Mark Rosenfelder

Read this in a day after it arrived. The original Language Construction Kit, originally an online article, was a mainstay of my teenage years, when I was into conlanging originally. I remember printing it out at school but at 4-point type to save paper. The older LCK book was basically the online article but fleshed out. This is all-new material. Rosenfelder writes well and includes plenty of real-world examples for the linguistic constructions he mentions in the book. There is a "guest chapter" by another author near the end, about North Caucasian languages, but unfortunately it is difficult to follow compared to the rest of the book.… (más)

Highly recommend for anyone looking to get into conlanging AND just about every fantasy author ever (and many sci-fi authors.)

The beginning contains a brief section on creating a 'naming language' for authors who just want to be able to name cities and towns and mountain ranges in their stories. It gives you enough info to have a coherent-sounding set of names for various features of your word without taking a lot of time or effort.

After that comes the meat of the book, which is a solid introduction to conlanging and lot of good references. Experienced conlangers likely won't find anything new, but may find it useful for charts and reference material. For new conlangers it's a solid intro that covers the basics without getting so in depth to be overwhelming.

As a bonus, it's a LOT cheaper than the standard books on linguistics or conlanging, so less of a commitment for the new conlanger who just wants to get their feet wet.… (más)