Re: How big

On Wed, May 29, 2002 at 04:00:12PM -0400, Christopher B Wright wrote:
[snip]
> 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 pages of text in Sturnan, much of it horribly outdated.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.)
Hmm. My conlang's a bit strange in this respect. I have, currently, 43
pages of grammar (typeset by LaTeX) with several more sections to go in.
But the number of lexicon entries does not exceed 150 words! In other
words, I have a lot of grammatical underfittings but not much "meat" to
put on it. :-P

(Of course, I've also had this feeling for a long time that an *extremely*
massive change should be under way sometime in the near future. Mostly to
straighten out the currently b0rked system of inflection and verb
conjugations. ...)

> The three questions, therefore, are:
> What is the ratio between size and morphability?
Hard for me to say.

> How large were your languages when you instituted the last major change?
Not sure. The last one I remember was way back when it was only a few
weeks old. There has been a recent change in inflectional rules, though
(mainly to smooth out sound changes). This is actually still in progress.

> and What word(s) should I deform / combine to make the word "simple"?
[snip]

*Shrug* My conlang's native speakers would derive something from words
that mean "to flow" (the idea being that when something is simple you can
do it in a smooth, spontaneous way, just like the spontaneous flowing of
a liquid).


T

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