Re: Uber newbie-conlanger conlang

Sai Emrys wrote:

> One of the people in my class is doing a conlang that, in the
> conculture, is meant to be a somewhat kludgy conlang.
>
> If you think of this a bit, what this means is essentially one of the
> goals is to be as much like a newbie's conlanger as possible... but
> more so. Almost, one could say, a parody thereof?
>
> So: Advice? What would you want to do to not grow out of, but *build
> upon* all those newbie's mistakes you've made?
>
> (This is presumably somewhat different than merely the opposite of the
> "naturalism" goal, though that's a good starting point.)
>
> FWIW, the setting is post-apocalyptic California.
>
>  - Sai
>
Include all the unusual sounds found in English but not in many other
languages, like /T/, /D/, and "American R". Be sure to distinguish
between /I/ and /i/. (I knew better than to use American /r/, but for
years many of my languages continued to distinguish between /I/ and /i/,
and I've always liked to include the /T/ and /D/ sounds. I mean, they're
not exactly rare sounds; widely spoken languages like Arabic do use
them, but they're more than a little bit unusual.)

Recognize that there are sound alternations in languages, but without
understanding why certain sounds are related. Make up rules for sound
changes that don't make much phonological sense. (Some of my early
"Elvish" languages had rules for changing final consonants when adding
suffixes, including such things as /r/ changing to /T/. That sort of
thing is fine if you know what you're doing; I can imagine a sequence of
sound changes that could have resulted in an /r/~/T/ alternation, but I
certainly didn't have anything like that in mind at the time.)

Continue adding sounds to your phonemic inventory as you find
interesting sounds in other languages or the IPA chart, but keep your
original basic vocabulary with its smaller set of sounds. You'll end up
with a lot of rare and unusual sounds that are only used in uncommon
words. (This is more or less what happened with my first language,
Olaetian, in its early stages of development. Later, some of what used
to be plain English sounds mutated to more exotic ones.)

Use single word English definitions for most of the words in your
vocabulary, without specifying which meaning of the English word is
intended.

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