Re: Conlanging with constraints

Sai Emrys wrote:

> How have you experienced your conlanging as being influenced (for
> better or for worse) by constraints imposed upon it, of whatever
> source? What constraints do you have, and whence derived? Why have you
> imposed them? What constraints have you considered trying?
I don't often impose explicit constraints, but there have been a couple
of examples. Jaghri was my attempt to build a language around a
self-segregating morphology; morpheme and word boundaries can be found
without ambiguity. Roots of more than one syllable are derived from
shorter roots, but not without ambiguity. The other example is Kisuna, a
language with only six segmental phonemes. The challenge there was to
make enough distinctions in the vocabulary without letting the words get
too long.

More often, I have an idea for what a language should be like without
setting any explicit constraints. Still, there are always implicit
constraints. The sounds and grammatical rules of the language should
keep within the boundaries of what's possible for human languages, but
they shouldn't be too similar to English. Even with my non-human
languages, I don't bend the rules far from human languages; all the
species with spoken languages are either related, or initially had
language taught to them from a human-like species.