Glossopoeia

Because that's what Tolkien called it; none of your vulgar "conlang" here, thank you. No not really but "glossopoeia" has a nice ring, huh?

This shall be random but I don't think I'm gonna use bulleted lists.

So, does anybody do the ol' Babel Text thing? Genesis 11:1-9, you know, as a demonstration of your languages? I prefer it as a sample text to the UN's "Universal Declaration of Human Rights", the sample text Omniglot usually uses; I just think that thing's depressing, since they all immediately set out to try and make Maritain a liar. Us Thomists be tight; it's representin', you feel me? Sorry, I just spent like three hours reading Penny Arcade newsposts, and I think Tycho's habit of randomly becoming gangsta is contagious.

The Babel Text proponents are right, though, Babel is a better representation of a language than the Lord's Prayer (another standby sample), since the Lord's Prayer is in the sorta stilted diction common to prayers. I really doubt the Amatsu Norito is a representative sample of Classical Japanese, you know?

Ahem. Anyway, so I'm actually getting pretty good at conlangs. I've got two whole language families, one for my fantasy book and the other for my SF one—though the former is really an elaborate cipher for Latin and the Romance languages, and for Old Norse and German. Still, if you're going to have a quasi-Medieval setting, why not? I've got two other alien languages actually worked out, in my SF book, as well as three or more others I mention but don't actually have detailed. I've also got an elvish language for a D&D setting I'm thinking of using, with the phonics of Hungarian and the grammar of Tibetan.

For alien languages, I like to use sounds not found in any human language, and take out some that are. For instance the felinoids in my book can't pronounce F or V, since their lips and jaws aren't mobile enough; their own languages lack those sounds and they pronounce them in human languages like IPA ɸ and β, the bilabial fricatives (which is how phi and beta are pronounced in Modern Greek, by the bye). They also have a pair of vowels, one rounded and the other not, that are pronounced with a low trill that sounds like purring (the apparatus is different though, sorta like a sideways bird syrinx—one vocal apparatus does normal voicing, the other only trills). I also decided to change the number of their teeth, to 25—they make the same shape inside the mouth as cat teeth, but the divisions are different; they have more molars and premolars and fewer incisors.

The evangelical Heideggerian aliens don't actually have vocal cords; they resonate their whole respiratory systems, like baleen whales, to produce "voicing", and also hiss on some vowels.

Another species, I don't know if I mentioned them, sort of feathered dromaeosaurs whose civilization bases status on conspicuous consumption and potlatch-esque intellectual property, and conceptualizes its economy as working by gift even where it doesn't, has a weird vocal apparatus I'm not entirely sure of (maybe something like bullfrogs, only maybe internal?). The major language they use (I mention they've got others, since this ain't Star Trek) also has tonal vowels, and sometimes uses "ww", a hollow hiss, as a vowel sound. Their consonants are what's really weird; they have two different click consonants that have no IPA letter. One is a lateral/postalveolar ingressive click, produced by sucking on the molars while separating them. The other is an alveolar egressive click, produced by slamming the tip of the tongue into the spot for "t", forcing the air out with a "hwut" sound. Of course technically they don't have teeth—instead they have hardened beak-like sections, inside their lips, that make a shape similar to a dog's teeth.

Grammar is full of possibilities, though in general, as I said before, it's not likely to be all that different from most human languages. The felinoids' major language, for instance, is head-final and agglutinating, and uses postpositions—all of which are extremely common on earth. It has two classes of nouns and verbs, depending on whether the first syllable has a "purred" vowel or a normal one. It marks noun case and verb tense with prefixes, and noun number and verb aspect with suffixes. It uses different cases for active and passive subjects, and passivizes verbs by switching them to the other verb-class's affixes. One peculiar feature is that nouns and verbs have a different sound structure from adjectives, pospositions, and adverbs; the former alternate syllables between purred and not, or vice-versa, while the latter are either all purred or all normal. Adjectives can't be used "intransitively"; you can't say "he's stupid", you have to say "he's a stupid person". Adjectives and adverbs go after the words they modify, and verbs can also have prefixes for a number of moods like imperative or negative (there's also a negator adverb for adjectives, basically like "un-").

The Heideggerian aliens use (I think, it's been awhile since I wrote any dialog in their language) a head-medial isolating language, like Chinese; I'm pretty sure it uses post-positions and has its adjectives after their nouns. I don't think it uses reduplication to make plurals (Chinese does), but it might use reduplication as an intensifier on adjectives. I don't think it's come up.

Yes I'm a nerd.