Re: Whatever happened to Aelya?

--- In conlang@y..., Aidan Grey <grey@F...> wrote:

>     Aelya was laid to rest because it was a daughterlang of Quenya, and
> infighting and dearth of vocab there frustrated me to the point of
> linguacide.
> It's now been replaced by Taalennin, which is unrelated (though
> still shows some Quenya and Sindarin influence).
Does Taalennin have a similar typographical appearance as Aelya?


>    - basic concepts shouls have shorter words, in general, and moe complex
> ones sholdbe longer. Eyes, for example, are pretty dang basic, so the word
> for eye should be pretty short. Chariots, on the other hand, could be a lot
> longer.
Good point.  I was going for succinctness in Obrenje and, judging in
retrospect, made too many words too short, thereby depriving the lang
of many well-sounding longer words while stuffing meaning into some
rather ugly but phonologically compliant words.  =P

Things like this are what drive me to start a new language, and do
everything right this time.  ;-)


>    - devise a realistic orthography. using ascii only to represent a lang
> has been done (especially among nonliterate cultures), but it lacks
> aesthetic beauty to me. If you can't reconcile the need for othography, a
> handy excuse is that the first linguist, working in the 1700's or whenever,
> used this system to represent sounds, and it stuck, with some modification.
> Without a nice orthography, it looks like a scrabble board vomited. IMHO,
> of course!
Sounds familiar.  Obrenje has a transliteration scheme that uses only
standard Latin characters.  Its one-on-one correspondence to native
script characters (Cirnaja) is useful, but produces atrocities like
|nokkce| "it goes" or |kwaq| "duck", although they don't sound as
vile as they look (/"nOk.ks=/, /kwaN/).

For my new lang, I've vowed to use more digraphs and especially
diphthongs.  For example, I'm going to represent the phonemes
/e: E: o: aI oI y: oU aU u@ i@ e@/ by
|ei ea oa ae oe ue ou ao uo ia eo|.  I like those visual images.  =)


>    - It really helps to have a model for syntax and grammar. Something to
> sort of follow, because otherwise the lang becomes cluttered with all kinds
> of cool and interesting, but stylistically opposing, features. Having a
> model, or a natlang origin, helps prevent a common Conlanger tendency to
> put in everything.
Hmmm... I was going to use an unconventional grammar using "vectors"
(inflecting auxiliary verbs) before each (uninflected) full verb.
That might cause some problems.  Unfortunately, I only know languages
of the central European region well, which limits my resources for
that kind of plagia... err... inspiration.  =P


>    Let me know if there's anything else you want to know about Aelya, and
> I'll see if I can find or remember what it did... Searching the archives
> for Daniel Andreasson's Cein will prove fruitful too.
OK, I'll have a look.  Has there never been an online sketch of Aelya
grammar and phonology?

Thanx for the feedback,


-- Christian Thalmann

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