Theiling Online    Sitemap    Conlang Mailing List HQ   

Re: THEORY: questions

From:The Keenans <makeenan@...>
Date:Sunday, October 21, 2001, 22:48
nd003k wrote:
> > Hi, > I was wondering if those of you who have made up your own > language would be willing to answer some questions: > -how did you go about creating your language?
I think I was unusual when I started Ok because I created the Ok words first. Ok isn't an artlang and I wasn't interested in making nice looking words. (Look at some of the monsters in my latest posts about translation exercises) I started out with a goal in mind for the language. I wanted it to be compact. I wanted it to be able to express complete thoughts in one word. But I also wanted to control the length of what came out. So, I created a bunch of vowel-consonant combinations which, would later have the meaning of one English word asigned to each. Before I did this I had already decided which sounds would be allowed in the language. Then keeping the same goal of compactness, I tried to construct some sentences. This would show me what I needed to do for a grammar. Because the language got bigger and bigger there came a need to address syntax. Once again I went back to my overiding guidline for the language; compactness. I found, as the language got bigger, that my options became fewer and fewer. This was because I also wanted it to be as unambiguous as possible so every feature had to be distinct from all of it's other features. But also because the new feature just had *to work with what was already there*. So, in effect the language itself just started dictate how it would be.
> pesiku (thanks,)
My pleasure -Duke
> nicole