Re: Verb order in Montreiano

On Mon, 2 Apr 2001, jesse stephen bangs wrote:

> Yoon Ha Lee sikayal:
>
> > But seeing this made me want to ask: In what order do people like to
> > settle on grammatical features (whether or not said features are later
> > revised)?  I confess I've gone roughly from _Describing Morphosyntax_ and
>
> The very first germs of a language are almost always a vague idea for me:
> "I'd like to make an active lang," or "How about something with
> German-like vowel ablaut?"  But once I actually make the language, I
Huh.  :-p  I start culture-first and language-second, which may or may
not be bass-ackwards.

> always start with phonology, then do inflectional morphology.  The
> morphology obviously depends a little bit on the syntax (is this nom/acc
> or erg/abs or agt/pat?), but I start out with very little syntax.  I
> usually do verbs first, but that varies.  Once I have the morphology I
> work on nailing down the syntax, and then vocabulary comes last.  But once
> I get really involved w/ the vocabulary, etc, any of the previous things
> can change if I feel like I need it; Praçí in particular has changed cases
> and word orders and syntax many times.
Interesting.  Do you give yourself a few "sample words" to start with
(before doing core vocab) to work with morphology?  I find it easier to
"see" what's going on with even morphology *I've* invented when it's
applied to an actual word, but that may be a peculiarity of my brain.  :-)

Vocab is probably my favourite part of conlanging.  <embarrassed look>

YHL

Replies