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

Hello, guys. I had the same experience. Just logged in an hour ago, having left my
subscription alone for five days, my server hung up at 300 of 692 messages. I
knew I'd have to download them all from the beginning so I just moved the "Real
Conlang" Flap 4/03 into a new folder which I'm examining. Yeah, the instigator
seems to have gone undercover again...doesn't really seem to listen to us
(witness his appreciative responses to "what is a REAL conlang," what is a REAL
language for that matter--Dan Sulani's reasonable remarks, Dirk's comments; and
"not all of us, yours-truly included, have EVERYTHING about our languages up
and on-line in full description).

But what the Instigator is good for, besides getting us all riled up again, is a
re-examination of what it is we're doing. From that standpoint, Harold
Stoiber's "The Magic of Conlang" posting might not ever have been posted had it
not been for Nowicki. That was a gem! I'll respond to that in a minute. Go,
Harold, go.

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? :)

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."



  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: David J. Peterson 
  To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU 
  Sent: Wednesday, April 23, 2003 9:28 PM
  Subject: Real Conlangs Here, Made-to-Order!


 Wow. Don't check your e-mail for a day or two, and look what happens... Oh
well. I would read through every e-mail and have a bunch to add, I'm sure, but
it looks like aside from one little reply, the instigator has yet to resurface.
Not that I'm surprised...

 Also, one word on vocabulary. You can choose any number of words you want, and
the judgment of whether one can use it conversationally is totally dependent on
the words the correspondant uses. For example, I now have a random word
generator (thanks to Josh Brandt-Young, who is awesome! Also does historical
sound changes, and only for Mac OSX). I can generate, let's say, 10,000 words.
I can randomly assign those to verbal meanings. Then I can say that the suffix
/-ka/ makes any verb into a noun meaning "the doer of x". That's 20,000 words.
Then how about another suffix, /-ta/, which makes any verb into the patient of
a verb. That's 30,000 words. Why not a suffix meaning "like x noun", say,
/-me/? Now that's 50,000 words. Amazing! Just like magic, I have a "real"
conlang in like 20 minutes! If you're interested in languages like this,
Andrew, I can churn out a couple tonight, once I'm done with my roughdraft on
Beckett's Watt (which seems oddly appropriate)...

  -David 

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