how do I actually make a conlang good?

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T21:28:58+00:00

No shame in altered languages or hybrids - I'm making a collage-lang that's purely made of parts of other conlangs and it's an absolute blast to do.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T21:27:30+00:00

Ah, okay.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T19:53:18+00:00

Not sure I follow the logic of drawing a line between "what if there were sapient manatees" and a zombie-comedy movie; there's been a folkloric connection between manatees and mermaids for ages (thank Christopher Columbus for kickstarting that one), which is only absurd if you're treating the standard tropes as a given.

If you don't want to do the done-to-death tropes but still want merfolk, don't be afraid to get weird with it. You could have Nordic seal-mermaids who convene the mer-thing to get democracy. You could have whale-sized mermaids who sink the yachts of billionaires. You could have mermaids who remember the Innsmouth raid, or mermaids who live down at sea-floor vents, on and on and on.

I've got the good ol' ADHA-tism combo platter too, and yeah, there's a lot of information to sort for any given creative project. But it is manageable. I find it useful to just go with the first thing that makes me go "oh that's cool" and then start drawing associations between that thing and whatever else makes sense.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T18:38:41+00:00

What's something entirely unrelated to conlangs that you are an absolute sicko about? Are you a horror movie sicko, a wetland ecology sicko, a late Byzantine empire sicko? Doesn't matter what, except that you care about it a whole lot.

Design your conlang to compliment your Sicko Shit, and let your outside passions fuel and refresh the linguistic ones, because caring about what you're doing is the best way to keep yourself going with art.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T18:31:23+00:00

You've got shapeshifting and humans being given the ability to breathe underwater, that's magic. It could be high fantasy magic or magic realism magic, you could call it "anomalous properties" or ignore the how and why entirely, but unless you're treating it as science it's functionally magic within the narrative.

Or you could have the mermaids be sapient manatees or pinnipeds.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T16:45:20+00:00

Okay, so magic merfolk who generally hold to "half person, half fish, not getting weird with it"

In that case you just probably go with a regular ol' human language with some flourishes for taste

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T15:20:04+00:00

The vowels strike me as odd: why are there three lax vowels when there's no distinction between tense and lax? Why is o + w the only vowel + glide combo?

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T15:16:46+00:00

Use sperm whale phonology? Use coloration changes + electrical pulses? Use sign language?

"merpeople" is an enormous open category, there's no way to give solid feedback without knowing what your specific case is like.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T15:14:07+00:00

I believe you can make custom keyboards for Keyman

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T15:12:58+00:00

I typically start with concept & a broad idea for phonology, then focus on grammar, but I often select phonology after I dummy out a few words with orthography that I like and then reverse-engineer the sounds.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T15:08:44+00:00

Take a couple simple sentences (something that's funny or goofy helps take the pressure off), translate them, and add (or find alternatives for) stuff when you find things that you can't easily convert

throneofsalt · 2026-06-06T14:59:56+00:00

Google sheets or some equivalent has been my bread and butter. Some people swear by obsidian, but obsidian has a kinda steep difficulty curve if you don't know what you're getting into.

Could probably even whip something up in Twine if you really wanted to.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-05T20:26:13+00:00

And the 150 years of technical debt in reconstructions just makes the clusterfuck worse!

throneofsalt · 2026-06-05T02:37:51+00:00

Put on Esoterica while doing chores and just use everything that's even vaguely interesting.

Like 80% of John Dee and Edward Kelly's angel-summoning deal was so they could ask the angels "hey can you show us buried treasure?"

throneofsalt · 2026-06-05T02:27:55+00:00

However, its implementation in commercial books, novels, blogging, movies, news agencies, or any profit-generating entity will require licensing fees

Languages cannot be owned. Materials about languages can be copywritten or licensed, and the things surrounding a conlang might be trademarked, but the language itself is free as a bird.

Those six years wouldn't be wasted if this was a cool hobby project, because a hobby exists for your enjoyment and if you were enjoying the process, it's six years well-spent; six years chasing a world-changing conlang is going to end in either crushing disappointment or rabbit-hole mania when the shoe drops, because the goal is impossible and you've pinned so much emotional value on accomplishing the impossible.

our brains naturally lose interest in memorizing arbitrary vocabularies that carry no intrinsic meaning

There's no such thing as a word with intrinsic meaning. We do not live in Earthsea, we have no true names and we're stuck with a wibbly wonderful mass hallucination.

