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Excuse this question, as in the end it may prove to be only semi-linguistical, but I think if I am to pursue Conlanging as an interest, and linguistics as a whole, it is important for me personal to get some sort of answer to this question. Since I only speak English, I only know its grammatical rules. I know there are a lot of things Enlgish does badly, and some things it does good, some consistent some inconsistent.

My question is, is the grammar of a conlang truly, 100% up to the creator to make? Now I’m not saying controlling things so intrinsic to language that there’s no need, so like, not making up something that doesn’t use Subjects and Verbs and Objects, but the grammar.

For example, in English a and an when used in front of a noun mean the same thing, you just use a in front of words that start with a consonant and an in front of words that begin with a vowel. Forging any historical reason why this may be, in my mind I find myself saying “at some point someone or someone’s must have arbitrarily started this rule, and once it was set in stone it became grammatical law”

Can I really just do that? Or is Conlaning kind of like poetry and that part of the art is making something that falls within a certain constraint. (exmple, someone that write free verse could be seen as less skilled then someone who can write a perfect sonnet, just because to follow all the rules of a sonnet takes arguable more skill)

Yes, and yes.

Conlanging is like poetry in the sense that much of the art involves fitting your work inside certain constraints in an "artful" way—but at the same time, it is 100% up to you as the creator to make, because you get to decide exactly what those constraints are.

There are certain common sets of constraints that have shown up often enough that we have given names to them. Many languages have been created under the constraints of being naturalistic, of mimicking realistic linguistic evolution, of fitting an imaginary culture of speakers—so we called these "artlangs." Many languages have been built not under the constraints of naturalism, but as experiments about particular philosophical or cognitive questions—we called these "engelangs." Lots of languages have been built to bridge communication between people of different linguistic backgrounds, and we called these "auxlangs."

In a way, you can look at these codified sets of criteria like poetry forms. There are certain things that your poem should do if you're going to call it a "sonnet," and there are different things it should do if you're going to call it a "haiku." However, in conlanging these rulesets are extremely squishy. It would be impossible to write a poem that was both a sonnet and a haiku, but it is not at all unheard of for a conlang to fit into both the artlang and engelang categories.

So, yes, artful conlangs do have to abide by certain rules, but at the same time, the creator has 100% freedom to decide what those rules are going to be.


P.S.: I would disagree with you about the "it takes more skill to write sonnets than free verse" bit. It may be the case that it takes more skill to write a perfect sonnet than to write mediocre free verse, but it also takes more skill to write a perfect sonnet than a mediocre sonnet. And if you compare writing a perfect sonnet to writing perfect free verse (if such a thing could ever be attained), it's not nearly as simple to decide which requires more skill. Writing good free verse is quite tricky—it's not enough to just throw some words down on the page and call it a poem. In some cases it may be more difficult to produce something that really works without the guiding structure of a form like a sonnet.

But that's just my silly poet-self getting distracted by bunnytrails. Carry on.

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Well, let's do a quick thought experiment. Imagine the space of all possible conlangs, C. Then, let's segregate C into two groups, Acceptable conlangs and Unacceptable conlangs. Let's call this segregation rule condition T.

If you want to find a target within the acceptable subspace of C, then your search has to take condition T into account. If we take "total freedom" to mean picking out random points within C, then it's clear this method can never consistently pick acceptable points so long as C is a strict superset.

In other words, if you want to make good art, there's two constraints that you can definitely never break: The one that makes it art, and the one that makes it good. If this sounds tautological... well it is. Point is you can't just literally do whatever you want and expect to end up with something that a lot of people will really like.

On that note, I really like naturalism in conlangs: If you want to impress me, your lang will have to be naturalistic.

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♀♥Ø

<an> and <a> are the same word, just that <an> is clitic. Some dialects realize <an> as /əʔ/. For example, some people pronounce <an apple> as /əʔ 'æpɫ̩/. However, <a> and <an> both come from "one", just as in German <ein(e)> is the indefinite article and means "one". So nothing is really that arbitrary.

