Making Up Words

So this post is up late. I didn't have time to write it before. But here it is now.

What I've been thinking about lately, and may have nothing to do with my NaNo project, are conlangs. Constructed languages. That's your Klingon, your Dothraki, your Trigedasleng.

I'd like to create a language sometime, for a story. I think it would be fun. And in a situation like that, you don’t really need a whole language. Just enough of one to say what you want to say and make it feel like there's a whole language hiding under there.

My many years of learning languages have taught me a few things. ("Years? What years?" That's two of Latin, one of Ancient Greek, one of Russian.) First off, I hate articles. That's your "a" and "the." I find them pointless. They just take up space. Second, grammatical gender is bullshit. I'm not declining nouns more than once. On the subject of declining, that is, breaking down a noun into a declension, with a different ending depending on where the word falls in a sentence, I'm still not sure how I feel about that.

English, as you may or may not have noticed, doesn’t have much in the way of declensions. You have your singular, your plural, and your possessives. Your datives and ablatives and whatever are achieved by sticking extra words on there, like "for" or "with." As far as I know, the only time you get a distinct form for an accusative (that is, the object of the sentence) in English is with some pronouns, such as "him" as opposed to "he."

So what I've boiled it down to is that I want to create a language with no articles and no grammatical gender, but with inflection in nouns. And we haven’t even thought about verbs yet! It might seem simple, until you start wandering into the endless labyrinth of pluperfect and future perfect and there's just a lot of options when it comes to verb tenses.

What do you think about fictional languages? What kind of story would be a home to such a thing? Was everything I said above just a bunch of gibberish?

I'll see you Tuesday, I guess.