If u feel up for answering random questions: How did u get into the conlang thing? How DOES one develop a language?
Making up pretty words has kinda always been something I've enjoyed? I remember 'making new words' for existing words back when I was like 6 or 7. Lots of kids do stuff like that, making a code. I just kept coming back to it over the years, partly in stereotypical thanks to Tolkien and re-reading The Lord of the Rings at least once a year from 9 years old to 25.
The current conlang I'm working on, Sanavran, was just an "i'm bored, make words" exercise back when I was in tech school in 2009. I got about 300 words in, showed it to a friend who was also nerdy, and then... well... forgot about it for an entire decade. In 2019 the aforementioned friend asked if he could use it in an audio play he was part of and I said yes. He asked if I could expand on it, and I said YES!
Only now I felt obligated to actually learn stuff and oh no, rabbit hole of learning the most utter barebones anything about linguistics argh this is all so boring I'ma just do shit and look up what it's called after I do it. Tada, modern Sanavran.
As to developing one... If you are thinking about taking up conlanging as a hobby (this is a fun hobby! do it! make pretty words, fun words, interesting words, odd words!) and you don't know anything about linguistics and you find trying to learn all that shit intimidating as fuck (raises hand) then this is what I recommend:
Start with a relex. That is a one-to-one replacement with your native language or other language you feel fluent in. You use the same grammar, just change the words. Make a couple hundred words. Don't worry about changing anything yet. Make words that sound like they could all come from the same language. And when you have those couple hundred words, take a look at them. What letters are you using the most? What sounds are you avoiding (Sanavran lacks j, p, q and w)? Can you find any patterns that you've been using, common combinations? This becomes your phonology. Congrats, you just did some fancy linguisticsnessy stuff.
Once you get your phonology, stick to it. But now that you have it... if you don't want to make "just" a relex (nothing wrong with a relex!) think about what you like/dislike about how your and other languages work.
For example, I hate irregular verbs. I don't like the whole I, me, mine, myself, you, yours, yourself, him, his, himself, her, hers, herself, etc nonsense. Not a fan of verbs 'agreeing' with the pronoun being used (I walk, she walks why the fuck is there suddenly an s I hates it I does). And really really disliked nouns having a gender. I liked that you could recognise when something is a verb in Japanese and Spanish in a way that English doesn't. I really liked all the things you could say by conjugating them onto the verb in Japanese.
So in order to make Sanavran more than a relex, I decided to make all the verbs be recognizably a verb based on the ending. But I didn't want the same ending for all verbs. So I decided to make verb *families* where the endings signified what sort of verb it is (location movement, body movement, state of being/mind/emotion, communication, and misc). And then I came up with various things to tack on to the end of the verbs to conjugate with that in turn meant I didn't need to use separate things like could, should, would, must, have, etc because they were now part of the verb!
For pronouny stuff, I decided mostly on one per level. First person (I, me, etc) was all just 1 word. Same with 2nd person. And since I didn't like my nouns having a gender, I decided to do away with gender entirely. There is no he or she in Sanavran, with the 3rd person being gender neutral, but that can make discussing things hard... ''they went to their house to get their book" - Am I discussing 1 person, 2 people or 3 people? So to deal with that I decided to create 3 options, and that the option used would relate to who showed up first in conversation. "They(1) went to their(2) house to get their(1) book."
So tada, using the above and a few more tweaks, I no longer have a relex but I also haven't had to deep dive into linguistics that make my brain hurt and I am having fun. I did eventually look up what things were called, and then wrote down what directly related to my conlang so I could remember them, but there's still a lot I don't know and don't need to know when my main goal is 'have fun'.
