Re: favorite aspects of conlanging

Tom Tadfor Little wrote:
 > But this got me to wondering--do the rest of you
 > have "favorite" aspects of
 > language design, areas where you seem to get all
 > sorts of ideas without
 > even trying, and "drudgery" aspects--things that
 > you do to make the
 > language presentable, but that you don't actually
 > derive much pleasure
 > from? And for those of you who've been at this for
 > years--do those category
 > boundaries shift with time?

  For me, it's the historical aspect. I started my
linguistic studies with Raimo Anttila's Historical
Linguistics, and with Tolkien's languages thrown in
too, well, I love being able to derive. My biggest
problem is that I sometimes don't like the resulting
words, (aesthetic is way important to me too), so I
have to revise the history.

  Morphology I love, but again have lots of problems,
because how any given morpheme sounds in isolation or
with one word doesn't always sound great on others, or
repeated a bunch of times in a sentence or phrase. I
have this aversion to repetitive sounds (lots of
dissimilation!). Aelya for "I vowed" is 'vannanen' -
too many n's! So that's going to change too...

 Syntax and grammar are the hardest parts for me - I
spend so much time fine tuning the morphology,
phonology, and historical derivations that I never get
around to the syntax or grammar.

  This is part of why I started a new lang a while ago
(Tatra) so that I can actually get to the grammar
while I continually fine tune Aelya.

  Aidan

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