Some of the ideas I've periodically revisited have included:
- A language where every possible monosyllable or disyllable was dedicated to a function word (inspired by Solresol and other old auxlangs; this was an idea I toyed with a lot in high school but later abandoned)
- A language where every noun bears a semantically rich monosyllabic affix encoding person, number, case, gender, definiteness, etc (like Indo-European synthesis taken to an extreme) (also now abandoned)
- A language where all grammatical relations are built out of four basic syntactic structures, which are indicated root-internally, and no two roots overlap in phonological form, and roots are phonologically self-segregating, and also there's no tone... I eventually worked out a couple workable schemes for this but they ended up being kind of ugly and weird, and the idea kind of lost its appeal.
- A language with absolutely no morphology at all, although I was never able to distinguish the potential output of such a project from, essentially, a rehash of Old Chinese or a post-European-age-of-discovery creole. Or a variation: A language where reduplication (whether just full reduplication, or also partial or templatic) is the only morphological operation.
- A phonologically minimal but typologically plausible language, based on Larry Hyman's article "Universals in Phonology". There are many ways to do that, and they are not necessarily ugly, but they often do end up sounding kind of weird. I also have no clear idea how to approach the grammar and morphology with this one.
- A language where every noun, almost Esperanto-like, takes the same four case-marking vowels, and this is the only bound morphology in the language (aside from a verb marker). Everything else is done through compounding or periphrasis. You'd think this wouldn't necessarily be ugly, but my obsession with handling everything through root words rather than grammatical particles kind of made it ugly.
- A language inspired in large part by Iroquoian where (almost?) every word is a morphological verb, except with a more pared-down and minimal verbal morphology. I have considered Iroquoian-like, Circassian-like, and most recently Austroasiatic-like morphophonologies for this scheme, but in each case I have wanted to make the morphemes rigidly self-segregating like in an engelang, which makes it kind of awkward and, again, ugly.
Part of it is that it is very hard for me to just make a complete naturalistic language, knowing that at some point I just have to make stuff up without appealing to earlier structures and diachrony (if I evolve it from a proto-lang, then the proto-lang has to be the history-less stage), which just feels very wrong and fake to me. Or it wouldn't feel so wrong if I was situating the language in an actual fictional world with its own history - but I am not a fantasy writer and I have not been an aspiring conworlder since my high school years. So part of me wants to make a rigidly mechanistic, history-less language that can exist purely as a product of my own mind - free, perhaps, of as many of the little helping words and grammatical morphemes as possible, which are so obviously the product of the fluid and erosional forces of linguistic history.
Okay, that's enough conlang therapy for now. I hope to come up with a suitable conlang idea that I can actually stick to at some point. It would be a lovely artistic and intellectual exercise to actually try to write something at length in a conlang.
P.S. One idea I have had recently is to make a conlang not for myself, but for an audience - to set up a social media account and present a conlang project on it, perhaps alongside visual art. Basically as a challenge to motivate myself and see what it takes to attract people to a conlang as an artistic and, yes, commercial product. Rather mercenary but it would provide one with definite goals.