Brinolia’s Linguistic Learning

 I recently found a great website for conlanging:  conworkshop.com . It’s part tool, part community, free, and built by conlangers. It has oodles of great tools and systems for documenting languages, so from now on, I’ll be switching over from Blogger/Google Sheets to Conworkshop for documenting Bullywug. If you’re interested in learning more about Bullywug as it grows, check out my username bwug or the language code BWG on Conworkshop . Here are some of the cool features I’ve explored so far: - A December challenge to create and share a word (or 10) a day. - A dictionary that shows the conscript and is easy to edit and sort. Here's my entry for the Bullywug word for water. The Bullywug script is just to the right of the romanization 'bo.' - A set of sentences to help you develop and test your language's grammar.  - A chart that shows the frequency of all phonemes/letters.

Here’s a picture of all the glyphs and video of me typing a few. I found a few errors I need to fix, but it’s pretty much all done! So exciting! More details coming soon.  

The way we created the orthography (writing system) for Bullywug means that a few things need to change about the syntax. I’ve also just plain changed my mind on a few things after looking at more conlanging resources and thinking more about Bullywug culture.  Syllable Structure: In Bullywug, there are base characters for consonants and characters that represent syllables. The base characters are arrangements of dots that the syllabic characters are based off of, and thus much less interesting than the syllabic characters. The previous syllable structure I had of (C)(C)V(C)(ʔ) not only would’ve been impossible because vowels can’t stand on their own, but it also would’ve looked odd with so many dots. When I’m finished with the font for Bullywug I’m creating, I’ll add some examples here. So, the new syllable structure will be (C)CV(C). Vowels In creating the orthography it made the most sense to combine some vowels, (‘a’ and ‘æ’ as well as ‘ʌ’ and ‘ə,’) which left the question of ho...

This video gives some great advice and ideas for conlangs for animals:

After reading the Orthography section of the linguistics book we’re reading, The Art of Language Invention , and letting seeds of possible Bullywug orthography roam around our brains, we’ve begun to actually create one.  The first thing we started with was what Bullywugs were going to write on and with. We decided that it made the most sense for them to write on mud with their fingers, at least for the first stage. So, we got some clay mixed with water to act as mud, placed it on trays, and brainstormed some possible glyphs. Here are some pictures of glyphs from that brainstorm session:  While we drew in “mud”, we decided that the writing system for Bullywug was going to be an abugida.  An abugida is, basically, a writing system where each glyph represents a syllable, instead of a sound, like an alphabet would. Tamil is an example of an abugida.  We also experimented with what some starting positions might look like. We had the idea that maybe each starting posi...

Check out this interesting and informative video about what it's like to be an interpreter .