Re: P.S.: Yivrindil

Responding to David Peterson.  This is the sort of critique we've had too
little of on the Conlang list lately, and I especially welcome the fact
that his comments are primarily negative ;-).

>     I looked at your webpage.  Very thorough.  One question comes to
> mind: Was it meant to be an auxlang?
Oh, god, by all means no.  Whatever gave you that idea?  It's a fictional
lang/artlang, spoken by the Yivríndi in the fictional world of Aratasa.

>  Aside from that, what I looked for
> and did not find (and this is probably the hardest thing to do online,
> considering webpage space, and all) is a list of words.
There isn't any list of words for the time being, and there won't be for
quite some time, probably.  The dictionary I use for myself would be
pretty opaque to most other people (I don't list compounds and
derivatives if their meanings are transparent to me), and it'll take
quite a bit of work to get it into a web-presentable format.  There are
about 600 roots in the total database with a total number of derivatives
estimated at 1,500.

>  The words I did see
> here and there seemed transparent glosses of English words.  This seems
to be
> a common theme in languages I've seen.  Every so often there will be a
word
> in a language here and there that will have been put together via some
> sort of metaphorical structure, but it, to, is oftentimes transparent.
This
> is the way my second-fourth or fifth languages were (in my first I
tried to
> do semantic isolation, so that every possible idea had its own
> individual root).  It wasn't until I started thinking about what should
have its own
> root and what shouldn't, and what words are commonly shared, which
aren't,
> and the idea of non-productive derivational morphology that I started
trying
> to create languages which had their own semantics.  To me, this is a
> good thing to shoot for.  Yivrindil, from what I've seen, didn't even
try.

This is mostly a problem with the lack of a word list.  Yivríndil has
plenty of words that aren't glossable by single English words, and the
semantics of compounds are not necessarily the same as would be intuitive
to an English speaker.  I deliberately avoided these in the grammar, so
that I could avoid complicating my examples with paraphrases and cultural
explanations.

You're absolutely right about the general principles, though--I haven't
been able to put as much thought into the semantics of Yivríndil as I
would like.  Most of the words that aren't simple English glosses are
cultural terms (e.g. _ild_ "a traditional Yivríndil dwelling," _ennura_
"Yivríndil family unit," etc.)  There are a handful of nonproductive
derivational processes and other compounds and whatnot, but the general
semantics are still too similar to English.  This and a lot of other
things are sort of relics of earlier, less linguistically sophisticated
versions of Yivríndil.  I've been working on this language since sixth
grade, and my early versions are nearly relexes.  The meta-history of
Yivríndil has generally to become less and less English-like (and less
Indo-European, as well), but of course this is still incomplete.

As for Kamakawi, I looked at the teach-yourself page you have up, and got
about halfway through lesson 4.  I'll post more detailed comments later,
but my initial impressions are:
  *  I adore the use of humour on your site.  It contrasts well with my
site (and most other conlang sites), which are pretty dry.  The purposes
are different--yours is an informal learner's grammar, while mine is a
reference grammar--but it's still something to admire.
  *  The four-way number distinction is interesting.  Does it apply
outside of pronouns?  The extremely regular formation of these is suspect
to me.  There are natlang precedents, but the general patterns is for
pronouns to be highly irregular (and highly conservative), to the point
where I say that if you're going to have a regular system of pronouns,
you'd better have a damn good reason.  So what are the con-historical
reasons for this regularity?
  *  I'm disappointed that the number distinctions are dying out.
However, this does show sociolinguistic awareness, something which is
entirely lacking in most conlangs (including my own.)
  *  The change of _i ei_ to _i'i_ is explained in the grammar as if it
were a case alternation.  However, given the lack of cases in the rest of
the language, it looks to me a lot more like a phonological shortening.
Why do you analyze it as case?  Or was that just a device to help the
learner?  And if so, why do you think the learner is helped by obscuring
the real nature of the alternation?

More to come.


Jesse S. Bangs     Pelíran
jaspax@ juno.com
"Skin and tragedy always attract a crowd."
    --Pedro the Lion