Interview with someone who designs languages for a living.

When I was 13, I designed my own language. Since I didn’t care about or pay attention in school*, I did most of it in class.

It took a few months. Having a consistent and flexible grammar was really important to me, so I spent a lot of time working on that in particular.

I decided to combine ideograms and a phonetic alphabet, and use a wide range of sounds (40) from languages as diverse as Navajo and Frisian.

I even concocted my own proto-language so etymology made some sort of sense, though that was a bit overkill I figured out later.

Anyway, at the end of it all I ended up with a language that 99% of English speakers couldn’t even hear some of the important phones therein, and which they couldn’t read, and which couldn’t be easily explained because most people accustomed to phonetic alphabets don’t get ideograms and combining them with a phonetic alphabet…well, let’s just say it was a powerful language, but not easy.

But what I liked about it is that the most common couple hundred phrases or so could be written as one character, and it still had all the power of a phonetic alphabet, with neither way of doing things being superior.

*I once spent two months in a class, and didn’t even know what class I was taking. I had never seen the book and though I did the assignments (sort of), they were so easy that I had no idea what the subject was in specific.