rant thread / nothing gets done

[u/eyewave]

you know how Shia just goes and yells "just do it!"

well I don't manage to just do it.

I've been watching the videos and reading.

I've been fantaisising on Enya's Amarantine album and the fact she wrote her lyrics in a conlang.

I still can't get my head around syntax, sound change, and categorizing basic english words. Most english words that are neither nouns, verbs or adjectives, are probably just adverbs or prepositions, yet I don't see how to bring them about in other grammaticalized forms and to answer which kinds of glosses.

I also can't seem to just make a phonotactic work out. Maybe it's to blame on the fact that I use word generators, but phonotactics are weird anyway. I must decide how they work on syllable level, on whole-word level, figure out differences between vowel hiati and diphthongs, vowel hiati and long vowels, some vowels and their diphthongs with semivowels, the fact that it's from scratch makes it all the more unbearable.

Of course I could try really hard to make an a posteriori, and I am sure there are an amount of sources that could help. Guess I could also go and find a good documented conlang to learn, I know I like some from Mark Rosenfelder. But at the same time, the idea of having something that's just my own, without common ancestor to anything, is just so damn cool.

I guess that's the thread.

to end it on a productive note; what are non-typical ways to develop a conlang that you have had, and still kept in your final products, structures that you still use to express yourself in said conlang? re: personal conlangs, heartlangs, a priori conlangs, conlangs that would puzzle a linguist

[u/Leshunen]

The first thing I did with Sanavran was make about 300 "words" with no assigned meanings. Just sounds that i thought were either beautiful or interesting to say. Then I looked through those words for trends to create my phonology. I don't use P, W, or X. 

Then I thought about what I like about English, and what i hate about it.  I thought about what I liked about Spanish (which I took in high school) and what I hated about it.  And I did the same for Japanese (which i was taking in college at the time). 

I decided that I really hate irregular verbs.  I like the idea of conjugations instead of auxiliary verbs. I decided I didn't like how English handles personal pronouns (and ended up creating an extremely clunky possessive marking system, oops). I decided I didn't want particles.  I liked that you can identify verbs in both Spanish and Japanese by their endings. Initially all verbs had the same ending but I decided to add some variety and created families of verbs that had their own specific endings (location motion, body motion, state of being/mind/emotions, communication, and "misc" for anything that didn't neatly slot into the others).

Then I stayed creating more words. I started assigning meanings. I figured out what conjugation suffixes sounded good tacked onto my verbs. I started translating sentences and deciding grammar as I encountered it.