• If you have a minimal enough consonant inventory, you could play around with allophony. Have <b> be /p~b~b̥~m/ and <d> be /t~d~d̥~ð~r/ and <k> be /k~c~q~ʔ/ and <g> be /g~ɣ~ɰ~ŋ/ or something.

  • The imperfective and perfective aspects are two different verbs. (Most of the time, the perfective is "pro" + the imperfective stem, but there are exceptions.)

    According to my textbook, Kafe Piter 2:

    Aspects imperfective perfective
    preterite chital prochital
    present chitayu -
    future budu chitat' prochitayu

    The imperfective is used for:

    1. having the emphasis be on the action happening
    2. inquiring after or stating whether the action has actually happened
    3. habitual actions
    4. having the emphasis be on how long the action took

    The perfective is used for:

    1. having the emphasis be on the fact that the action is complete, or the action's end result
    2. multiple finished actions
  • I only ever use a simple imperfective. For my next lang, I'm considering a Russian-style aspect-via-prefixes system (though slighly more logical).

    (FWIW, the Finnish Present-Imperfect-Perfect-Plusquamperfect system works exactly like in English and Swedish. There's like a squintizillion pieces of derivational morphology in addition to that, so there kinda sorta is an equivalent of an -ing form. Finnish's main differentiation in this respect is its lack of a any future tense.)

  • I KNOW RIGHT (I also have a passionate loathing of pre- and postpositions.)

  • My darlings are the many, many extant cases. ALL of this chart, in other words. Also lots of other cases, like the Comitative and the Abessive. ALL THE CASES.

    I also tend to be a bit boring with verb conjugation – person & number conjugation, past vs nonpast, that sort of contrast. My love of Finnish shows through a bit too much at times, perhaps.

  • Try <kh> for the velar fricative /x/? (Or ǩ if you share my eternal unconditional love for hačeks. :P)

    I currently have a language (family) I'd like to show some friends eventually as part of a setting, and am thinking about how to romanize stuff like /ɨ ɤ/. <ï ë>? (Or <ɨ ë>, since I can form ɨ with dead keys?)

  • I have a disliking of diphthongs, too, though that's probably my antipathy towards digraphs showing. (I am the sort of person who spells /s ʃ z ʒ ts tʃ dz dʒ/ as <s š z ž c č ʒ ǯ> because hey I can compose all of those with dead keys! Thanks keyboard <3)

    Hmm. I guess I should try to kill my darlings just once, too. And introduce some things I don't appreciate, like voicing contrasts.

  • Ooooooo.

    Do you do phoneme constraints based on what's cross-linguistically common, or have any favorite phonemes? (Or least favorite ones?) Mine are /k ɑ r ʍ ɬ/

  • Hee. I'm a diehard ... builder, or whatever the opposite of discoverer conlanger is. My greatest flaw is getting bored when it comes to the vocabulary generation part, so do tell me about getting words before grammar!

  • I usually start with the name of the language – either I get a nice phoneme set and syllable structure and get a name from there, or I get a name and derive the phoneme set and syllable structure from that. Then, a bit of grammar, a lot of words, and a conlang appears!

  • I avoid digraphs like the plague!

    I also tend to use only letters I can create with my keyboard (AltGr is best key). Þ over theta, diareses are excellent, and combining stuff is the very best.

  • I tend to have ejectives be dot above/below: ṗ ṭ ḳ. You have a large enough quantity of them that I don't think that's quite feasible. I'd go for the apostrophe, honestly.

    I admit to having personal issues with digraphs, but they might be only way to properly get everything. Here's an orthographic suggestion for you to inspire yourself with – though do everyone a favor and don't use <pw> for /pʷ/ if it contrasts with /pw/, frex. The only limitations are what I can do with my keyboard vs copypasting from a character map. Digraphs used for different methods of phonation but not for the "underlying" phonemes for each sequence.

    /m n/ <m n>
    /p pʷ p' pʰ t tʷ t' tʰ/ <p pw p' ph t tw t' th>
    /k kʷ k' kʰ q qʷ q' qʰ/ <k kw k' kh q qw q' qh>
    /ɸ ɸ' β ɬ ɬ' ɮ θ θ' ð s s' z ʃ ʃ' ʒ x x' ɣ/ <f f' v ļ ļ' lž þ þ' ð s s' z š š' ž ǩ ǩ' ǧ>
    /w l j/ <w l j>
    /t͡s t͡s' t͡ɬ t͡ɬ' t͡ʃ t͡ʃ'/ <c c' ţ ţ' č č'>
    /r/ <r>

    Whatever you choose, please place the pronunciation guide at the front of the book.

  • I suppose one would just have to use a table of contents + headings and be very, very organized and thorough.

  • I generally just have a Libre document for grammar and usage examples and a csv for vocabulary. The csv is okay and usable (Ctrl+F ftw) but I think the grammar doc may grow unwieldy once one has lots of stuffs in it.