Re: CHAT: Three questions from a lurker

Keenan wrote:
> I have learned on this list that my encodings are pretty much English.
> In fact there are only about five encodings in Ok that aren't taken
> straight from English. I think this is a symptom of Ok's lack of a
> conculture.(Any comments on that idea people? [Pssst... There are plans
> to fix this])
I think that that's pretty common with novice conlangers.  My first
conlang's vocab was pretty much English, with a little influence from
Spanish, which I was learning at the time (for instance, I thought that
the Spanish _me gusta_ was "cool", so I copied that).  It really helps
to know another language, or at least read about lots of different
languages.  You don't really need a detailed conculture (altho I think
that that's half the fun), but it helps to have a skeleton of it.  For
instance, does your culture share our Western mechanistic viewpoint, or
are they more spiritual.  If your language has some sort of gender
system, an idea of what your culture believes may be quite useful.  For
instance, if it's an animate/inanimate distinction, perhaps trees could
be inanimate ("animate" in most languages usually refers to living
things that can move - i.e., plants are usually classed as inanimate).
Maybe your culture believes that fire is alive, thus it might go in
animate.  Or, if you have a human gender, perhaps birds could be human,
because they're believed to be the souls of dead humans.  Also, your
vocabulary encodes the beliefs and customs.  A culture with greater
emphasis on sharing and doing things as a group, your words might
distinguish between doing things by oneself (e.g., eating to stay
alive), and doing things in a group (e.g., eating as part of a comunal
meal).  Also, distinctions English thinks is important might not be
important to your people.  Perhaps the distinctions we make between
lakes and oceans might not be important, after all, that's only a
difference in size, yes?

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