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?
Just as Tepa is clearly the product of a phonologist, my conlang Tokana is
clearly the product of a syntactician.  It has a sentence structure that only a
syntactician could love:  Intricate rules of word order, elaborate
morphological constraints, a bizarre (yet perfectly logical) case-marking
system, etc..  I seem to be constantly reshaping and streamlining it.

I like phonology too, but as my tastes run towards the minimalist, the Tokana
sound system is not especially complex or interesting.  Vocabulary creation I
generally find tedious, although from time to time I have creative spurts where
I just can't stop making up new words (or revising old ones).  I'm also not
terribly interested in historical change:  Tokana is an almost entirely
synchronic creation--a language without a past!

Matt.

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