I hope you’ll get access to the necessary resources; I’m sure that researchers at any university would be ready to help with this sort of inter-disciplinary project that is a bit out of the academic world.

Consider issues of translitteration. Use IPA right from the start. Please *pretty please* don’t use English-style litteration, it’s braindead and retarded, burdened by tradition that has nothing to do with your world. You must have noticed that when you attended school.

You know, where I come from, children in pre-school are told that in English-speaking countries, there are contests called “spelling bees” where children compete on who knows how to write words. Hard for a pre-schooler to understand; what a hilarious idea! How could someone *not* know how their own words are spelt? People generally learn perfect reading and writing in half a year. With six years of age, and I’m talking about national averages.

Words are important, don’t just fart them up. Shape matters, pronunciation matters; litteration matters. If the words are just any letter combinations, why not rip them from an existing language; say, Latin?

A good artificial language evolves and develops from a set of constraints, or selective pressures in evolutionary terms. Naturally by studying natural languages of sufficiently different and remote language groups (myself I have a fluency in languages from four groups, one of them being the indo-european ones), you can find features that define and distinguish a language from another. You also notice quickly how their different environments have influenced the form they’ve taken over the course of their histories.

Now, if I’d create a language, I’d try to come up with something that “no one has come up with before”. Acknowledging it’s but an illusion, aiming for anything less would make the whole labour seem just… not worth the while; why not just pick Tolkien’s elfspeak? I hear it’s tremendous! This is closely related to my first point of annoyance; why re-invent the wheel? Natural languages definitely never did if there was any chance of absorbing it from the neighbours (and that’s why I mentioned language groups instead of single languages; knowing Italian and Spanish you only know one language really). Why try to do the same, just better? I very VERY seldom ends up being better.

And that takes me to my second irritation about synthetic languages: they’re poorly made in general. Half-assed. Brainfarts. Refutable in three seconds, non-coherent, inplausible. Bad.

Please don’t make a (new) bad language! Take a less bad instead that has been tried and tested.

I want to write a story [I haven't taken a creative writing class, but the idea is there and I've written a few things down pertaining to the story I want to write]that involves nudity, but nudity that is commonplace in the society that the protagonist grew up in. Now I’m running into the same problem as you regarding if I’m being immoral especially since my protagonist is also female.

Where our issues aren’t similar is that I’m trying to cultivate a culture from scratch and you are using historical references. At least that’s the impression I get. So I believe that since you’re taking it from a historical point-of-view you should be able to do what you want in the context of what’s actually documented. Because it’s documented you will have foundation and backbone to shore up the reasons for why your protagonist is depicted the way she is. Anyone who decides to incite animosity towards your work can be met with documentation citing how you know things were in that time.

I know that many do not want to be the forerunner in anything like this that almost screams to the viewer that they change the way they look at things, but it will fall to someone and it’s much better that you do it as I think you aren’t making a political statement as I might.

Frankly I’m tired of people shying away from things because of supposed morality when the subject of nudity shouldn’t come down to morality but to context of how the nudity is used. I don’t know if it was said here, but in the US we live in a sexually repressed society where sex is also a lucrative business venture. We slap “Showgirls” with an NC-17 rating and limited screens while giving “Eyes Wide Shut” an R rating with a nationwide release for I forget how many months that movie was in theaters. We admonish depictions of nudity in games, but have no issue with having characters behead individuals, and/or slaughter civilians at our leisure. It doesn’t make sense.

Now that I’m thinking about it because of your documentation you may actually get a pass much like Kubrik did. I, on the other hand, will still find it difficult much like whoever directed Showgirls (though I intend for my story to have considerably more depth).

In short, (as I said earlier) do what you want and let the documentation/research cover you and I look forward to seeing what you produce.