/Conlanging/ General

Hey lads.
So I’ve been slaving away at a really pleb-tier conlang for quite a while now, effectively trying to build a semi-functional fake romance language closely related to Occitan, Portuguese, and a couple branches of Italian. Been also working in some Etruscan and Greek for lore reasons/in-setting cultural influence.
I’m really passionate about this part of my worldbuilding and have been enjoying the results so far, but everything’s just so complicated and sprawling that I’m starting to have difficulty organizing it. I’m glad to have this big backlog of notes but I want to somehow have a structure to it so that I can more easily draw from key parts for writing/planning and especially for ad-libbing during sessions.

Anyone here have tips for an amateur? Experiences? Any proto-tolkien’s want to weigh in?
Also /conlang/ general for anyone wanting to share their own stuff.

Show me your phoneme inventory

See that’s my problem. I don’t even know how to properly construct something like that. I’m shit at linguistics and looking at the guides I often get bogged down with all the technical jargon and particulars till my head is about to split.
My brainlet method has literally been to fiddle with individual words/roots and the way they interact with their native language.

Literally don’t know what the fuck I’m doing and I have a feeling that being less ignorant will help me in spades. World builiding came naturally to me on the culture/history/architecture side but even a simple language project like this is giving me a run for my money.

So you wanna fake Romance æsthetics, right?

Yes. Specifically Occitan/Catalan/Portuguese flavor. I’m using Etruscan loanwords/influence as an analogue to the indigenous language of the area and greek words/influence because I’m using Greek as the language of the cultural powerhouse (like Hellenism in real life).
The whole project is just to have a distinct, yet believable dialect that will clearly feel like romance even when it doesn’t 100% line up with real examples. Ideally it wouldn’t look out of place in a comparison chart with the real thing.

Okay, to be fair, for me it looks pretty easy: since you're going for a pseudo-Romance language with real Romance roots + Etruscan (not quite something I'd advise though, the language is really underresearched for a variety of reasons) and Ancient Greek loans, you won't need to go through that lexicon generation thing that's a huge pain in the ass.

So, what you should do is to is look into Latin, as in read several linguistics books (not textbooks!) about Latin, its phonology, morphology (this one is very important, for a native Anglophone it's extraordinarily easy to miss how important it is for the majority of continental European languages), syntax etc.

Then read up on phonological changes in real Romance languages. Apply them liberally trying to not fuck up the order in which they happened IRL. Be careful with isoglosses, though.

Okay, so now you tell me if this sounded like gibberish.

Much more understandable than the other things I’ve been looking at you. Thanks, user. And I agree it’s a relatively simple project. I wanted to set a reasonable goal that wouldn’t drive me mad.
Any further tips IE morphology/isoglosses? How are they so crucial & how do I avoid bungling the order?
I’ll keep what you said about Etruscan in mind, thanks.

Isoglosses is a bit of a linguistics grognard thing. Most language changes end up being tied to some territory. You can't really tear languages out of their historical context, because real natural languages have most of their fiddly bits fixed on some concrete values BECAUSE that context.

A language/conlang in isolation would need to extending that "artistic licence" manually to places you really wouldn't want to get into: there's a fucking quagmire of essentially inconsequential shit high on interdependencies happening there. You could theoretically say fuck it all and random everything, but that's a recipe for a disaster known as "my first conlang with all the kewl stuff that I thought would fit in there". If we are talking artistic conlangs, like yours, that is.

The historical context which can be drawn from IRL serves to generate a relatively headache-free framework that handles the fiddly bits for you. Granted, everything will look like "my take on %%existing_natural_language_name%%", but at least it's gonna feel like quality.

So, isoglosses are one of those fiddly, interdependent bits. Say, it would be pretty weird to mix up sound changes from Romanian and French, because they had little to no contact until 19th century or so. They didn't even share their donor languages, Germanic to French and Slavic to Romanian.

Thanks user. Makes sense. I think I’m grasping it all better.
You’ve done me a world of good. I very much look forward to applying some of this stuff.
I’ll be sure to stop by and post as things progress.

IE morphology is a huge ass topic. The most simple way to get your head around it is that words in most archaic IE languages are made up from individual morphemes like from Lego blocks.
Prefixes (I'm talking the Germanic/Slavic type, as in "be+come = become" or "under+stand = understand") usually denote aktionsart (the way something is done) and secondary "associative" meanings derived from aktionsarten. These had been adverbs some thousands of years ago.
Roots are roots. But, unlike English there is no such thing as a dictionary "word". You can have dictionary "nests", though. You rarely even see a bare root being usable as a standalone word. And the nest tries to describe the possible combinations of prefix(es) + root + suffix(es). But, the funny thing is, all is futile: the Lego constructor principle implies that you can make up new words on the fly, just as you can make up phrases in English.
Suffixes are used for derivation (e.g. to make a noun out of a verb), mainly. Too broad to talk about them in a Veeky Forums post, really.
Desinences are the endings certain idiots use to scare learners. "Our glorious language has 100500 endings hurr durr". Well, there's a system and logic behind those staggering numbers.

Anyway, archaic IE morphology is best understood as though English phrases have been condensed into long-ass "words", while retaining their intraphrasal semantics.