I had a thought today. What conlangs have contractions? I know at least German, English, French, and Greek to have contractions, and am quite sure that almost every does, but conlangs are always spoken/written with flawless grammar. For that matter, dialects.
Right now I'm making a writing system for a conlang of mine. It's not quite a syllabry because letters don't represent syllables - just strings of two or three consonants. (Some letters, mostly vowels, stand alone.) But each of those letters can be modified to "delete" one of those consonants, so that you just get one phoneme. Furthermore, there are different forms of each letter depending on whether it's in the front, middle, or end of a word, and the front, middle or end word of a sentence. It is a language used mostly for religious purposes.That's an interesting idea, marking a script for what's NOT there.
Right now I'm making a writing system for a conlang of mine. It's not quite a syllabry because letters don't represent syllables - just strings of two or three consonants. (Some letters, mostly vowels, stand alone.) But each of those letters can be modified to "delete" one of those consonants, so that you just get one phoneme. Furthermore, there are different forms of each letter depending on whether it's in the front, middle, or end of a word, and the front, middle or end word of a sentence. It is a language used mostly for religious purposes.That's an interesting idea, marking a script for what's NOT there.
As of yesterday, FairyLang has exactly 200 words. I'm aiming for 1,000 by the end of the year.
ETA: In my other conlang, Oltengo, which is the language of my cat people the Leorin (http://JohnRaptor.deviantart.com/art/Leoren-Caste-Chart-164081559), I just coined a word for bath that literally means "big lick." It amuses me.
They usually wash their fur with a wet washcloth. Similar to licking but more... dignified.
That gives me an idea. The word for washcloth should also derive from tongue! ;D
Yeah, I started without even knowing what a phoneme was. That said, learning a little bit of linguistics on the side helps make really satisfying languages, and is very interesting.
If you haven't seen it before I highly recommend Mark Rosenfelder's Language Construction Kit (http://www.zompist.com/kit.html) as a guide to conlanging.