How to write a constructed language

Here I post my methodology, in the next post I will create a language.

Review popular existing constructed languages (or maybe not–especially if you want to be original)

Grab a free dictionary.  The free Esperanto dictionary at the Gutenburg Project good place to start because it is free and if you use it as a starting point, you will have a tri-lingual dictionary. Also, I think to avoid the bane of the conlanger, accidental encoding (i.e. creating a code of your mother tongue), you should also create a thesaurus, Rogets is a good place to start.

Read up on the art of creating constructed languages, either at Zompist or the various pages about languages in science fiction.

Also, read up on the things that define a language, phonology–especially IPA, grammar and sometimes culture.  If you aren’t aware of your mother tongues grammar and phonetics, you’ll just reproduce it in the conlang you write.

If you don’t make an explicit choice about culture affects your language, you’ll end up with a language with the same metaphors, implicit judgements, etc as your mother tongue. Examples would be the “arugments are war” metaphor and the sexist masculate default pronouns found in English, which reflect either old or accidental ways of thinking influenced by the culture where the natural language evolved.  Two popular strategies are culture-neutral and constructued culture. The culture neutral strategy is very hard as abstractions are difficult to discuss without metaphors and using metaphors will inevitably lead to culture specific references.  An entirely constructed culture will almost certainly move your language into the category of “artistic” language, something that is pretty to look at, but unmotivating to actually learn.

Create an initial vocabulary.  Try to stick with common words and … words about grammar and language.  The early users of a new language usually are language hobbyists, linguists and are likely to do a lot of meta-language discussion.

Create a path. Learning a language is hard.  If your desired end product is a language description that is entertaining to read, then by all means, make it hard as you want to. Otherwise, you will want to have some gimmick to pave the way from not knowing the first word to knowing a lot, not knowing how to change them or string them together and not knowing how to pronounce them to being a fluent, talking, writing user of the language.

Write some texts.  The story of babel, lord’s prayer are popular texts, but I think people could be a bit more original.

Pick a license.

Release to the world.  Releasing to the world means building a community.  This is the first time you’ll have an audience and if you want a successful language, you should design the language with that audience in mind.

Are they casual conlang enthusiasts? Hard core philosopher logicians? Fans of the Captain Zubidido Comic?

Do they want to meet each other face to face? Are there enough enthusiasts to meet locally?

What experiences do you want to be able to experience while using the language? For example, a hypothetical goal of  toki pona was to achieve peace of mind and happiness whilst being incapable of thinking about anything overly complex.  The goal of Esperanto of course was to facilitate a conversation between a tourist and a native–particularly pairs of people who haven’t the time to learn a each others language, but both are willing to learn a third. The goal of loglan was to allow philosophers to talk to each other with the precision of mathematics and solve the problem of philosophers not being able to understand each other.  Artistic languages are for doing small amounts of translation and then enjoying the language (in song, in script) without necessarily understanding it fluently, e.g. toliken languages.