Alicornutopia

I think compound English words are underrated. A lot of supposedly untranslateable concepts can totally be translated in a phrase or three, and if you pick two words from this phrase and glom them together you get something sensical, pronounceable, sounds-translated, and yet novel. But this won't tend to work for character names.

I like to find a conlang somebody's already created.

Maybe try hitting the random page button on the conlang wiki until you find one that looks promising? Visiting the pages of prominent conlangers?

Compounds are a good option in general. But in this case I have worldbuilding reasons to not want to embed any English meaning up-front at all. Also, I want to make some short semi-words (things like "Mr."), and words that share parts in ways English wouldn't.

I'll give the generator Kappa linked a try. It's not far from something I was thinking of programming, and that it generates a big wall of text looks great for playing with choice of letters.

If you like tinkering with code and either know or are interested in learning Racket, I have a slightly expanded version of that thing with some premade language options here.

Thanks to the generator (the version on a web page, because it is convenient) I am making some progress. I figure once I have all of the words I think I need I'll post them (without definitions) for an opinion of if they seem coherent.

(Irrelevantly, an interesting linguistic phenomenon: phonesthemes.)

Oh my goodness. What an excellent concept.

Itty bitty tiny bits of progress. I now have more empathy for all those stalled glowfic threads.

Okay, so I now have a bunch of vocabulary worked out. I'd appreciate a critique, because I can't tell whether this pile of syllables resembles a (tiny fragment of a) language or not, being too involved in its creation.

Several of these words are related concepts, as suggested by how I've arranged them. I'm a little concerned that they're too regular. They're all, loosely speaking, nouns; I have only vague ideas about grammar, inflection, closed-class words, etc. because I don't expect to need them. (I'm also planning not to use some of them where there is a reasonable compound English translation but wanted to have them available to build more words off of.)

I've also checked through Google searches/translations that none of these words already mean anything less innocuous than “mug” (of beer).

Those look like a legit piece of a language to me.