same book seems to be available on US Amazon, but at a steep price.

Edit: Looking more closely, another US seller seems to be offering it new for a very reasonable $23.78 plus $3.99 shipping.

Multiling is good (very customizable and all) but its IPA keyboard is not very great. Lacking a lot of symbols (e.g. most diacritics, many superscripts…). This one here is the best IPA keyboard for Android I’m aware of. Has all the common symbols and diacritics in the free version, and if you pay for it also a lot of rarely used IPA extensions.

There are written guides for making languages! Try this. Or this.

I made a conworld for my conlang Bamofexenwi. Click on the word Sonzewüyu to see the OneNote Notebook I made about it.

I made a conworld for my conlang Bamofexenwi. Click on the word Sonzewüyu to see the OneNote Notebook I made about it.

In case you're serious, take a look around here. There's not much about sentence building unfortunately; I'll add some basics really soon.

Just a couple of years ago duolingo made an esperanto course available. I would expect that will give it a boost in the foreseeable future. Also, it's available on google translate (and hence, everything paired with it, such as a twitter) and has a sizable Wikipedia version. I don't know the measure, but speaking by experience, it seems to me the use in twitter has grown (an example of a search of common words). My guess is the language will grow while the esperanto culture (peace, knowing people, etc) will slowly whither away, since people can learn it on their own without interacting with clubs.

I’m obsessed with this one. I didn’t know what this could mean though, so I picked a random sentence from History of Wolves, the book that was closest to me. Since I picked it randomly, the gloss may not make much sense.

ńdḿgvpĺka i zḿbaga!

nd-ḿgvpl-ka =i zm-bav-ka

NEG-like.that-2SG =1SG.ACC DIR-see-2SG “Don’t give me that look!”

• I’m not sure about this, and I’m not great with tone, but I had this concept in mind: every word needs to begin with high tone, which will extend through the word until it’s blocked. After the high tone is blocked, no vowel (or syllabic consonant) can be high again. Unmarked nuclei are always low, and will block tone unless there’s a marked vowel after it. Thus, the suffix -ka blocks tone, but if you add a suffix like -mú after it then tone is never blocked.
  • The approximant [ʋ] is a transparent syllabic consonant (i.e. it can’t block tone), so it’s never marked. An interesting case is /l/, which is not transparent when it’s strictly a syllabic consonant but it is when it could take another nucleus. That means that the word atĺ-i [á.tĺ̩.i] is produce with a hiatus, while ḿgvpl-i [ḿ̩.ɡʋ̩́.pli] is not.
• ḿgvpl- is a verb meaning “to do (something) that way,” with no specificity as to what that way means.
• zm- is used as an intentional marker with verbs of perception, but is a directional marker with verbs of motion: ina “to run, to escape” vs. zm-ina “to run towards”.

While u/kilenc is correct that we don't know for sure where the Semitic root system came from, that doesn't mean you're on your own. You don't have to do all the guesswork yourself, because others have already done plenty of it. The most accessible resource is this video by Biblaridion, but if you're willing to spend some money, The Unfolding of Language might be worth picking up.

Keyboard Designer does allow you to change the font for all its keyboards, so if you created a keyboard for your font and changed the Keyboard Designer font, you could do it. But you couldn't have one keyboard layout with one font and another keyboard layout with another font.

Android is unfortunately not great for supporting custom fonts generally. So even if the characters showed up in your font on your keyboard as above, you'd still need to type somewhere that supported the custom font or the output would still be a regular font. So this would work if you were typing in WPS Office and installed your font in that app, but if you were typing in discord, it would still use the default discord font and if you were typing in Google docs, the output would be restricted to one of the preinstalled Google docs fonts.

> I've never used spreadsheet, could you tell me what software I need to get?

If you have a Google account, Google Sheets is probably the easiest way to go. Excel or LibreOffice Calc are also good options.

Wow, take a breath dude. :)

I think you should pick up an actual linguistics book. I liked Understanding Morphology but there are a few books with "morphology" in the title.

