>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/
>=========================================================================