Re: Conlang Irregularities
| From: | Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, March 8, 1999, 8:32 |
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At 13:00 07/03/99 -0800, you 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?
>
>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?
>
It depends on what kind of language I do. Azak, which is a heavily
agglutinative language, has no irregularity at all, but agglutinative
languages are generally very regular themselves. Moten seems very
irregular, but most phonetic changes are regular, but complex. It does have
some irregularity however, but only to form compound words or for informal
speech. Reman has some irregularities, because it is a Romance language.
The verb iri (to go) is completely irregular, as the "verb" esi (to be
+ING). There are also some irregularities in other verbs, of for some
plurals, but not many, and you can often find a kind of "alternative" rule
that applies when the "normal" one doesn't, like in many other Romance
languages.
To be general, I could say that I allow irregularities when I feel it,
when I feel that the language needs it (for pronunciation needs or others)
but I don't bother when there is no irregularity. It only means that the
language didn't need them.
>I have the choice of modifying my volitional verbs
>that end with an "n" and that have done so for twenty
>years. _Euan_, for instance, means "to go," volitionally..
>But I've fairly recently made it a rule that non-volitional
>verbs will end in "n" in their absolute form (retaining the
>vestige of the gerundive suffix that marks them as
>non-volitional: -ned.) So: teprorem, y tepro, "touch,"
>"I touch"; but teproned, y tepron, "feel," "I feel." Brilliant!
>But what do I do with euanrem y euan, "go," "I go," denrem
>y den, "tell, I tell," and uenrem, y uen, "take, I take"?
>Except to make them exceptions to the rule? These
>are beloved words that I've had for decades and don't
>want to mess with. And yet I can predict how they might
>change in subsequent usage: _euaned_ "go" but not with
>volition, and a new vol. form, euarem, y eua--which I'm not
>crazy about. And an epinthetic vowel inserted between
>root and suffix for uenrem and denrem: _uenarem, denarem_.
>which are other verbs. Yikes, what to do?
>
>
>Sally Caves
>
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/verbs.html
>
>