Re: Real Conlangs Here, Made-to-Order!

On Sat, 26 Apr 2003 14:01:24 -0400, Sally Caves <scaves@...>
wrote:

>I feel compelled to add, though, that my method of handplacing every single
>newly minted word will beat your word generator hands down and all hollow for
>any truly creative effort at inventing language. <--joke> But God, is it
>slow. I'd like one of those. But what would Tolkien have thought of a
>word-generator? You've got the conlang, 30,000 words in two minutes. Now you
>have to learn it, like any natural language. Sort of defeats the purpose,
>doesn't it? :)
Not only that, you've just got the forms of the words, not their meanings.
You can take someone else's set of definitions to start out with, but
that's one of those short cuts that makes long delays that Gandalf warned
about. Other languages' definitions just don't fit, much of the time.

I agree, there's no substitute for hand-designed vocabulary. One of the
reasons I was never really satisfied with Jarda or Tirelat is that after a
while I got impatient and used random numbers to assign meanings to words.
That's something I've resolved not to do with Lindiga or the new, as yet
unnamed Zireen languages. I'm going back to the old way of defining words
by hand, one at a time .... and now that my standards of what I consider
"adequate" definitions have gone up from long exposure to the Conlang list,
it's taking a lot longer than it ever did! But I'm confident the results
will be worth the effort.