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The Language Construction Kit (1996, 2012)

ja de herramientas para construir idiomas (en español; traducido por Renato Montes) O Kit de Construção de Línguas (em português; traduzido por Gustavo Pereira) Il Kit di Costruzione di Linguaggi (in italiano; tradotto per Daniele "MadMage" Calisi) Der Sprachbaukasten (auf Deutsch; übersetzt von Carsten Becker) This set of webpages (what’s a set of webpages? a webchapter?) is intended for anyone who wants to create artificial languages— for a fantasy or an alien world, as a hobby, as an interlanguage. It presents linguistically sound methods for creating naturalistic languages— which can be reversed to create non-naturalistic languages.

Creating the lexicon is the part of conlanging that takes the most time and requires the most real-world knowledge; you need this book to help. If you’re curious, it reads Ďitelán mu cum pén veaďen er mësan so Sannam, meaning “Go forth in peace to love and serve the Lord.” The accented Ď sounds like the th in then; the vowels should be pronounced more or less as in Spanish. A bad example is Hergé’s Syldavian; since he basically made it up in pieces, as he needed it, it’s impossible to create a consistent phonology or morphology for it, based on the scraps of the language provided in the Tintin books.

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