Re: Conlang Irregularities

On Sun, 7 Mar 1999 13:00:52 -0800, Sally Caves <scaves@...>
wrote:

>Here's a new question that I'm curious about,
>and that I didn't ask on the Lunatic.:
>
>I know that one of the difficult tasks of getting
>a conlang up and running is to make the rules
>of grammar.  How many of you established
>conlangers, after having done that, deliberately
>introduce irregularities and contradictions into
>your conlang with an eye to giving it dimension
>and realism?  Or maybe you don't do it so
>deliberately... maybe it just happens and you
>decide to leave it be?
Olaetyan has a number of grammatical irregularities; sometimes due to
changes in the grammar, other times an ad hoc simplification of an =
awkward
cluster. There are also irregularities in Olaetyan spelling. Some of the
Elvish languages have deliberately irregular conjugations of the more
common verbs such as "to be" and "to have". But I generally don't have a
plan for irregularity when I set out to design a new language. If it is
successful, I can introduce irregularity once I'm familiar enough with =
the
regular structure of the language.

>In other words, how many exceptions to the rules
>you' ve made will you tolerate?  One of the
>criticisms leveled at invented languages is that
>they are too regular.  Does that bother you?
I've thought about it, but I haven't really come to much of a conclusion.
On the one hand, irregularity makes a language harder to use (an =
important
consideration when I had so many languages to juggle, as I did until
recently when I've been concentrating on one or two at a time). On the
other hand, languages that naturally evolved over generations do tend to
have lots of irregularities, so it makes sense to make fictional =
languages
irregular to some degree.

Jarrda is an anomaly in a way; it started out as an experimental personal
language, so I naturally wanted to avoid irregularity. However, it now =
has
a dual role as a fictional language, Janarrtal. In time, the two =
languages
may diverge, as Janarrtal gathers irregularity and idiomatic usages, and
Jarrda adds vocabulary for Earth-bound usages that would be of little use
to the Janarr.