(Part 2) Top products from r/conlangs

>The grammar simplifies itself the more people use it.

How are you defining grammar? I would highly recommend cracking a textbook on historical linguistics (Introduction to Historical Linguistics by Crowley and Bowern is great, as is Historical Linguistics by R.L. Trask).

You seem to be specifically referring to the tendency of highly synthetic languages to become more analytic over time -- but seem to be forgetting (or are unaware of) the fact that analytic languages become agglutinating and then synthetic over time. The whole process is referred to as the grammaticalization cycle.

>Language carries with it a certain amount of entropy; if it's taught properly it can maintain itself, but most people don't have the time or need.

Again, I highly recommend consulting an introductory textbook for historical linguistics.

>So gradually people start playing fast and loose with the syntax and what not.

This is flat-out wrong. Either of the books I mention above will explain why.

>Lexical complexity is only the result of introducing more words though conquest or immigration which is common enough but it doesn't happen on it's own.

This is also wrong. Seriously, both of the above books are great -- both are very readable, and Trask has the excellent quality of being charmingly (and intentionally) hilarious.

You're clearly interested in language, otherwise you wouldn't be posting in this subreddit. I think you'll find the scientific study of language to be incredibly interesting and fun -- and more rewarding than just positing unsubstantiated suppositions.

In regards to the third question, there are generally considered to be five kinds of relative clause, in a hierarchy.

In order:

1. Subject
   
2. Direct Object
   
3. Object of an Adposition (preposition/postposition)
   
4. Object of a Possessive Noun Phrase
   
5. Object of a Comparison
   
   The idea is that if a language can relativise a lower position on the list, then it will definitely work for a higher one - for example, if you can say "The table which I placed the cat under" (Position 3, "under" is a preposition), then you must also be able to say both "The plate which fell" and "The plate which I dropped" (Postions 1 and 2, respectively), but not necessarily "The man whose friend won the book" or "The sword which my knife is sharper than" (Positions 4 and 5).
   
   This book has some good info on relative clauses in it, and I know for a fact that there are free pdfs of it floating around the internet somewhere if you look for them.
   
   I also wrote a short essay last year with several examples of each kind of relativisation, comparing how relative clauses work in English with one of Tolkien's Elvish languages and Irish (all the examples are translated into English :) ), if you'd like to have a read.

This may or may not be a helpful answer to you, but I find that possibly both of your questions might be helped if you take a look at Role and Reference Grammar. It's an attempt (that works mostly pretty well IMO) to make an integrated syntax and semantics framework that is very explicitly not based on Indo-European prototypes - a lot of it is based on the mechanics of languages like Lakhota, Dyirbal and Tagalog. RRG should give you both a good framework to talk about case relations and an expansion of your understanding of what syntax should look like. (I don't at all like the notation RRG uses for semantics and case relations, but the concepts are good.)

It's not necessarily an easy topic to read up on, though; the guy who came up with it doesn't always have the clearest writing style. The class I took on it used this book; I read this book first, though, and thought it somewhat unintentionally functioned as a pretty decent introduction (ignore its title, though; and beware that some aspects of RRG have changed since it was written).

I'm working on one (vaguely inspired by them, at least) myself, I know u/non_clever_name had some ideas for one. Both of us were going more North Australia/Daly River inspired than Pama-Nyungan though. u/opipik has done some stuff with Aboriginal languages as well. There's a couple other people who's reddit names I can't remember who've worked on australianeqsue stuff too.

As for what to use, the Oxford Handbook of Polysynthesis has been helpful in my case. This as well. Sealang in general has lots of good resources. If you want to do something more PN-y (or anything really) the pile has lots of grammars and some are even good. I highly recommended the Upper Arrernte grammar since it is designed for beginners. Dixon has written (despite his controversial opinions) a very good book on this, which I was able to borrow from my university library.

It's not easy to find resources for Australian languages, but they are out there. Go, try, and ask questions here. There are definitely some people who can sort of answer!

Did you make this? Whoever made it, and whoever brought it to our attention here, thank you.

I've finally started to get to grips with phonetics and this animation/synthesizer is bringing it alive for me. While anyone who wants to really get good at the subject is ultimately not going to be able to get out of learning to make the various sounds themselves, for instance by following the course of exercises laid out in J Catford's A Practical Introduction to Phonetics, the trouble with doing that is it makes me feel and sound like a complete loony.

This wonderful internet gadget also makes some weird howling and hissing noises, but I can put headphones on so nobody else can hear.

