The Language Construction Kit

This set of webpages (what’s a set of webpages? a webchapter?) is intended for anyone who wants to create artificial languages— for a fantasy or an alien world, as a hobby, as an interlanguage. It presents linguistically sound methods for creating naturalistic languages— which can be reversed to create non-naturalistic languages. It suggests further reading for those who want to know more, and shortcuts for those who want to know less. —Mark Rosenfelder The above is a sample of an artificial language of my own, Verdurian. How about a suite of webpages? Before I could write this little inscription I had to: Decide on the sounds of the language Create the lexicon Create the grammar Design an alphabet Decide how the alphabet is modified for cursive handwriting Translate the desired text You may have two reactions to this: The order of the steps above is significant. Let’s get going! Where do I go from here? There’s a list of web resources here.

http://www.zompist.com/kit.html

Related: A Radical View of Chinese Characters

Constructed Languages How do we communicate? Well, usually, by way of a language of some kind. So, what else could a web site devoted to the creation of the fantastic have to say about language? Here are a few thoughts on constructed languages, some links, and some tools as well. Well, actually, there used to be tools here, but now they're gone. Why? How to create a language [All the pages of How to create a language can be downloaded for offline browsing in a .zip file. That doesn't include multimedia content. A big consolidated page with all the topics is also available for reading, and is a bit more suitable for printing.] These pages are intended for people interested in creating languages for fictional purposes (or just for fun) and in linguistics in general. They're not meant to be an online linguistics course, but you sure can learn quite a few things about linguistics by reading them, the same way I, not being a linguist, learned from others.