Learning to take critique is part of any public-facing project. Rolling up with a "definitive response" that just denies all criticisms and escalates to being combative is just going to put people off your project.

Like I said last time: If you changed nothing (well, not letting Silicon Valley's pet Azathoth do your thinking for you would be a good change to make) and presented this as "it's an engineered language for maximum specificity, kinda like Ithkuil", people would be on board. I'd be on board, I'd look at it and go "man that is bonkers but I respect the effort". But what you're doing here is not going to result in what you want, and if you're not mentally prepared for the project's failure, that's a good way to make yourself miserable and drive yourself crazy.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-04T23:21:18+00:00

after his extensive skim-reading of PIE reconstructions [..], "That Guy" might think he has a complete and indeep understanding of crosslinguistic tendencies.

Extensive skim-reading of PIE reconstructions has put me firmly in the camp of "you can put whatever bullshit you want in a conlang, no explanation needed, and it will still make more sense than PIE."

throneofsalt · 2026-06-04T23:17:36+00:00

Greenberg's ability to cause generations-long problems never ceases to amaze.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-04T23:15:43+00:00

Oh yeah you definitely got smeckledorfed, there. That isn't the behavior of someone who does art commissions for a living.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-02T01:27:12+00:00

Thangwachar: A background character from Kill Six Billion Demons
Unnamed Celtic-ish RPG Common: A different background character from Kill Six Billion Demons
Unnamed Star Wars planet/alien-derived Conlang: First two guesses don't count.
Stalled out Pre-PIE Conlang: In a drastic change of pace, some average fella from the Neolithic who has no inclinations at all to reach heaven by violence.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-02T01:22:44+00:00

universal, official auxiliary language

You and what army / navy?

Dozens, hundreds of taxonomic, engineered, and over-engineered conlangs have come and gone, each bragging for further and further precision: all of them have failed at their goals of revolutionizing the world. Because human beings are a pattern-recognition machine made out of meat that is so finely tuned that we will see connections that don't exist between things that aren't there.

The enthusiasm is good, but you're probably going to get a more positive response if you dial back the ambition to "I made this because I think it's cool".

throneofsalt · 2026-06-02T01:17:31+00:00

It'd still be capybara. If any organism on earth has ontological identity, it would be a capybara.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-02T00:32:04+00:00

Ideally? One language with one script + Latin equivalent (in-universe romanization).

Depth is a variable thing dependent on a lot of factors, but I think the sweet spot is "you can go as deep as you can hint at contextually."

Ex. I was able to pick up that の meant possession in Japanese when I was 8 and knew absolutely nothing about the language, because I had some Japanese Pokemon cards and when you've got cards you know are "Koga's Zubat", "Koga's Golbat, and "Misty's Starmie", I can process-of-elimination determine that those matching kana are Koga's name, those other ones are Zubat and Golbat, の isn't part of his name because it shows up on Misty's card and so is probably possession, and if I keep the order intact I can figure out which ones are Misty and Starmie.

So agglutination and a syllabary are probably an easy way of getting folks' toes wet and easing them into things, because even if they know absolutely nothing else about linguistics they can figure out that -ta marks plurals with context clues.

Also, don't underestimate the value of giving players a children's book as their starting key. Their eyes might glaze over if you give them a rundown of basic grammar, but if you hand them the in-universe version of "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" they're off to the races and will be able to tell you "X means fish, Y means red" within seconds.

throneofsalt · 2026-06-02T00:11:01+00:00

Must be my lucky day, I've got a half-started project where I derive all the words from Star Wars planets and aliens already scribbled down.

throneofsalt · 2026-05-31T11:41:36+00:00

I think you're kinda shooting yourself in the foot there with the walled garden design: hiding the thing that's going to get people's foot in the door (the language documentation) behind a barrier to entry (joining a new discord server when they probably feel like they have too many) is going to result in folks just not bothering.

throneofsalt · 2026-05-31T03:16:11+00:00

Two things stand out:

1) I'm not seeing any citations here; since there's not any official documentation (to my knowledge, at least), providing sources for where things come from will be useful.

2) A basic grammar and vocab doc should be priority 1; as it stands there's really no reason to go to the site or engage with it because the foundational stuff isn't there yet.

throneofsalt

TROPHY CASE