Introduction, and a Couple Questions

Hi there, my name is Parker Glynn-Adey. I've been lurking in various conlang
communities for a while now, and felt it might be a good idea to introduce
myself, before hollering out too many questions / ideas here. Right now, I'm
a second year math / philosophy student at Trent University. My interest in
conlanging goes back to the beginning of highschool, and I've studied:
lojban, Rikchik, Toki Pona, Esperanto, Klingon, John Wilkin's Language, and
stared up at the edifice of Ithkuil. I can only say I speak Esperanto
passable. In terms of natural languages, I speak French, and English, and am
currently studying ASL in college. It's a major life goal of mine to be able
to speak: French, English, German, (Spanish or Esperanto), and ASL with my
children.


My conlanging interest is to create a personal language. Right now, all the
prototypes are vaguely amerind taking inspiration from the work of Benjamin
Whorf, and Ockrand (or should I say Lieutenant Worf). To get my head around
some of the terms in descriptive linguistics, I've been reading Describing
Morphosyntax by Payne, with my trusty copy of The Oxford Dictionary of
Linguistics at my side. I also have an oldish copy of An Introduction to
Descriptice Linguistics by Gleason which is a little out dated. Next year, I
might take a phonology course at my university, simply to learn this stuff
better, since  my knowledge of the IPA is essentially nill.

About conlanging though:
   -Why do most people start their work on a language with their phonology?
   -Does anyone know of conlangs that use cuneiform as their native written
medium? I'm considering this for my current project, and would like to see
some of the exploratory work done in this directions.
   -I notice that a lot of people have conlangs that take the form of pretty
PDF files, is anyone here a LaTeX user?

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