Conlanging can be overwhelming for even the most experienced conlangers—especially in the beginning stages of a new project when swirling swarms of ideas create a flurry of possibilities. I break the process down into daily prompts for a yearlong experience. One year, one conlang. Join me in making this a Conlang Year!
Goal: Organize your notes and make a templatic structure Note: Use the template to show the basic structure of noun phrases. Tip: Lexical sources and headedness affect these structures. Work focus: Organize/Plan/Structure You’ve now made decisions about whether your nouns will occur with inflections that indicate class, number, definiteness, and/or function. You’ve also decided what…
Goal: Explore options for marking nominal functions Note: Options include word order, adpositions, and/or case markers. Tip: Case-marking is also referred to as “flagging.” Work focus: Brainstorm/Learn/Try Today is the last prompt asking you to explore options before the upcoming series of prompts that ask you to actually start creating forms and putting your plans…
Goal: Explore options for marking definiteness Note: Grammatical information can be indicated in other ways. Tip: Select options that cohere with your vision for the language. Work focus: Brainstorm/Learn/Try Some languages have special inflections or grammatical words to indicate definiteness for a noun. In such systems, there might be a form to indicate the noun…
Goal: Explore options for noun number Note: If you want to mark number, brainstorm possible lexical sources. Tip: Remember that inflections do not need to be attached to the noun base. Work focus: Brainstorm/Learn/Try Another common noun inflection is number, which means marking a noun to indicate if it is singular, plural, etc. Some languages…
Goal: Explore options for noun classes Note: If you want noun classes, list potential options for lexical sources. Tip: For now, you can just list the lexical sources in their English equivalents. Work focus: Brainstorm/Learn/Try The next four days are focused on common ways nouns can be marked for grammatical information, whether that marking comes…
Day 43, February 12 Goal: Explore options for noun classes Note: If you want noun classes, list potential options for lexical sources. Tip: For now, you can just list the lexical sources in their English equivalents. Work focus: Brainstorm/Learn/Try Day 44, February 13 Goal: Explore options for noun number Note: If you want to mark…
Goal: Start a basic introduction to your conlang’s grammar Note: This may just be a sentence or two for now! Tip: Keep these notes organized so you can easily reference them. Work focus: Solidify/Write/Share Formalize some of the decisions you’ve made about the basic foundation for your conlang’s grammatical structures by writing a basic grammar…
Goal: Decide on a more synthetic or analytic approach Note: This decision reflects how forms grammaticalize in your conlang. Tip: Situate these decisions with your sound change timeline. Work focus: Learn/Brainstorm/Try The way units come together in a language’s grammar can be more analytic or more synthetic. In a more analytic system, each unit is…
Goal: Select word order and syntactic alignment Note: Create clause templates using current vocabulary. Tip: Focus on the general structures. Specifics will come later! Work focus: Organize/Plan/Structure The first part of today’s prompt is to select the word order and syntactic alignment you want to use for your conlang. Once you do that, create some…
Goal: Explore options for word order and syntactic alignment Note: Decide whether you want more head-initial or head-final strategies. Tip: Word order is often defined in nominative-accusative terms. Work focus: Learn/Brainstorm/Try It’s time to move on to decisions about grammar! The first major decision I’m presenting to you is in two parts because these two…
