Board Thread:Linguistics/@comment-25515174-20160209161900/@comment-26253206-20160209191211

Well, it dependa a bit on how yo want to approach your language.

If you want your language to be natural or "look"/"feel" natural, you should get yourself familiar with the language group you're dealing with. Since you want your language to be a mix of old/new English/German, I would suggest looking up Middle English or Middle High German as these languages are right inbetween. From there on, you can take words and apply sound changes to them (there are sound change appliers online which help a lot with consistency etc.).

Doing this should provide you with a base vocabulary for your language - of course you could also start with an older or newer stage of English/German. I would suggest not taking a very old language (like Proto-Germanic) because then you'd have to look up the sound changes to English/German to give them the proper feeling and then (on top of that) make up your own sound changes.

During this stage you should also make up a spelling for your language. My tip for this is: DON'T GO CRAZY! Try to make the orthography as straightforward and easy as possible - it'll help a lot with converting English/German to your language and also help you with reading/speaking it. Once you are more advanced, you can change the orthagraphy to your liking, but I much prefer either a phonetic or phonemic alphabet. Just don't do shit like English or French.

Now you should focus on the grammar - decide on how analytical or synthetic your language should be. Does it have grammatical cases? Does it have gender? Does it conjugate verbs? If it does, you should look at German grammar (because German still has all of these things) and change it to fit your language. If it doesn't you should look at English (because it doesn't have a lot of inflections. Of course you can also make up your own grammar or make a fusion of the two grammatical systems.

The last point is usually the syntax - so once you have all the words and all the inflections done, you make up rules how to put them together to create a sentence. In my opinion (as a native German speaker) you should stick to English syntax as a basis. English and German often have a very similar syntax for easy expressions like "I give him the book" or "My name is Joe" but German syntax as a whole is much more complicated and very difficult to understand without a lot of practice/knowledge about it - a side result of the bigger inflectional system of German. (A lot of it is actually complete and utter b*llshit - I have no idea who came up with this system) But as always: If you want your language to be more like German, you might wanna look it up and decide for yourself.

And that's about all the advice I can give you right now.