Re: THEORY: questions

    (I originally was going to send this just to Nicole, but I thought the
list at the end might be useful to some.)

In a message dated 10/21/01 2:42:34 PM, nd003k@MAIL.ROCHESTER.EDU writes:

<< I'm also
doing a linguistics project on constructed language making. >>

    Wow, what university do you go to?  Every linguistics professor I've told
about language creation laughed.  Good naturedly, but they laughed,
nevertheless.

<<-how did you go about creating your language?>>

    I assume you mean "first" language for those who have many (like me).  I
modeled my first language after Arabic.  I, of course, started with the
phones, since I love orthography.  I made an Arabic-like script in that it
connected and went from right to left, though the only non-connecting
characters were glides.  Anyway, so I started by creating the different root
patterns (I don't know if you're familiar with Arabic).  So, I created a
pattern for human nouns, natural adjectives, verbs, etc.  Then I started
creating roots, and then came the words.  Difficult syntax questions came
last.

<<-what components are necessary for the plethora or words and
rules someone just made up to be considered a language?>>

    Let me reproduce a list my pidgins and creoles teacher gave us about what
a language needs in order to be a language:

What Does a Language Need?
1.) Definite/indefinite opposition (possibly via zero marking of one)
2.) Nouns
3.) Adjectives (although in many languages the class is very small, with most
property items as verbs)
4.) Verbs (claims that certain Native American or Southeast Asian languages
have no disctinction between nouns and verbs is at present controversial.)
5.) A dative/benefactive marking strategy
6.) An oblique case marking strategy
7.) A plural marking strategy (although only used emphatically in many
grammars)
8.) Pronouns for three persons (there are languages which do not distinguish
number in pronouns)
9.) A proximal and a distal demonstrative
10.) Spatial deictics (or nominals used in this function)
11.) One general locative preposition
12.) One modality marker of obligation and one of probability
13.) Causative marking
14.) A subordination strategy (not all languages have a distinct
relativization strategy)
15.) Adverbs
16.) A focus marking strategy
17.) A topic marking strategy
18.) Question words (e.g., WH-words)
19.) A conjunction "and" (or a word with a broader usage subsuming the domain
of "and")
20.) Interjections

    That's what my professor, John McWhorter, says every language must have
in order to be a language and not a Pidgin, or, in conlang terms, a sketch.
I'm interested to see what comments there'll be (if any).

-David

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