My First Conlang - How NOT to Make a Language

Did you use your custom language while explaining? I don't understand a WORD

To me the best way to start a conlang is basing on the speaker's lifestyle.
The way someone speaks is not the same if they live in a urban city, or living in a pasture raising cattle.
For a shepherd in the latter is more useful to have 20 words to describe a bull based on the coat, age and if is castrate or not. Meanwhile they only use one word for fish to describe any species of fish, because they never eat it in the first place. For them there are all the same.

That rule of thumb can be applied to pronouns, verbs, adjetives and so on. It shows what the culture cares about.

A real example is japanese, there have tons of honourifics because for a long time the social hierachy was so profound it was considered rude to call someone by their name if they are not acquantiances.

I will make a language with all these mistakes and more

im making my own conlang called Ixkhazhdār, I'm making sentence structure, a bunch of words and vocab, sentences, alphabet (AZDER), currency, numeric system, race, Proto-Ixkhadāric heiroglyphics, letter evolution, and more in the future!
Sentence: "Hello! Is your house the 23rd house on Rōtum 5 in the Desert Quadrant? (For context, the island nation is divided into four biomes/kingdoms btw, the desert is one of those four biomes)" TRANSLATING INTO IXKHAZHDĀRIC: "Āsa! Unn Fin-Rōtum-Tel-Vrīe Unn Xakhabra-Gat zutein Bēt kin?" (Hello! On Rōtum 5-23 in Desert Quadrant your house is?)
CONTEXT: Rōta, or Rōtum are circular neighborhoods surrounded by walls and forts and surrounding and having gaps of shops, businesses, etc. The Desert Kingdom, Xakhabra-Mulami-tim, or Desert Quadrant of the Island Region Ixkhazmoralli, uses Rōta for cities.

I tried creating a deterministic, logical, and without vagueness but it did not go well, speaking in parenthesis and describing anything in it is incredibly hard so I guess vagueness, and abstractness is so convenient that removing it will make the language not viable

I guess everyone starts somewhere

The funniest part is that he consulted a middle school presentation for the adjectives

cases overcomplicate a language and are harder to parse. thats why i dont use them for my conlangs

I am about a month into my first conlang. I am encouraged by listening to this that I'm making some good decisions by keeping the language as simple as possible. Perhaps I will be more experimental and do wild things if I make more languages, but this one's going to be simple. :-)

guy described the midset of a conlanger, but then failed to optimize his conlang. So as h said - it became bloated

8:23. I took a crack at reading it and couldn't because of how confusing it looked.

Here’s what I learned during my conlang adventures:

BUILD THE CULTURE AND PHILOSOPHY FIRST. I thought I could make a language that had nothing to do with a fictional race of people speaking it, but I soon found that to be impossible. Language is just verbal culture, it presents their way of living and thinking, therefore your language should follow the rules of that culture. Some things you could think about is:

-what species they are, human or not
-what environment they live in
-what they normally eat
-their government and politics
-their religion (if any)

Just taking a minute to think about that stuff will immediately make it clear what kind of words and language features you need to have, and what would not make sense to have. Working within limited parameters create the best and most interesting results imo.

For example, I’m currently developing a language spoken by anthro wolves, and it’s been a blast. My favorite thing I’ve added recently is that they can only have four color words: black, white, yellow and blue. Because dogs irl are colorblind and can only see those colors! It’s such a dumb thing but I thought it was super clever.

Anyway, that’s my thought nugget for you all. Happy conlanging!!

You made English

hi blibloblabla

Imagine if in the Dark Lands of the Refugium, they speak Thandian.

You talked for quite a bit about how the morphology and how bad it was. What was Thandian's syntax like? Was it similarly convoluted, convoluted in entirely different ways from the morphology, serviceable, or was it simply like most beginner conlangs where syntax pretty much doesn't exist beyond a couple basic rules?

"Adding EVERYTHING they know about languages"
I did the opposite! Multiple parts and systems of my first conlang are doing double, triple, or even quadruple-duty! When I was like "there's no system for that..." I just said, "Oh! We can make this other thing ALSO do that!"
And sometimes I did do the omission thing. For example, there is no way to indicate whether an action is happening now or happened in the past. Present and past tense are implied, but future-tense is indicated with a particle, mostly in context with military or divinely ordained decree. Like "God says, 'You will do that thing!'"

