I'm an intermediate Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic) speaker with a background in Gaeilge (Irish Gaelic) and Cymraeg (Welsh), both medieval and modern. I've interviewed professors of linguistics and researchers in bioacoustics for the sake of the constructed languages in the Petals of the Twenty Thousand Blossom series, and I've done a fair bit of reading in linguistics on my own. I love language, I love creating languages for fiction and I love it when authors bring linguistic diversity to their work. So I've decided to participate in that process by consolidating some of what I've learned, some of what I've enjoyed and some of what I've created into a series of blog entries about constructed languages with writers in mind.
Over the next few months, I'll be adding new entries and linking them to the expanding Table of Contents below. This series can also be identified by the unique 'conlangs101' tag at the bottom of each entry. I'll be discussing departures from English for native speakers, the brain, body and biology of communication, linguistic fundamentals and other pertinent topics. Along the way, I'll point you to resources I think might be beneficial to you and cheerfully correct previous entries in the series when I learn new things about the topics I've covered in them.
Sometime in the next week then, I'll begin with an eclectic tour of communication, both real and fictional, to entice you out of the English language a bit. Until then, tapadh leibh airson a' leughadh, agus qapla!
Table of Contents
ConLangs 101: Introduction
ConLangs 101: A Departure from English
ConLangs 101: The Biology of Communication
ConLangs 101: Units of Speech and Writing
ConLangs 101: Culture of Communication
ConLangs 101: Placeholder
ConLangs 101: The Primordial World Sea People