Re: Declension Help

Adam wrote:
<<
I need help with creating a declension (system?). I think I'm quite
bad at
it. I've looked at various languages and the patterns they seem to use.
Which gives me ideas, but I don't want to rip mine right from an
existing
language. I was wondering if anyone had any advice that might make it
a bit
easier?
 >>

Creating a declension system is, for me, quite possibly the most
interesting part of creating a language.  If you're happy with the
forms (suffixes or prefixes, or whatever), and it comes to naming
cases, and how they're used, what you should do is go to your
verbs.  What kinds of verbs do you have, and what do they need?
What kind of information needs to be encoded, and where do
you want to put it?  Part of what your case system can do for you
is it can help to make the verbal system more precise--especially
if you don't have a lot of verbal morphology.

If you're stuck on how to go about it, I'd strongly recommend
taking a look at Matt Pearson's talk at the LCC, which you can
view at Google video by following the link below:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?
docid=-7308759491555175687&q=language+creation+conference

You can download his handout from my site here:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/misc/pearson-handout.pdf

I think Matt's title is rather relevant here: "Case, Aspect, and
Argument Structure: One Conlanger's Investigations".  Creating
a system is something that's individual for each conlanger and
each conlang.  Even if you try to borrow a system (which I've
tried to do in the past), it invariably ends up becoming individual,
anyway, either because the details get left out in the transfer (or
rearranged), or the conlang itself demands that the system be
altered in some way that only makes sense because of how the
language you've got works.  Matt's talk is great because it not
only gives you some background on case and aspect, but it
shows you how he went from the beginning to the finished
product with Tokana.  His description of that process might be
useful to you.  What he did was he decided to rethink his case
system by starting over and reimagining how it all might
work, giving each case a basic meaning, and seeing how that
would work with the rest of the language.  The way he defined
it gave the whole system a certain feel that's left its footprints
all over the language.

As you start to develop stuff, you should post on conlang to
get some feedback; see how it all shapes up, and how you like
it.  I dig case.  I'd be interested to see how your system develops.  :)

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

Reply