Three Dollar Quill

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:

• Stative verbs are cool.
• What if I made negation into an aspect marked on a stative verb?
• (months pass)
• I want to pursue this language seriously, and come up with an entire elaborate conworld for it to live in.

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.

• Technical level: prove out my ideas about using stative verbs
• Aesthetic level: get some vowel harmony in there, and also draw from languages thematically connected to the speakers in the conworld; this connection is somewhat loose, but I feel like there's some aesthetic potential in trying to draw together the sounds of Greek and Swedish, so I'm sticking with that.

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.