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Dotjen
Kotanese

^ there's an underlying assumption there

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任何事物的发展都是物极必反，否极泰来。

Fine then: You can't just do things arbitrarily if you expect to get a result that will please you, yourself.

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♀♥Ø

Thank you everyone that pretty much answered my question.

I guess deep inside I have some inner grammarian, or something, and when I sit down and look at a noun and go “Ok, to make it genitive case ill just an –ey at the end of the noun” and something inside me comes up saying “You can’t just do that, that’s not the rules.”

Frankly I think you can, in theory, do whatever you want, if that's what you really want to. But don't expect anyone to appreciate it, much less even want to bother with it, just because. For instance, I really could have a conlang like this:

'a' k'p 'j'x' 'a'q''o 'rrt 'er'swq' 'f'bh'j'ra'y'a' und' kkl' azxef'cv'b'uuuuuuuuuu' 'dfe'g'! 'a' ich'h'ar'ta 'em'ba buuu' 'aa'!
"I really want to go eat some tasty cheese pies! I see one right now!"


If you don't notice, it's an English cipher with an atrocious amounts of apostrophies and nonsensical choices of consonants. Now if I wanted to, I could call it a day and be happy with that. But chances are most people aren't going to appreciate it: if you put it in a story (like many of us do), then your readers will probably be turned off by how difficult it is to read, visually; if you ask for suggestions for many of the conlangers here, we probably will be criticizing the fact that it's a badly made English cipher and that it has tons of unnecessary apostrophes. However, if that's what you really, really want to do, then all the more power to you. We're just here to give suggestions and such.

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I now have a blog. Witness the horror.

I think I think, therefore I think I am.
- Ambrose Bierce

You can do that, though. There is nothing wrong with that.

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Dotjen
Kotanese

Don't be silly. Now you are the rulemaster! You can do whatever you want!
For better or for worse...

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Ikasmu ati'uki nai uraiur.
Hinai nimuśim naimi nai sasamiur urukani. Śi'ama nai huhumiur na ni'amuśim nai sasamiur.
Pumaki nimuśim śima'a na ami nimuśim ara'a. Hini nihrasum i'aku tumra urukani na nihrasum sanik hraspir.

As others said, Conlanging is an art.

In art, you can do whatever the hell you like. If it appeases your fellow comrades, then that's an added bonus.

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초보

Now, primarily, conlanging has to be something you do for fun, and only a tiny minority of conlangs are ever going to gain very much attention (and even then, it'll probably be quite superficial - even within the conlanging community, I suspect few people could tell you many details about even the "big" conlangs like Klingon, Quenya or zompist's Verdurian). Therefore, other people's "rules" are a secondary consideration at best.

People in this thread have been arguing the same idea from the standpoint that "conlanging is an art". Now, firstly, it's possible to argue against this premise. But even if conlanging is an art, it arguably isn't like other types of art - because a big part of why people write poems or paint pictures is to show them to other people, and if that's your main aim you're even more likely to be disappointed than most poets or painters are - there simply aren't that many people who are going to be interested. And this means, I think, that whilst poets or painters would generally be advised to follow the rules to some degree, in order to please other people, the conlanger has a lot more freedom. Furthermore, while it's difficult to say what a good poem or a good painting constitutes, it's far harder to say what makes a good conlang.

That said, a lot of conlangers like to work within certain vague frameworks, and I think this is often a good idea. A particularly popular one is trying to be "realistic". This means that you try to restrict your language to things that, to the best of our knowledge, are possible within human languages. So human languages don't have rules like "the third word in the sentence must be an article" or "the vowels /a i u/ alternate with the stops /p t k/ when a suffix is added", and this type of conlang shouldn't either. This is the framework I almost always work in, and personally at least I enjoy working with these restrictions more than working without them, though occasionally I will deviate when I think it's best. Trying to make an impossible language can be interesting too, but ultimately I don't ever find it as satisfying.