Humans are totally fine with all words beginning with the same thing. After all, in most inflectional languages, every infinitive verb ends with the same stuff. If it were inflected by prefix rather than suffix, you'd expect to see the same thing happening there, with every infinitive beginning with a certain sound or sounds.

Navajo provides a lot of interesting examples of what you're talking about, and it is highly prefixing. Look at, among other things, bi-yi prefixing. You'll see there is a huge amount of repetition in the beginnings of verbs here because it is prefixing. This is OK.

Word compounding is also part of morphology, it's derivational morphology rather than inflexional morphology. Also covered in books about morphology.

Also, I would suggest you make a few small languages just to try out your syntactic ideas. If it makes sense to you in a small language, it will generalize to your magnum opus. But it sounds to me like you're trying to just make one big perfect language without leaving a trail of shitty languages in your wake. If this art form is like any other, this is like deciding you're going to paint the cathedral ceiling without doing any sketches or studies or smaller paintings first, which would be absurd. Make a few to throw away!

Chinese grammar is far from simple. Exposure to European languages can make it seem like grammar is all about verb endings, but there’s so much more to it than that: classification systems, syntax, collocations, reduplication, periphrastic constructions, etc. Sure, you could try to make a language that strips all of that away (arguably that’s what Toki Pona does), but it wouldn’t be like Chinese.

I like Keyboard Designer for Android. I recommend buying the premium features which are just a few bucks. I use it to make keyboards for my conlangs that I've been happy with. You can even make a dictionary for your conlang in it.

Interlingua: Grammar and Method is probably the book you want.

Muna Lingi is clause backing: if the subject noun phrase, the object noun phrase, or the verb phrase (verb complex) include a dependent clause, then that phrase must occur in last place in the sentence. Example dependent clause: Ma-ua ku ika fo aha-tulanga e te aliki aloha pea nui ku mate fo ia ipo, 1xdSBJ PRF fish LOC where NOM sDF king beloved MOD AUG PRF die LOC his lover. “The two of us fished where the dearly beloved king died next to his lover.”

I invented it independently, then realized it was a thing, maybe while reading Mark Rosenfelder's <em>The Syntax Construction Kit</em>.

As my conlangs are romance languages, sometimes I am able to think on some basic frases, especially curse word (since they are memorable to me). I was riding my bike once and a dog reshed onto me and as I was on those "mind trips" about conlang I thought "BALALJERA CÁN" or "WH*RE OF A DOG". Some basic phrases as well. "Celo diaü éz asuro", the sky is blue.

Trying out an exclusively right-branching, CV-structured concept.

Toi sįgo nu hëgi maa gų lų simiko sį kutura mekö.
/toĭ sɯgo nu hɛgi maa gų lø simiko sɯ kutura mekɔ"

toi sįgo nu hëgi maa gų lų si- miko sį kutura mekö PM friend REL meet occasion no PST SBJ-3P.ANIM SBJ stranger all

"Strangers are friends who never met."

This is gonna take forever with more complex sentences, but the results are so satisfying!

What I do is just draw little scribbles that look nice to me and assign meaning to them as I go. I've done this twice, once ending up with a right-to-left alphabet with some interesting applications for letter cases, and another time ending up with a cursive right-to-left abjad that intentionally had letters for some very exotic sounds and left out some of the more common consonants. The first strongly resembles a more flowy, curly Arabic, and the second resembles Russian cursive writing from hell. You can come up with some pretty interesting things if you want to :)

Try looking around at different real-world alphabets. The Javanese script is fascinating to me, I think every script maker should look at it: http://www.wikiwand.com/en/Javanese_script

The number one thing I can reccommend is to try to avoid things that the Latin alphabet does. Does your script have to use two different letters together to represent /d/? Great! Modern Greek does that too (πτ). Do you want to have no letter cases but use an older, more archaic form of the script when transcribing religions passages? Congratulations, your script is now as good as Tibetan.

One final tip is to look at IPA and think about what sounds you want to include. My main conlang, Aarkhosh, intentionally includes most of the fricatives on the list :P