Re: Hello...

David ániyë:
 Amensazhus liel !
 (Greeting in Diom.)
 ("May the day be beautiful.")

 Nissa sili emeili Alarie, ne einto yendea ureilya!
  "My the moon-goddess shine upon you and may your days be joyful!"

  Welcome to the list from Silinestin.

 You can see my main project, Diom, on the web at:

 http://www.bloomington.in.us/~dstokes/diom_intro.html

  I'll check it out when I get the chance.

 Diom is an inflectional language, with a free word order, sort of like
 Latin or Greek. It was made for a fantasy game world. It is not meant to
 be related to any RW languages, although French speakers (and I am not a
 member of that group, by the way) might recognize some of the
 vocabulary. One of the early source of vocabulary was heraldry terms,
 many of which are from Old French.
 It is not finished, but then it sounds like conlangs are never finished.

  Conlangs, finished? Surely not. Indeed who could ever be finished in
creation.
  I constantly find something new to add or something to change. For example
I'm still working on "if-clauses" in Silindion, but haven't got it right for
about five months now. At first I tried a Japanese system with several
different ways to say "if ... " depending on what type of clause it is, but
this has proved entirely to unwieldy for Silindion.


 One thing I found when working on Diom is that I was too close to it. I
 repeatedly found myself paralyzed when I'd come up with something, then
 say "No, thats not right." and erase it. I was making it up so it would
 seem like I could do anything I wanted. But it felt like there was an
 already existing correct language out there and I was just trying to
 find out what it was. Does this happen to the rest of you ?

  Absolutely. As I described above, some things are good for my language,
Silindion, like its system of enclitic pronouns and possessives, others are
entirely to wierd like the "if ... clauses" thing. Some of the things that
are in the language are not even entirely understood by me. For example there
are basically two different types of verbs, those that have -n in the third
singular and those that have -r in the third singular, but why they have this
distinction is hard to say. Sometimes it looks like -r describes inherent
properties, and intransitives and sometimes I'm just confused. One thing's
for certain, they will have to stay since they are one of the things that I
really enjoy about Silindion.

 So now I have decided to set Diom aside for a while and work on some
 other projects. These will give me chance to try out some other ideas.
 Then maybe when I go back to Diom I can progress a little more easily. I
 will discuss these other projects in future posts.

 Good luck! All of my ideas that I have started after Silindion have become
(or rather not become) fairly minor and under developed languages.

 A short biographical note -- I was born and raised in Austin, Texas. I
 currently live in Bloomington, Indiana. I studied astronomy as an
 undergrad, philosophy as a grad student, then ran out of money and now
 work as unix sys admin/digital map maker. I speak Russian, German, and
 have just started teaching myself Japanese (haven't gotten very far with
 that yet).

   Japanese is certainly one of the more difficult languages, even for me a
prospective Linguistics major. I've been studying it in private lessons since
August 99, but have yet to be able to hold a fluent conversation with my
instructer.

  Elliott.