language

1. Phonetics, including how to read the IPA and a crash course in vocal tract anatomy.
   1. IPA fonts.
2. Phonology
3. Morphology
4. Syntax
5. Writing systems
6. Historical linguistics – how to construct a language’s descendants.

miscellaneous

biological basis of language - different methods of communication found in the animal and other kingdoms, communication and language centres in the brain, sound production and the anatomy involved; the hows and whys of language’s origin; an introduction to the field of linguistics - its history, its key players, its frameworks and theories, its big debates; semantics; language acquisition; pie and historical linguistics

notes on usage

Introductory linguistics textbooks, and indeed degree programs, typically follow a trajectory of phonology —> morphology —> syntax. This is a very idealized way of doing things – all three subjects interrelate and overlap significantly. Additionally, it isn’t always the most useful order if you’re building a language from scratch, since most textbooks are designed to introduce you to linguistic analysis: determining what features a language displays based on the linguistic data that’s been gathered. But conlangers are not starting out with a data set to interpret – we’re choosing our language’s traits and then building the data from there. It may be more useful, then, to introduce concepts in reverse order. I’m choosing here to introduce some syntactic features before morphological ones, because in the case of many natural languages, these syntactic features determine which morphological ones appear.

sample gloss

Indonesian:

Lezgian: