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Re: CHAT: Three questions from a lurker

From:Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>
Date:Saturday, November 7, 1998, 0:52
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? -- "It has occured to me more than once that holy boredom is good and sufficient reason for the invention of free will." - "Lord Leto II" (Dune Chronicles, by Frank Herbert) http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/X-Files/ ICQ #: 18656696 AOL screen-name: NikTailor