(Part 2) Best products from r/conlangs

This was what I started with. It's very dense, and it's definitely a bit dated (being published right after OT came out), but a lot of the insights you find in it are still going to be extremely useful even in the OT framework that's supplanted it (e.g. feature theory never really went away, even though no one uses ordered rules anymore).

For OT itself, I'd highly recommend McCarthy's Doing Optimality Theory. It's quite accessible, and it has a lot of useful tips for formulating constraints well and even has a list of the most commonly used constraints. I know there's some stuff about stress in there.

I'm working on one (vaguely inspired by them, at least) myself, I know u/non_clever_name had some ideas for one. Both of us were going more North Australia/Daly River inspired than Pama-Nyungan though. u/opipik has done some stuff with Aboriginal languages as well. There's a couple other people who's reddit names I can't remember who've worked on australianeqsue stuff too.

As for what to use, the Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis has been helpful in my case. This as well. Sealang in general has lots of good resources. If you want to do something more PN-y (or anything really) the pile has lots of grammars and some are even good. I highly recommended the Upper Arrernte grammar since it is designed for beginners. Dixon has written (despite his controversial opinions) a very good book on this, which I was able to borrow from my university library.

It's not easy to find resources for Australian languages, but they are out there. Go, try, and ask questions here. There are definitely some people who can sort of answer!

Did you make this? Whoever made it, and whoever brought it to our attention here, thank you.

I've finally started to get to grips with phonetics and this animation/synthesizer is bringing it alive for me. While anyone who wants to really get good at the subject is ultimately not going to be able to get out of learning to make the various sounds themselves, for instance by following the course of exercises laid out in J Catford's A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, the trouble with doing that is it makes me feel and sound like a complete loony.

This wonderful internet gadget also makes some weird howling and hissing noises, but I can put headphones on so nobody else can hear.

I hesitate to make any criticism at all of something so awesome, but it would be nice if the teeth were pictured and the upper lip was able to descend as well as the lower lip rising. In fact it would be nice if the speaker's face was pictured - it took me a minute to realise that the diagram was facing right; for some reason most of the illustrations of human speech apparatus I have seen face left. Is there a way to make /θ/ and /ð/ that I haven't found yet? Same goes for /l/ and /r/, although I suppose they are intrinsically harder to picture on a 2D diagram.

But these are minor points. You have saved me from being carted off to the funny farm.

Here are links for the Thai, I used this one for Khmer (not the best). I also used textbooks from the University of Washington and SEASSI. They might tell you where you can buy the resources even if not in the program. (SEASSI is a great place for heritage speakers to do intensive summer language programs, btw, and they offer scholarships - or did - when I went years ago.)

I think all of the languages work really well with abugidas, so I would stick to that. Lao is probably the best script for an interlingua if the goal is simplicity and basic communication. But any of the three scripts could be pared down to basics - and for that, Thai is the most widely understood by all three language speakers due to its economic and cultural dominance. Just my two cents!

For clarification: is this for you to get gifts for another conlanger in your family or for people in your family to get you stuff?

I have various ideas for books, though I haven't personally read all of these.

• Mark Rosenfelder of LCK fame also has the Advanced Language Construction Kit and The Conlanger's Lexipedia.
  
  
• Describing Morphosyntax tells you how to do just that in over 400 pages.
  
  
• In The Land of Invented Languages is a nice overview of the history of conlangs.
  
  
• Andrew Robinson's written a fair amount of books on writing systems; I particularly like Lost Languages about undeciphered writing systems.
  
  
• You could get a nice thick reference grammar for whatever language(s) the conlanger's interested in.
  
  Of the top of my head I can also think of getting nice calligraphy pens, though I wouldn't know specifically which kind. There's probably also some expensive software out there that's useful for conlanging, but I can't think of it.

Pilot Metropolitan! Great basic fountain pen. Love this thing.

Ben Burtt, the guy who did the sound effects for the original trilogy (and I think some of the prequels), actually published a book that has a small amount of vocabulary and grammar for most of the "languages" in Star Wars, Huttese included. I thought it was pretty cool when I was a kid, and I'm glad to see someone expounding on that framework. Good job, OP.

If you don't mind forking over a few dollars, The Conlanger's Lexipedia is a pretty great book.

While I couldn't find a pdf of the book, I found a much cheaper (although still quite expensive) listing on Amazon. I don't understand why so many linguistically oriented books are priced this way. Why are you interested in this book, though? Perhaps there's another more reasonably priced option that would be helpful. Have you tried In the Land of Invented Languages? Both seem to cover a similar thrust.

Consider natlang grammars--a simple sketch might only be a few pages long, sure, but you can find grammars that are hundreds of pages long. Scratch that, you can find books that just talk about English phonology that are hundreds of pages long. I mean, here's a 230-page book that literally just talks about English vowels in North American dialects.

Languages are fractal. It's easy to write one or two sentences about a topic, but when you start diving deeper into that topic, there's always more (and more and more) detail to be brought out.

I know Hamlet and Gilgamesh have been translated into Klingon. There's also been quite a bit translated into Esperanto. Besides that, I do not know.

I would love to write some full works of fiction in my conlang. It will be hard work, and only maybe four people will appreciate it, but it'd be fun, I think.

It would probably workout to something like Saramaccan. Creoles tend not to have tones. Here's a good book about Creole languages.

One thing to remember is that creoles start out as pidgins, so figure out your pidgin. And then figure out how the children born into that mélange are going to systematize and grammaticalize what they hear.

> If you can pick up a cheapo tablet off ebay or whatever it will make your life a million times easier.

Huion H610Pro is a decent cheap tablet: https://www.amazon.com/Huion-H610PRO-Painting-Drawing-Graphics/dp/B00GIGGS6A/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1483383963&sr=8-3&keywords=huion+pro

I have used mine for a few years, and performs like a several-hundred dollar Wacom.

Excellent resource. I actually bought The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots from Amazon last week. It's basically the same list, but it also has English words derived from the roots. Highly recommended.

If your understanding of grammar needs work, I highly recommend at a minimum picking up a used Latin grammar (like this one or this one) and reading through the grammar explanation bits. That should give you more solid ground, especially with declensions.

edit: Oh, or maybe this.

Dia agus Muire duit! Táim Gaeilge ag foghlaim le Duolingo agus téacsleabhar a cheannaíos. Your Irish is actually quite good, although cá lenites the verb, so it would be cá bhfoghlaim.

xkcd's comic on standards is applicable here: https://xkcd.com/927/

You may be interested in this book, which among other things, describes a Esperanto meeting and the struggles that arise: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Land-Invented-Languages-Arika-Okrent/dp/0812980891