Read that again#

Middle-earth is scaffolding.

Quenya and Sindarin came first, by decades.

The world was built so the languages had somewhere to be spoken.

The other way round#

A production needs alien dialogue by Tuesday.

Someone is hired.

The language arrives to fit a script that is already finished.

Both work#

Both methods produce languages.

Only one produces languages that reward being looked at closely.

It is the slow one.

So not vocabulary#

Vocabulary is week six.

You do not have the sounds yet. You do not have the rules about which sounds may sit together. Inventing words now means inventing them twice.

You start with a brief#

Four questions.

None of them are about words.

One — who speaks it?#

Not “elves.”

How many. Where. Living together, or scattered? Do they meet strangers often, or almost never?

Two — what for?#

Trade, ritual, warfare, family, record-keeping, all of it?

A language used only in ceremony ages differently from one used in a market.

Three — what stops them?#

Bodies. No lips means no /p/, no /b/.

History. A written language with no paper is a language carved short.

Four — what would break it?#

The thing you would refuse to change.

Find it now. In week eight you will want to.

Why#

An unconstrained language has no reason to be one shape rather than another.

Every decision becomes taste. Taste is undefendable in a crit.

A constraint gives you an argument.

Thursday#

Bring one page.

• who speaks it, how many, what for
• one thing their bodies or history will not let them say

It will not be marked. It has to exist on paper.

Also Thursday#

Watch the film first.

The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) — screening is compulsory, and the Build Log asks what it changed in your language.