Re: Report on Albacon

Sally Caves wrote:
>>  I even thought of two new questions along the lines of
>>power and control... such as what percentage of us on Conlang prefer to
>>invent rather than learn a conlang.
Me, for sure. I'm terrible at the memorization of vocabulary, probably
because I have never found the right way to learn it, or perhaps because
the only way to learn it is that way that I've tried, which always bores me
into doing something else...

But I love to read grammars, and make them up... And I love the interplay
of sounds and rules, especially regular rules that make irregular appearing
results.

>>The second question that was an obvious one to
>>ask and I didn't was:  how many of you invented scripts to go with your
>>conlang?
I always do, in fact, I usually have many more scripts of one sort or
another floating around than I do languages. My Dapnant project is up to 3,
but i think I may steal one of them for a new langauge (as yet untitled)
that I'm liking much better on it's own merits.

Since I've always wanted to create beautiful nooks in imaginary languages,
I always want to make a writin system. That's a project that always gets
barely started, because I keep finding a new lanuage or script before I get
fully
underway.

I keep meaning to scan in a bunch of scripts for the website, but I keep
putting it off.. On the other hand, I'm putting it off to write my thesis,
so that's all to the good.

I donotice that scripts are the only thing that I develop in the way that
many people have described for conlangin. That is create first, then
organize the partial results. I just kind of explore strokes and
combinations in a kind of "structured doodle" until I have the germs of a
system. Then, careful graphical exploration can perfect the functional
organization and look of the final result.

I usually do indic-style systematic syllabaries, always finding it a bit
exotic when I do the occasional pure alphabetic system.

I'm mostly conlanging on plane trips right now, as that doesn't make me too
guilty.

  -- David

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David Durand              dgd@cs.bu.edu  \  david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Boston University Computer Science        \  Sr. Analyst
http://www.cs.bu.edu/students/grads/dgd/   \  Dynamic Diagrams
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