Web Resources

Almean languages

All you could want to know about Verdurian is on the web; the language information is just part of that encyclopedia of Almean life, Virtual Verduria and even more at Almeopedia. There's a dozen or so languages there, each of which is doing something a little different.

• Cuêzi is a pretty, Greco-Latinish language
• Proto-Eastern is the head of a well-developed language family
• Wede:i is wonderfully agglutinating, and has a logographic writing system
• Kebreni is designed to be not very much like English while still being typical of human languages
• Elkarîl is a non-human language which violates several human universals, and has a featural writing system based on faces
• Axunašin has a particularly well developed syntax
• Xurnese goes into great detail on semantics and pragmatics
• Old Skourene is based on triconsonantal roots with absolutive/ergative morphology

More from Zompist

You can meet other conlang enthusiasts— and get help when you're stuck— at the zompist bboard.

There's plenty of interest to conlangers on my main page, zompist.com, including the Sound Change Applier, If English was written like Chinese, Hau to pranownse Inglish, the number from 1 to 10 in over 5000 languages, and When do people learn languages?.

Good reading on dead trees: see my list of recommended books for conworlders.

Conlanging

(+) in the following list indicates victims of linkrot that I couldn't fix by Googling (June 2009).

Jeffrey Henning writes and posts regularly on the process of creating model languages and reviews a number of projects. Check it out. (+)

Rick Harrison has an elegant page with a respectable conlang, Vorlin, and a renunciation of IALs that IALers will dismiss at their peril. Esperantists will not like Justin Rye's critique of Esperanto, but for others it contains much to think about while constructing a language.

Richard Kennaway has many links to descriptions of conlangs and resources for creating them, and it's annotated (something not enough linkmeisters bother to do).

If you read French, see Christophe Grandsire's page of conlang reviews: meaty descriptions of quite a few conlangs.

Pablo Flores has some nice Tolkienesque languages, plus his own guide to language creation (based on this one).

If you're thinking of generating vocabulary by machine, take a gander at what Chris Pound has done.

The master of the secret vice is J.R.R. Tolkien, whose conlangery is lovingly annotated here. Don't miss the Harvard Lampoon parody.

See a bunch of constructed alphabets (including Verdurian), and contemplate supporting them with Unicode, at the ConScript Unicode Registry.

Newsgroups: try alt.language.artificial. There's a number of mailing lists, such as Conlang, Auxlang, Tolklang, and k.d. lang, which were active as of 2009, at least.

Conworlding

If you're interested in constructing whole worlds, you might like Juuha Vesanto's huge list of fantasy worlds (+), or Geoff Eddy's guide to creating worlds, or Patricia Wrede's list of questions for world creators.

Font creation

FontStruct is free tool though its methods (fonts are constructed from "geometrical shapes... in a grid pattern") sound limiting.

FontLab has a number of products at various price points, including Fontographer; I used an early version for a number of Almean fonts. The cheapest is TypeTool for just $99.

FontCreator is another non-free editor, for Windows only; the Home version is $79. There's a free trial version.

Linguistics

As mentioned in the book, Kevin Russell's intro to acoustic phonetics is good.

Of certified interest to conlangers: the Language & Linguistics Library on my board.