Classical Marpanni/Part One

Introduction
As opposed to my more mainstream way of describing my languages by fleshing a grammar page out as I go through the process of making them, I'll be doing something more unconventional with Classical Marpanni: I'll document the process of me making the language in a linear, chronological manner, in hopes of giving others an insight into how I work.

Initial Design
Before I begin working on a language, I tend to contextualise it either by figuring out key ideas or positioning it within some conworld context. For Marpanni, it's primarily going to be the second. I then go on to rough out the general morphosyntactical and typological traits of the language.


 * Compared to modern contemporary Mestian, Classical Marpanni (from which contemporary Marpanni, a neighbour of Mestian, is descended) is a language no longer spoken, but is still used by a fairly large amount of educated people as a literate lingua franca, a position it is losing to the influence of Mestian. It owed its influence to the literate merchant classes that spoke it and used it as a language of literature. As such, a vast body of native literature in it is preserved.


 * Classical Marpanni, much like its descendants, is a very inflecting language. Uncharacteristically of languages on the Dragonforge, it is morphologically split-tripartite; its contemporary vernaculars have, in various ways and to various degrees, resolved this oddity.

I don't tend to put much weight on typological classifications like "fusional" and "agglutinating": many agglutinating languages have the occasional fusional morpheme, and the same also applies the other way around.

At this point I usually decide what orthography I will use for the language:


 * Classical Marpanni is written in its own native alphabet, even when typeset within texts written in the Imperial script.

This just means I'll have to make a new script for it eventually.

At this stage I'm still working in the roughest of drafts and vaguest of ideas. I decide the syllables of the language will probably be (C)(C)V(C)(C), with a strong preference for a maximum internal -CC- clusters. I'll also employ phonation distinctions beyond just plain voicing (or absence of it). This is where I get into phonology.

Preliminary Phonology
Even though the end result is usually fairly intricate, I usually start work on the phonology by taking some general design principles and broad strokes, and then whittling it down until it resembles something satisfactory. I never really finish work on the phonology in one go: the preliminary design is always a rough indication of the phonemes and occasionally also phonotactics and some morphophonological processes. I don't actually work out the phonotactics of my languages all too often: they're sometimes implied by the few sample words of the language I begin working with — but more on that later.