Re: conlang survey part 2

On Thu, 28 Nov 2002 16:23:50 -0800, Padraic Brown <elemtilas@...>
wrote:

>There's also the matter of the fluidity of most
>of our conlangs: what you read in a text today
>may change radically tomorrow or next year. It's
>a bloody pain to have to change everything to
>reflect new realities - especially when we'd
>probably have to do it three or four times in the
>life of an average conlang. The more texts we
>write, the more we'd have to change.
That's a big part of the problem with Tirelat. The language never really
reached a stable state. Now that it's starting to settle down, I've already
started on Lindiga and a handful of new Zireen languages, so I haven't had
much time to do anything with Tirelat. But Tirelat changed so frequently
that my web pages were always out of date, and I had to re-translate
everything whenever I wanted to bring them up to date.

Another reason why not much was ever written in Tirelat -- nothing original
longer than a few sentences to illustrate some point of grammar or
vocabulary -- is that I haven't been doing much conculture stuff lately.
Most of my older langs were developed in conjunction with at least a
minimal sort of conculture, with a general idea of where the speakers
lived, rudimentary facts about their species, and maybe even a bit of
history -- nothing very elaborate, but it gave me something to write about.
By the time I started getting more elaborate with my languages, ending up
with Jarrda and Tirelat, I'd stopped doing anything with concultures.

Playing around with languages is fun for its own sake, but I think it's
more interesting if there's a conculture to go with it, especially if the
speakers aren't quite human. So I've been thinking a lot about the Zireen
lately, and I'm trying to get a better sense of what their world is like
before I start developing their languages. Then I'll have something
original to write about again. If I only had the time....

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