Anyone here developed a fictional language for a project before? Working on a story set in a sort of post apocalyptic dark age, several thousand years in the future with small, isolated bands of humans speaking different languages.
When I began teaching for the English Faculty, I made two other friends, both Christians (these queer people seemed now to pop up on every side) who were later to give me much help in getting over the last stile. They were H. V. V. Dyson (then of Reading) and J. R. R. Tolkien. Friendship with the latter marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both.
The ingredients in Quenya are various, but worked out into a self-consistent character not precisely like any language that I know. Finnish, which I came across when I had first begun to construct a 'mythology' was a dominant influence, but that has been much reduced [now in late Quenya]. It survives in some features: such as the absence of any consonant combinations initially, the absence of the voiced stops b, d, g (except in mb, nd, ng, ld, rd, which are favoured) and the fondness for the ending -inen, -ainen, -oinen, also in some points of grammar, such as the inflexional endings -sse (rest at or in), -nna (movement to, towards), and -llo (movement from); the personal possessives are also expressed by suffixes; there is no gender.
]So, philology is the word for the study of language structure/development/relationships to each other.
That's not quite what philology entails; philology is the study of dead languages, or how modern languages came to be. Today it's often called historical linguistics; linguistics is the study of language structure/development/relationships to each other.
Philology or historical linguistics is a sub-set of linguistics.
As someone who bought it twice, I recommend The Language Construction Kit!
I'm working on creating a language for a book of my. What I have done is start with a Romani-dialect as a base (meaning I bought the only Romani-English dictionary for sale on Amazon), but I used the surrounding languages in the world of a book. For example, I adjust most nouns so they have a masculine or feminine root, like Spanish, and also conjugate all verbs using Spanish conjugation. For more structural rules, I revert to English, such as the adjective going before the noun and all verbs being proceeded by a pronoun.
And the name of the language I'm writing literally means 'mixed language', so incorporating all these sources that would be around the speakers works for me.