I'm working on making up a language for a project; was just curious if anyone else has done this or is doing it. :) I've been interested in language construction for years but never had a reason to seriously start creating one until now. So far the most challenging parts have been learning to use the phonetic alphabet and learning what phonotactics is and what my options for syllable structure are.

I've always been interested in it but never had the drive to do the hard work of creating a language; probably because I don't have an actual use for one, which I think would provide some good motivation.

Are you creating your language along with a setting and culture, or as a more theoretical exercise without those things?

Mine is for the Voynich Emulation project I've wanted to do for years - make a coffetable book with faux-antique art and all the text in a mysterious language. I want to invite people to try as a hobby to translate the book, the way people do with the Voynich Manuscript and did with Egyptian hieroglyphics before they became a solved problem. There would be a culture and setting to go with the language, I'd need them for the illustrations and story in the book.

Heh. I thought I had my consonants sorted out, but was having trouble with vowels. Now I have the vowels decided, but I'm not so sure about the consonants any more. ^_^;

So how is it going ?

Can you give any tips ?, As i've looked at The language Construction Kit and don't understand a lot of it, Proberbly need to google the terms a bit more :(

And have you looked at other conlangs ?

I'm interested in the use of conlang's for alien species, As it would be nice to not have all species speaking english( like in mass effect ), But will probably with some type of "universal translater" for the player like in star trek )

Good luck with your conlang!

@Docbrown Cuneiform letters have a nice shape. :) They would work well as marks made my some kind of race with claws, I think. Though certainly wedge shapes would also work for humans with brushes, in addition to the original styli.

@Ryan20Fun I think that reading a college textbook on linguistics is the easiest way to get started with the grammar part of conlanging. _An Introduction to Lanuage_ by Fromkin and Rodman is a nice book, and I'm currently reading _Transformational Grammar_ by Radford. For the phonetics part, Wikipedia has an awesome set of pages associated with the IPA where you can play all the sounds used in all the world's languages, and see the symbol used for each. If you pick out a set of sounds for your language in the IPA, then you can write out phrases of your language in IPA symbols to tell a piece of software how to speak those phrases to a player.