Re: Karnnugaan isn't working

In the last episode, (On Wednesday 11 July 2007 04:51:10), Geoff Horswood
wrote:
> It started out as such a great evil conlang idea, but
> it's so difficut to write anything in Karnuugaan that
> I'm really tempted to give up.
>
> The phonotactics are easy enough.  A root may not end
> with a stop (except for the glottal stop) and it may
> not begin with a glottal stop.
>
> It's the grammar that makes it so tough to make
> headway with.
>
> I'm trying to do away with regular semantic classes.
> Karnuugaan doesn't have nouns, verbs, adjectives etc.
> It has Roots and Modifiers.
>
> Roots are the semantic equivalent of the root
> components of Chinese ideographs, and have meanings
> centred in a concept.  Eg there is a root "kar" which
> has the literal meaning "blood", the metaphorical
> meaning "life", and also means "living", "alive", "to
> live", "to bleed" and a number of other things,
> depending on what other roots it is combined with.
> Roots combine in strings, and then have various
> Modifiers attached to front (a few Modifiers like the
> ones denoting proper names, numbers and suchlike) or
> the back (everything else).  And you can have big
> strings of modifiers, too.
> There are several dedicated Modifiers, for example the
> ones carrying the meanings of "now",
> "wholeness/completeness", "ancient" and "time".
> However, many Modifiers are Roots pressed into service
> to further clarify the meaning of the root string.
>
> The problem is this:
>
> Technically, you should be able to say anything with
> this.  But I'm having real problems distinguishing
> fine nuances of meaning.
>
> It's a great idea, but the grammar is such a
> linguistic fever-dream that I can't work it.
>
> I may have to shelve the project, but I have some
> other ideas I'm working on...
>
> Geoff
>
I encourage you to keep up. Rather than trying to come up with umpteen
different nuances at once, why not concentrate on a few basic ones for
starters? For example, you could start by being able to write sentences that
incorporate the idea of "now the big x runs speedily towards the..." and
continue on to "now the small x runs slowly..." later.

Secondly, remember there's nothing wrong with ambiguity, and ambiguity in
different places in English can actually make your language a more worthwhile
conlang. A monolingual Inuk ("Eskimo") learning English, for example, would
constantly be looking for a word in English that means "that one specifically
up there", whilst a monolingual Quechua speaker would be flummoxed by the
fact that you can't encode the reliability of your information in an English
sentence without using circumlocutions like "I believe that,"  "I have been
told that..". And that's without going into levels of politeness like most
European languages do.

The short way of saying this is that just because it looks ambiguous to you,
don't assume that (a) it's ambiguous to your conculture; (b) things which to
you are not ambiguous are not to your conculture.

HTH

Jeff
--
"Please understand that there are small
European principalities devoted to debating
Tcl vs. Perl as a tourist attraction."

                            -- Cameron Laird

Replies