Re: How big

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Christopher B Wright [mailto:faceloran@JUNO.COM]
> Sent: Wednesday, 2002 May 29 15:00
> To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU
> Subject: [CONLANG] How big
> How big is too big to change? Sturnan has 1100 words (thank
> you, Aidan, because without you, it would be 150 words
> lighter) and perhaps five pages of grammar when I condense
> it. There are between twenty and thirty pages of text in
> Sturnan, much of it horribly outdated. (I've probably done
> forty pages, though not all survives.)
>
> The three questions, therefore, are:
> What is the ratio between size and morphability?
> How large were your languages when you instituted the last
> major change?
<lurk mode off>
        Strangely, I'm in the middle of a change of that type right
now.  The language has about 700+ words, and it seems like its
progressing slowly...of course, since what I'm doing is fixing the
broken phonology that I made when I didn't know what I was
doing, I'm probably instituting a greater number of changes than
you're planning on.  Unfortunately, now that I'm about a 3rd of the
way through it, I also realize I'm going to have to rework the
pronouns entirely so I'll be doing a few syntactical changes as well.
        I've been thinking while I'm doing this that I don't want to
have to do it again, unless it's in the interest of presenting sound
changes because the language has evolved.   I probably will
feel differently in a few months...after I'm finished.
        I imagine "how big is too big too change" is dependent
on just how much of a perfectionist you are, and how big of change
you're really making.  1100 seems like a lot to me right now, since
that would be about 400 words more than I'm doing now!
        A gut feeling is that 2,000 words is the real dividing line,
but since I've never been there, I don't know for sure. :)

<back to lurking>