Re: Conlanging with Dick and Jane

On Sat, Dec 11, 2004 at 09:35:36AM -0800, Gary Shannon wrote:
> Hidy ho.
san tse.


[...]
> Returning after an absence of 6 or 8 months from
> conlanging, I naturally I looked back at my several
> unfinished conlang projects to decide where to pick up
> the pieces.  Of course the only sane solution is to
> scrap everything and start all over from scratch.  But
> I hated to do that knowing that I'm going to make the
> same mistakes and end up with yet another incomplete
> and uncompletable conlang fragment. That's when
> inspiration hit and a possible solution to systematic
> conlang discovery occurred to me.
[...]
> The solution occurred to me when I was sorting through
> some boxes of old books and came across a handful of
> children's early readers. Suppose one took a first
> year reader like "Fun With Dick and Jane" or
> "McGuffey's Eclectic Reader" and began on page one
> with "See Spot run." and "The cat sees the mouse." and
> translated the entire book, sentence by sentence, into
> the new conlang, discovering vocabulary and
> grammatical principles as they were needed.
I've thought about this before. In fact, now that I have laid down the
basic principles of Tatari Faran, I'd probably do well to pick up an
early reader like this and start translating them.


[...]
> And finally, by working with the conlang beginning at
> such an elementary level it is likely that one
> by-product would be for the designer to develop actual
> fluency in the conlang as the work progressed.
[...]

Yep, I always strive to be at least semi-fluent in my conlangs.
Unfortunately, Tatari Faran is growing so fast I'm having trouble
keeping up. This is where I think doing translations from children's
readers would help a lot.

The other idea I have, which I've already started on, is to go through
the Tatari Faran lexicon from beginning to end, and make a sentence
containing each word/phrase. (Yes, people have already told me I was
nuts.) When I started, the lexicon was about 400 entries or so, but
now it's a whopping 494 entries. But regardless, my approach is to
just move forward (so new words added to parts of the lexicon that
I've already passed won't be included in this run).  Currently I'm at
_husu_, "to surge", "to flow", roughly 1/3 of the way through.

I've found that having to construct sentences this way forces me to
experiment with different types of sentences. E.g., you can only do so
many "I see X", "he sees Y", "she sees Z" sentences before you get
utterly bored, so you've to find more interesting things to say. This
causes you to explore parts of the grammar which you may perhaps have
never really given much thought to before.

For example, it was during this exercise that I realized that the
then-current way of forming statements of equivalence doesn't work in
practice. So I had to revise TF grammar to handle these cases more
smoothly. I've also found that I've completely forgotten to consider
question formation with non-verbal sentences (e.g. "is that house
red?", "is she the woman from the village?") in TF grammar. So now
I've filled up the gap. Another large gap was in how idiomatic set
phrases would be used in complex constructions (e.g., "go to rest now,
for it is night" - "it is night" is a special set phrase in TF that
didn't quite fit into the "A because B" paradigm before). Another
thing I'm finding is that temporal phrases may need another revision.

So even though this exercise may be completely crazy (who in their
right mind would make a sentence each for every word in the
dictionary? [1]), it has helped me improve TF a lot. Something to
consider. :-)


[1] The answer, of course, being left-handed people. ;-) Specifically,
left-handed conlangers. :-P


T

--
Why can't you just be a nonconformist like everyone else? -- YHL

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