The Never Asked Questions.
Q: Who are you?
A: My name is Brynne McKay and I'm a young adult author. My personal website can be found here.
Q: How can I get in touch to tell you what a loser you are?
A: Accusations of loserhood will be taken in stride. You can reach me at brynne.mckay at gmail dot com.
Q: I don't think you're a loser.
A: That's not a question.
Q: I like this site - where can I find more like it?
A: My inspiration was Mark Rosenfelder's Virtual Verduria, which is incredible and light years ahead of my own.
Q: Okay, so this conlanging (constructed language) thing - I want to give it a try. Any recommended places to start?
A: I really haven't found anything better than Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit, Guide to Map Making, and other worldbuilding articles.
As far as worldbuilding...there are a few things that have helped me more than any article:
READING: Read about other cultures, history, religion, philosophy, anything that's applicable to building a world - and everything is. Fantasy isn't necessarily the best guide - I find that whenever I read it I start to imitate it, and while when you imitate life it's considered realistic, when you imitate fantasy it's just derivative. Like, you don't need to use apostrophes to indicate foreign names (I'm looking at you, Star Wars), and the bad guys don't necessarily need to speak a gutteral language.
TRAVELING: Obviously this has budgetary limitations -- but experiencing other cultures and languages, particularly radically unfamiliar ones is very useful. You don't always have to go far. Do you live in a country on the planet Earth? Spend some time thinking about how placenames are constructed where you live. Like, my hometown is named after a vice presidential candidate who ran against Abraham Lincoln. Are places named after the people who lived there, or the people who funded them, or the landscape, or a local legend, or in support of a politician, or what? What language are they in? If you live in the United States, think about how many placenames are indigenous and how many are European. Just get yourself thinking about your own landscape as if it weren't your own, and try to think about its patterns and why they might exist. When you can do that, you can think about ways to make your invented world like your own, and ways to make it different from your own -- but you're less likely to mindlessly imitate your surroundings without asking "why," and to arbitrarily deviate without considering underlying structures.
LEARNING A LANGUAGE: I think this is good for people on a lot of levels. But seriously, if you are a monolingual English-speaker learning this, get out there and pick up some of a second language. It can be Spanish like everyone else. Just get some linguistic experience that operates in structures different from yours, because it'll get you thinking 1) about how language is structured, and 2) how language can differ from your own.
It is obviously super useful and applicable to learn Spanish or French or Arabic or a modern language. Here I'd like to put in a plug for a radically different approach. My degree is in medieval history, and I took a year of Latin. Just a year. I learned pretty much the entirety of Latin grammar and syntax in that year, though my vocabulary is still limited. I am recommending this highly if you ever have the opportunity. Why? Because taking Latin is a lot like taking a linguistics class. (That's not a bad idea, either.) People shirk from thinking about parts of speech and syntactic function and all that. But you need to know those things if you're going to put a language together. You can make a good language without Latin. I'm not saying otherwise -- it would be stupid to think that Latin is, like, the be-all and end-all of language-learning. But if you can't tell subjunctive from indicative and direct from indirect object (to offer the basic examples) you're going to have a hard time not just copying English structures. More radically, if you don't know what a case ending is (or a subjunctive!), you're going to miss out on a lot of options.
Okay. You don't have to study Latin. I created Meroned with fairly rudimentary Spanish, a smattering of Farsi, and some exposure to but no knowledge of Mandarin. It evolved as I became proficient in Spanish, and is almost certainly influenced by my Spanish grammatical training (I still think in terms of pretérito and imperfecto, for better or for worse). I have had, however, to do a lot of revision of it. If you start from the beginning thinking in terms of structures rather than vocabulary, it will save you a lot of future angst. Before you build a dictionary, make a chart of all the different tenses. Decide how you want your verbs to conjugate. Decide if you want case endings for your nouns.
I don't want to discourage conlangers, but I do want to encourage thoughtful and informed conlanging, because when I started out, mine sure wasn't, and it's frustrating to look at the language I built and see its flaws. Really enormous gaping holes I have to fill.
Just a thought. :)
