Conlanging 2021-05-07

By Max Woerner Chase

I took a start at describing the intended phonotactics of my current conlang project. It's probably going to go through a lot of revision still. I'm going to need to either seek out some seemingly-obscure papers, do actual linguistic legwork, or just wing it, when it comes to basing syllable structure off of the inspirations for this language, though.

I should probably go through my creative process thus far:

At some point in all of this, jan Misali releases their video on Quenya, and notes that Quenya did not copy Finnish vowel harmony, I agree that this seems like a shame, and decide to be the change.

I kind of see this language as having goals at different levels.

In the past, I've tried to put together phonologies in an a-priori kind of way, and that was really unpleasant for me. At least for now, I prefer the experience of taking natlang phonologies, looking for the distinctive elements, and trying to harmonize them together. It's possible that, with enough experience, I'll get a sense of which parts can be properly considered as components that can be combined, but I don't want to jump the gun.

I feel like the main obstacle I'm hitting currently is, I can find some information on Greek and Swedish phonotactics, but it's not quite as much or as clear as I would like. There are either glaring gaps in the literate I've found, or stuff that I "should be" filling in because it's "obvious" and I don't quite have a sense of it.

I think at this point, I should be asking people for help rather than shouting into the void like usual. I'll get on that in the next few days. For now, it's super late and I should sleep.

Good night.