Re: Some Random Questions

On Sun, 11 Apr 1999, dunn patrick w wrote:

> 1.  You know, I notice that my conlangs tend to peter out quickly -- none
> of them seem to grab my interest, although I have this idea of a perfect
> conlang that perfectly expresses my artistic vision. . . okay, I guess
> that was more of a comment.
>
In my experience this often depends on the way the conlang started.
There are conlangs, such as Bruslani and Matraian, that have started
with a song that consists of likely syllables - these songs I analysed
and translated, but afterwards, the language wasn't developed further.

For other languages I took my standard Grammatical outline and tried to
write the chapters the outline demanded - these often didn't progress far
beyond the introduction, though in some cases, there are tables of
consonants and vowels as well.

My most consistend results have been with working on the language I
designed in a most inexpert and amateur fashion one summer when I
was fifteen on the basis of my French grammar. I rapidly produced texts,
naive grammars and dictionaries for a few years. The fact that the
beginnings of the language were so imperfect was an obstacle, and
overcoming that obstacle was what kept me interested, I guess.

Nowadays, after an interval of half a decade, I've started working
on that language again, and the origins are now so distant that I
can apply the techniques of descriptive linguistics I learned at
University on the available data and come up with new results. What's
causing trouble now is that I don't dare to think up new word-families...

>
> 2.  How do you handle irregularity?  I know this has popped up before, but
> I'm still not sure.  For instance, do you always make the verbs of being
> irregular?  The personal pronouns?  Or do you just let irregularities
> evolve?
>
Irregularities will crop up automatically if you write in your language
and forget a certain rule, and then try to reanalyse the error into
a new rule. As for the verb to be - I generally choose between two
possiblities: not to have it all, or having at least three verbs
that can be translated with to be, all with a subtly different meaning.

> 3.  How unnatural is it to have only one class of noun declensions?
> (Well, now that I think of it, I guess English only has one real class of
> noun declensions -- of regular nouns, anyway)  Or only one of verb
> declensions?
>
Both complete natural. No declension is just as natural as well...