Re: Conlang book?

On Sat, 27 Jan 2001 MGreenlee@AOL.COM wrote:

(yes, I know I've left this far too long; I'm not too late, am I?)

> I've started compiling information for the book. It would be helpful if
> people could send information on their languages to me so I can incorporate
> it directly into the book instead of putting it together myself (it would
> also help to make errors less likely). The areas I need information on for
> each language are:
>
> 1. a general description of the language and background information
> 2. basic summary of the phonology
> 3. overview of the writing system
> 4. description of the morphology
> 5. description of the syntax
> 6. other grammatical information which does not fit into the other categories
> (e.g., proto-languages)
> 7. a sample of text in the language, with interlinearization
> 8. possibly a short lexicon
It's not that I don't want to do it - in fact I want to do it very
much - but would it be possible to see an example of what someone has
already done? I'm very bad at writing "basic summaries" and "short
overviews" from scratch, and I don't know what exactly should go into
a "description of the morphology".

Also, how long should a sample of text be, and how short is a short
lexicon? I have about 1800 different words, not counting obvious
compounds, and it's hard to choose a representative selection.

And how many words/pages do you expect the whole of it to be?

   Irina

--
           Varsinen an laynynay, saraz no arlet rastynay.
irina@valdyas.org (myself)     http://www.valdyas.org/irina/valdyas