Re: A question and introduction

>Well, I created the conculture before I even had the thought of making a
>conlang for it :-)
>
>Perhaps one day I should sit down and write the external history of the
>conculture... it has rather interesting, divergent roots (which may
>explain some of its oddities :-P), pieced together from scraps and
>fragments of ideas I had from time to time. The physics part was conceived
>independently as a result of pondering over what-if's in physics and
>chemistry. Then, for a period of time, I had this tendency of borrowing
>ideas from this con-physics into various fictional stories I made up,
>often without much thought as to how it would fit. Eventually, I sketched
>a very long timeline covering several long eras, just to account for
>everything.
>
>The conlang, OTOH, was very meticulously planned to fit the conworld. The
>conworld by that time had developed quite a bit, and I wanted every little
>part of the conlang to integrate into it seamlessly. After I got started
>on the conlang, though, I found that it was helping me work out details in
>the conworld, and vice versa. So I guess you could say they are "evolving"
>together now.
>
I guess I kind of did the same thing, to a lesser extent.  I had an idea of
the culture and history before I began on the language.  I was really just
world building so that I could finally write down some story ideas I have.
It's sort of a dark future Earth (cyberpunkish, but somewhat dirtier and
more totalitarian than Gibson et al) that meets a society that arose after
the settlement of Mars.  The Martians are radically different than the
dominant global culture on Earth, so naturally lots of interesting conflict
can ensue.  When the idea began to take it's most recent form, I happened to
be studying Irish at school, and when I started needing words to describe
aspects of Martian culture I just used Irish or compounds made from Irish
root words.  Of course, it didn't make much sense that the great great
grandchildren Martian settlers would be speaking 20th century Irish (esp.
since the first truly Martian language would have been some kind of wacky
creole of a dozen or so Earth languages, even if Irish was one of them).
Thus, I needed a conlang.

Now I'm at a point where I can't / don't want to continue developing the
culture until I have some consistent vocabulary to work with.  For the most
part, however, the language (Komahren) will be fairly uninteresting by
conlang standards.  Originally it was going to be Irish type grammar with a
more Asian (most likely Chinese) syllable structure, but I've since started
adding some elements reminiscent of Altaic languages (at least in terms of
verbal inflections), and I've decided to use an absolutive / ergative case
structure, which will be marked by noun inflections and by the use of
articles which must agree with the case of the noun phrase (so there are
about eight articles).  I'll probably end up revising it all when I get some
vocabulary made.  The Komahren are a race of mystics, so I'll probably try
to make the language reflect their philosophy more explicitly when I have
something more to work with.

Andy






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