Re: an accidental conlang

Gary wrote:

<<To avoid biasing the language toward any one
grammatical system the collaborators would have to
come from diverse liguistic backgrounds. Otherwise
the new language would end up being a relexification
of English, or whatever the majority language was
among the collaborators.>>

I haven't found this to be exactly true.   Rather, it's a
combination of: (a) The language that everyone shares;
(b) features from other languages people know; (c) features
of what people think a foreign language "is supposed to"
sound like; and (d) language-internal motivation.   The
language itself can motivate certain changes.   For example,
the first time I ran my pidginization experiment, I found that
everyone started putting their adjectives after the nouns.
I thought this might be because of Spanish or French, but no,
as it turned out, it was because of the phonology.   I worked it
so that all nouns ended in vowels and started with consonants,
and all adjectives began with vowels and ended in consonants.
A vowel-vowel sequence, then, was deemed easier to pronounce
than a consonant-consonant sequence.   You might be interested
in taking a look at the online write-up I did (or am still doing.   I
need to finish it) of the two pidginization experiments I ran at
Berkeley.   The url is:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/wasabi.html

And you might also be interested in the Babel Text that my class
did in Wasabi, which can be found at Langmaker.com at:

http://www.langmaker.com/db/bbl_wasabi.htm

In particular on my site, you might look at roman numeral IV at the
very bottom of the page, where I essentially suggest the same idea as
you did.   Though, if I may put my two cents in, 300 to 400 words is what
should be shot for.

-David
*******************************************************************
"sunly eleSkarez ygralleryf ydZZixelje je ox2mejze."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/

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