Anyway, the Old Tongue is usually only used and spoken fluently in the pride by those who are more closely connected to stars as a sign of spirituality and prestige. In practice, that means leaders, sacred ranks and medics.
Leaders, sacred ranks and specifically prophets/starseers take on names translated into the Old Tongue.
Do you have any tips on creating a language for warrior cats? I have a few words and their meanings but that's kinda it lol. I'm not sure where to go from there. I feel like I'm just creating words that sound cool instead of creating a working system. The only thing I have is that I'm leaning more towards an onomatopoeia theme, like how in Watership Down a tractor is a Hrududu. So far I'm trying to group them into words that sound similar to cat vocalization, so words that sound like 'growl', 'yowl', and 'hiss' would have a negative connotation, such as my word 'yowla' which translates to 'demon or beast' based off of 'yowl'. Similarly I have words that have a positive connotation from 'rr' or 'mi' sounds from purring and mewling that's connected to mothers and kittens. Other than that, I just have a list of random words that look cool together.
Oh, so what you're struggling with basically is grammar. I'll tell you straight up: You're going to make like 30 bad versions before you hit a good version. Try not to get too upset with yourself while you'e figuring it out.
Putting together the grammar is what really makes it feel like a language rather than just random words.
This got long so a cut XD
Noun Cases - If you've done practically any language but English you'll remember this. Nominative, Accusative, Genative, Dative etc.
Noun Classes - Or grammatical gender if you choose to do masc/fem/neuter. I use grammatical gender a lot bc I like Swahili and it makes generating new words really easy.
Note: A language that does cases doesn't usually also do noun classes becuase that's confusing but I mean, cat language so do what you want.
Articles (the/a) - Do you use or need articles? Some languages don't have them (like swahili), some languages only have one ("a" or "the") and languages like English have both.
Tense - Explaining when in time things happen. Now this can get complicated really fast so in simple words, how does a language convey when something is happening? The most common ones are past tense, present tense and future tense.
English: Only has past and present tense. We can still talk about the future obviously, but we only grammaticize past and non-past. So played (past) vs. play (future or present) and the future is conveyed with "will."
Spanish: And most other romance languages have the past present and future tense
Others: Some languages break up the past into recent and distant past. Other languages will break up the future similarly! In general, the past will have more tenses than the future.
Aspect - Tells how in time something happened. You can have a lot of fun with this. Try not to get as carried away with this.
Mood and Modality - I admittedly don't understand this one too well so I don't use it often.
Derivational Affixes - Making these makes creating words a hell of a lot easier. For example in the kingdoms, the word Alai means tree. An affix ka- basically means "place" and so I make words like, Kaalai (forest) or "tree place."
When you're building your lexicon, keep semantic drift in mind. Technically this means the meaning of a word changing over time, but the part hat makes the language most alive is creating the vocabulary from the perspective of the speakers.
Keep me updating with your cat-conlang :D I'm by no means a professional conlanger but I like doing it.
Edit to Add: Most of the languages I make are agglutinative because it's easy but fusional languages like Spanish are really cool. Spanish endings for example encode a lot of stuff.
-as encodes third person, feminine plural I believe for example
