Describe what kinds of conlang you like and the features and design priorities they generally have. I think discovering conlanging through Lojban has definitely influenced my tastes a lot.
I mainly like very unnatural and regular languages with unusual grammar. To me the main appeal of conlanging is creating languages that are in some way “ideal” or “perfect” that could never exist naturally. This is why Lojban, Ithkuil and Eberban are my favourite conlangs and why I find the categories of logical, philosophical and engineered languages so appealing.
My taste in conlangs is a mess, because on one hand I like when things are neat and regular but interesting like you do, but then I also love when things are messy and overgrown and hopelessly irregular as long as they feel “real”. My favorite ever natlang is Ancient Greek and it’s been a blast to learn, because it inherits just about everything from PIE but puts its own little twist on it. A lot of naturalistic conlangs don’t replicate this feeling for me, so I tend to prefer engelangs overall.
I guess that explains why I like Láadan so much? It’s really regular with unnatural grammar (pretty sure Lojban was inspired by it; Toaq even more so) but there are lots of human quirks in it.
Verbs take me- for plural subjects, but this has the optional allomorph n- (a syllabic nasal, which doesn’t appear anywhere else in the language) before d.
There are no consonant clusters except for a very small number of words that start with “br” for some reason.
The vocab is quirky in ways that aren’t transparently in service of Láadan’s goal of expressing the perception of women, and there are some synonyms and homonyms as you would expect from a natural language.
I think i tend to like conlangs for their aesthetics, as a necessary (but not sufficient) condition.
Also usually not into highly irregular or naturalism-first langs.
Mostly I enjoy clongs with an interesting design-goal.
Toki Pona’s minimalism, Lojban’s attempt at being logical, Toaq for being more loglangy and at the same time more naturalistic, Eberban’s very unnaturalistic way of being super close to set logic, Láadan’s consequent application of 2nd wave feminism (the “soft” phono is such a funny expression of that), …
(I’m realizing most of these are loglangs or very close to being one…)
Like music, I tend to like all types of conlangs. But I personally love when I can see culture reflected in a language. funnily enough, toki pona’s genre isn’t my preference for conlangs; it is still one of my favorite conlangs ever though
despite never really investing myself in his works, tolkien has inspired my taste in conlangs with how he admitted that he came to the realization that a language needs a culture. similar to lipamanka above, conlangs with concultures that manifest themselves in the language, whether it be the lexicon or even the grammar, always charm me. i think my general fascination in cultures shapes this interest!
Yeah, I also tend to like experimental languages. I usually judge a language by its stated goals. Toki Pona does well here. Toaq does better than Lojban, but both are really solid. Esperanto was amazing for its time. I especially like esolangs, i.e. languages that make me question what language is. The Cursed Conlang Contest has been amazing for this.
Some naturalistc languages are cool, and I definitely respect the craft that goes into them, but honestly they just don’t inspire me to learn them like languages that push boundaries.
I like conlangs that explore an idea or a vibe thoroughly. For example, loglangs, cursed conlangs built around taking a single concept to the point of ridiculousness, alternate history conlangs, regional interlangs designed to exploit shared features of natlang families, conlangs built to depend on a particular grammatical feature, microlangs, super-compressed languages, Ithkuil with its focus on describing an event with all of its context explicit, etc
In terms of ones I’d like to learn rather than just admire, I generally prefer ones that don’t require a lot of instruction - like they’re simple, or they have few words and its possible to learn how to use them well through practice, or you can use knowledge of a natlang to understand a lot of it.
I think a lot of my taste on grammar have been influenced by Mandarin, at least on the phonology (Mandarin has C(G)V(X)T phonotactics) and grammar (Mandarin is analytic) levels.
There also seems to be some influence from Lojban, such as tolerance for non-natural grammar and dislike of ambiguity.
IANALinguist so take whatever jargon with a grain of salt.
I think there are two parts of conlanging that I really enjoy: the social-political aspect and the semantics of the languages themselves.
I was introduced to conlanging through toki pona & Esperanto, both of which are languages that take a strong political-philosophical stance on unity, simplicity, cross-understanding, etc etc. The collaborative meaning-making that tp requires is one of the things that draws me to it day after day. I was thinking about this re: on fluency in toki pona - #15 by TheAndSys this post. The conclusion that I draw here is that tp cannot take a concrete form without its community – the speaking of the language simultaneously builds it, and thus the language reflects the community that speaks it. The community is the thing, so to speak. (Also makes me think of Viossa)
This lack of a governing body on toki pona + the existence of reference materials that partially lexicalize the language (lipu pu, lipu ku, Tatoeba, whatever else) + the fragmentation of the community creates a situation similar to Arabic imo. You have a “standard Arabic” spoken in cross-regional news programs and with unfamiliar people, and then you have regional languages (i.e. Egyptian Arabic, etc) that are spoken in more familiar settings. Toki pona has taken on a similar sociopolitical fragmentation, splitting into multiple closely related languages sharing a common near-ancestor from nasin pi lipu pu. I absolutely love the politics here. It fascinates me to no end (& because of this I eat up like everything @gregdan3 writes lol). As far as design priorities go, I suppose this can only happen with a language willing to give up its ownership into the community’s hands. Contrast this with Lojban’s many reforms, which are nowhere near as pervasive or widely accepted, historically because of the LLG’s grip on the language and today because of many notable Lojbanists’ feelings towards CLL purism.
As far as semantics go, I feel similarly to @samflir in that I think it’s very cool when a conlang takes on some unique, idealistic way of meaning-building that differs from how a natlang might usually do it. On this front, I think about toki pona’s semantic subsets (see [2/100] toki pona and the semantic subset | DK’S ABODE and semantic spaces dictionary), Toaq’s serial predicates (Toaq - Syntax), or Eberban/Lojban’s slots & the existential claims you can make by not filling them. Lojban specifically has a ton of tools for meaning-making that throw me for a loop, like quantification through prenexes and PA4 or tacking things into slots in odd places (like through be or modals). When I first started learning Lojban, the idea that lo ... ku rips meaning out from the first slot immediately got me hooked and opened my mind to what’s possible with semantics.