Re: Easy-Bake 2-step holiday conlang recipe

On Wed, 29 Dec 2004 18:35:28 -0800, Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> wrote:

>Step 1. Uncork the bottle of disinflectant and
>dis-inflect English completely, garnishing with
>particles as needed.  You might also dream up a few
>new verbs to ease the load on some of the overworked
>verbs like "to be".
>
>Step 2. Now that the grammar is completely different
>from English, simply fold and stir the word order and
>relexify to taste. Then serve piping hot.
>
>For the complete recipe and all the details of
>applying the two steps to the first 30 or so sentences
>of the McGuffey corpus, see
>http://fiziwig.com/twostep.txt
Sounds nice, but there's still a good bit of superfluent stuff that doesn't
need to be in there :) So here are the advanced instructions:

>Step 1. Uncork the bottle of disinflectant and
>dis-inflect English completely, garnishing with
>particles as needed.
For a quick preparation, you can borrow particles from languages that use
some, like Japanese.
Now call in Pest Control to take care of all unwanted house guest like
articles and such. To add a more exotic flair, you might also pour in a
healthy dose of Verbs-B-Gone and throw in more particles instead.

>Step 2. Now that the grammar is completely different
>from English, simply fold and stir the word order and
>relexify to taste. Then serve piping hot.
You can even come up with a completely free word order if you use particles
to indicate actor/target/action.

Let's see what this basic recipe gets us:

>25. Ned is on the box.
>26. He has a pen in his hand.
>27. A big rat is in the box.
>28. Can the dog catch the rat?
25. Ned pres on-box pla.
(pres=indicating present, pla=indicating place)
26. He pres pen hand of he pla poss.
(poss=indicating possession)
27. Rat much size pres in-box pla.
28. Dog pres rat abil to catch ka?
(abil=indicating ability, ka=indicating question)

That's already not bad so far. Now we can do something to refine this. For a
quick-and-dirty preparation, simply apply some sound changes to closeby
sounds, e.g. d->t, n->m, e->i etc. (see Cxs table)
Don't change every letter to the same sound.

25. Nat prish am-wox bra.
26. Chi prish pem chant ob chi bra fos. (ch=/x/)
27. Lat nush sis prish en-wox bra.
28. Tok prish Lat avir ta gats ka?

Now this very nice already and not remotely close to English anymore.
You can reach an even more alien language if you spend more time and
translate the English words into something exotic like Proto-German or
Sanskrit before applying sound changes.

--
Pascal A. Kramm, author of:
Chatiga: http://www.choton.org/chatiga/
Choton: http://www.choton.org
Ichwara Prana: http://www.choton.org/ichwara/
Skälansk: http://www.choton.org/sk/
Advanced English: http://www.choton.org/ae/