Mathias Barra
2 min readMay 11, 2020

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Wow, thank you so much for explaining everything in such detail!

It’s incredible to see the amount of attention dedicated to the creation of a language. Since I’ve only learned languages and know they just evolved as centuries passed, I’ve never put much thought into what it’d be like to create one from scratch.

Thinking of “how to communicate effectively without feature X” must be quite an experience, going against habits of language you’ve developed. How do you come up with such new ideas? Are you combining multiple languages you’ve learned to find discrepancies and then get inspired by these?

As for your lexicon creation software, it indeed seems it could simplify the entire process for all conlangers. Since your ideas seem very well-organized, I suppose the difficulty is to create the code behind all of it, right?

It wouldn't be as easy as to combine every idea you gathered from other people I guess, but I can see the potential it has. Who knows, it might contribute to creating a new language even deeper than already existing language.

As for how I pick which language to tackle next, it usually starts with the melody of the language and then I find an anchor to the language. Something that becomes dear to me. Burmese started because I liked the sound of it. But what anchored it was that my brother’s fiancee is from Myanmar and I wanted to badmouth him in front of him, just for the pleasure of it. Since then, it’s grown on me and I’m enjoying discovering many grammatical similarities with Japanese, such as the use of topic particles or the sentence structure. As long as I find a way to have fun in a language, I consider it a good candidate to be learned and discovered.

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Mathias Barra
Mathias Barra

Written by Mathias Barra

French polyglot speaking 6 languages. Writer. Helping you learn languages. Get my new ebook → https://linktr.ee/MathiasBarra

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