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

From: David J. Peterson

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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...

[reply]

This is an adaptation of the "rope-a-dope" technique of Muhammad Ali, for
trollers...

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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)...

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[reply]

Polysynthetic languages like Inuktitut/Eskimo have large vocabularies
derived from a relatively low number of roots, from what I've read.