7:43 "Clearly, I was influenced by Klingon's use of mixed case for its romanization" DAMN YOU MARC OKRAND DO YOU SEE WHAT YOU'VE DONE

Looking at Poliespo, I have to say, you've been a bit harsh on yourself, as there's worse out there (Poliespo), a language so bad I can't even comprehend how a language could be even worse as any attempt to do so paradoxically makes it good.

Turkey mentioned 🇹🇷🇹🇷🇹🇷🐺🐺🐺

Rifling through other languages for funky concepts and grammatical nightmares? Were you just recreating English?

15:18 Good thing that he didn't learn about the Romanian Supin

So the moral of this story is "just because you can doesn't mean you should"

Do u make your conlangs with Excel?

I just made it hard for myself and made a word for every English word possible...

I am extremely surprised by this information, my first conlang was pretty simplistic with no articles, genders, cases and only a few prefixes and suffixes. The reason was laziness

13:27 Bro I'm so dissapointed, what is this really?! As a native Turkish speaker I'd say all of Turkish sentences in there are wrong translated and some of them are absurd(I mean there are logical mistakes if the grammar is correct though)...
Okey lemme fix:
Present: I'm seeing a dog. (The English sentence is wrong)
Past: Bir köpek gördüm. (You really don't have to add subject and we never do, unless you want to emphasize)
Past progressive: Bir köpek görüyordum. (why did you use the suffix "-mış"? It gives an absurd meaning to the sentence)
Future: Bir köpek göreceğim.
Future progressive: Bir köpek görüyor olacağım. (there are nothing to do with "if" by the way, English one should be "I will be seeing a dog")
Conditional: Bir köpek görürsem... (why did you add "past simple" to both English and Turkish?"
Past conditional: Bir köpek görseydim... ("görseymişim" is okey too actually, it would take a long time to explain which one is more correct depending on the situation you're referring to)
Distant past: There are no "distant past suffix" in Turkish, and no suffix pile. (you never use the suffix "-mış" twice if you're not making a sarcastic speech btw)
Future in the past: Well, congrants! Seems like this is your only accurate translition, just you don't have to add "ben".
Pluperfect: Bir köpek görmüştüm. ("görmıştım" is against vowel harmony)
Necessitive: Bir köpek görmeliyim.

I can't understand half of this and I'm not even set onto the idea of making a language. This is just very entertaining. I applaud you, sir. For somehow capturing my disgusting attention span with something rather complex.

you think that's bad? my scrapped old conlang had klapppaqq as one of it's words. WHAT WAS 8-YEAR-OLD ME ON

yes moi decie ralar que un hon begine

I made my first conlang, it's focused on drawing on rocks but I'll make my other one drawing on bubbles. I call it ckckru and it's definitely not great. I did have some fun with it tho

I made my first conlang, it's focused on drawing on rocks but I'll make my other one drawing on bubbles. I call it ckckru and it's definitely not great. I did have some fun with it tho

as a Turkish guy that light bulb trigerring my traumas XD

How to ruin a conlang 101:
1. Be a native English speaker
2. Be greedy with features from other languages

Remember these old words of wisdom: 'Keep it simple, stupid.'

Thanks. Now I know that I DONT want to make a language.

This is better than any "how to make" videos xD

Interesting. My first instinct is that the language should convey as much information in as little breath as possible. Efficency as top priority. And then I'd go from there to give it some personality via quirks and make it sound nicer.

Walked into this expecting to understand 70% of it
Five minutes in and im like what do you mean you were a beginner

Hunuee Kha’okhāʔ Pua Hukha

This is my language. It has eight letters and 3 modifiers.

You forgot to discuss procrastination. That's an issue I got when conlanging.

1:20 I got a Geico ad with a guy saying “I wanna be rich” and just about died laughing🤣😅

It`s some years I`m creating my conlang, i would be happy if you could mention this comment and maybe evaluate my language

تۆمے اَس، اَس مے سی کۆنلٍڠ۔ مے دَفا اَس "قُرُستانی" کَہتُرَبی۔

Btw, this is my conlang. I call it Qurustani. It's fully phonemic and harakats are mandatory. Some additional letters in this script are ڠ (ng), ڤ (v), and ۆ (o). All vowels are distinct in my conlang and dipthongs exist. Aspirated and retroflex letters too exist.

For me difficulty while creating a conlang is to creating vocabulary.

8:13 This should actually be sooo obvious and put into English too: [θ] = "th", [ð] = "dh". I makes sense more than everything else...

Just testing a comment

h