I hesitate to make any criticism at all of something so awesome, but it would be nice if the teeth were pictured and the upper lip was able to descend as well as the lower lip rising. In fact it would be nice if the speaker's face was pictured - it took me a minute to realise that the diagram was facing right; for some reason most of the illustrations of human speech apparatus I have seen face left. Is there a way to make /θ/ and /ð/ that I haven't found yet? Same goes for /l/ and /r/, although I suppose they are intrinsically harder to picture on a 2D diagram.

But these are minor points. You have saved me from being carted off to the funny farm.

Here are links for the Thai, I used this one for Khmer (not the best). I also used textbooks from the University of Washington and SEASSI. They might tell you where you can buy the resources even if not in the program. (SEASSI is a great place for heritage speakers to do intensive summer language programs, btw, and they offer scholarships - or did - when I went years ago.)

I think all of the languages work really well with abugidas, so I would stick to that. Lao is probably the best script for an interlingua if the goal is simplicity and basic communication. But any of the three scripts could be pared down to basics - and for that, Thai is the most widely understood by all three language speakers due to its economic and cultural dominance. Just my two cents!

For clarification: is this for you to get gifts for another conlanger in your family or for people in your family to get you stuff?

I have various ideas for books, though I haven't personally read all of these.

• Mark Rosenfelder of LCK fame also has the Advanced Language Construction Kit and The Conlanger's Lexipedia.
  
  
• Describing Morphosyntax tells you how to do just that in over 400 pages.
  
  
• In The Land of Invented Languages is a nice overview of the history of conlangs.
  
  
• Andrew Robinson's written a fair amount of books on writing systems; I particularly like Lost Languages about undeciphered writing systems.
  
  
• You could get a nice thick reference grammar for whatever language(s) the conlanger's interested in.
  
  Of the top of my head I can also think of getting nice calligraphy pens, though I wouldn't know specifically which kind. There's probably also some expensive software out there that's useful for conlanging, but I can't think of it.

Ben Burtt, the guy who did the sound effects for the original trilogy (and I think some of the prequels), actually published a book that has a small amount of vocabulary and grammar for most of the "languages" in Star Wars, Huttese included. I thought it was pretty cool when I was a kid, and I'm glad to see someone expounding on that framework. Good job, OP.

Excellent resource. I actually bought The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots from Amazon last week. It's basically the same list, but it also has English words derived from the roots. Highly recommended.

If your understanding of grammar needs work, I highly recommend at a minimum picking up a used Latin grammar (like this one or this one) and reading through the grammar explanation bits. That should give you more solid ground, especially with declensions.

edit: Oh, or maybe this.

I found this book on Amazon on syntactic change for Proto Germanic specifically- maybe it'll help. I can't speak for it personally since I was gonna wait awhile to order it
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0198783582/ref=ox_sc_saved_image_4?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER

> abugida : a type of writing system whose basic characters denote consonants followed by a particular vowel, and in which diacritics denote the other vowels

this is the Daniels and Bright definition (on pg. xxxix) which corresponds to what I was taught. they use "particular vowel" where I used "inherent". Wikipedia's wording seems kinda vague... though I will to concede that perhaps the definition is more open to interpretation ?

Oh yeah, i see the a = you now. For some reason I saw the a and thought it meant 'to' even though 'a' was used twice and the word 'to' only once.
https://www.amazon.com/Please-patient-have-autism-Flat/dp/B07559T69G

Read this book.

Print. They are:

https://www.amazon.com/Uralic-Languages-Routledge-Language-Family/dp/0415412641

https://www.amazon.com/Uralic-Languages-Description-Influences-Orientalistik/dp/9004077413

https://www.amazon.ca/Survey-Uralic-languages-B-Collinder/dp/B0006C1E3E

There's this pdf, too:

http://www.helsinki.fi/~tasalmin/SW.pdf

Thanks! I was just thinking back to my linguistics classes and discussions of how noun classes expand from non-arbitrary to arbitrary. Much mention was made of Lakoff's "Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things."

One example that stuck with me through the years is (I can't remember which natlang it is) one language that puts "airplane" in the same noun class as "tree". It seems ludicrous at first until you follow the path it took. First, they started with trees and whatever noun class they belong to. Then from trees they made boats, which inherited the tree's noun class. Then later on came airplanes, and since an airplane is a vehicle, and a boat is a vehicle, airplanes inherited the noun class that boats belong to. And suddenly it all makes sense.

As to the title of the book, if memory serves (and this may or may not be the same language as the other example) one population's traditional division of labor had women tend the fire. And fire is a dangerous thing.

As my language's vocabulary grows, I look forward to finding things that I can classify in more arbitrary ways based on this natural drift.