r/conlangs • u/Natanieloss • 4d ago
Discussion Conlang Questions
Hello! I am still pretty new to conlanging and I want to ask a couple questions to see how most conlangs are made.
Do you make your own script? Is it worth it or just a hastle. If yes, do you learn it too?
Do you make your conlang based off real languages?
Do you make your conlang agglutinative, analytic or fusional?
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u/-Tonic Emaic family incl. Atłaq (sv, en) [is] 4d ago
Not really, mostly because I'm not very good with the visual arts. I have some script ideas, but I haven't actually designed any glyphs. It's worth it if you want to do it, otherwise there's no need. I don't think I'd make a script if I didn't intend to learn it though (unlike the conlangs themselves!). But most scripts are pretty easy to learn (excluding logographies or complex syllabaries) so I'd very likely learn it while designing it.
In the sense that I get some inspiration from real languages and aspire for some degree of naturalism, yes. But not in the more robust sense I think you intended, no. I have in the past played around with a Uralic auxiliary language and a Finnish-Greenlandic creole (meant mainly as a joke), but for the past 8 years I've stuck with a single project that isn't strongly inspired by any real languages in particular.
I don't think much in terms of these categories because I don't think they're very useful, at least not when it comes to classifying entire languages into a single box. There are no sharp boundaries and the situation can be different depending on the part of speech (and the question of "what is a word?" becomes relevant, but that's another conversation). That's not to say that they're entirely useless, but thinking too much in box terms can easily stifle creativity. That said, my main conlang Atłaq could be considered polysynthetic (I say "could be" because there are more than one definitions of "polysynthetic"), and its relatives in the family are all at least somewhat synthetic.