Re: Some conlang questions

> From: "A. Ingram" <red_grass23@...>
> Sent: Friday, December 27, 2002 11:57 PM
> > how would one go about making up dialects?  i know that dialects
> > are
> > phonetic variations (?). Would one just modify the sounds a little
> > bit, or is there more to a dialect than that?
-

Well, it depends what kind of dialects you're looking for... they may
just have differences in sound, or differences in grammar, or a mixture
of them.  For instance, the different dialects of my conlang Gabwe only
differ in phonology;  the grammar is the same.  However, some of them are
so different in sound from one another that it'd probably take a lot of
time for a speaker of one to train themself to understand a different
dialect - for instance, a monodialectal speaker of Standared Tierean
Gabwe would have a very hard time understanding a speaker of the unnamed
dialect under the word "unnamed" in the chart at:
http://bingweb.binghamton.edu/~bh11744/gabwe/Tiereans.jpg
Or you could have predominantly grammatical differences.  For instance,
to cite a natlang, although there are phonological differences between
'Standard' Media American English and African-American Vernacular English
("Ebonics"), they also have some important grammatical differences.  If i
remember correctly AAVE distinguishes simple |you standin| (='you are
standing') from habitual |you be standin|, a construction that doesn't
exist in many other dialects of English, including the 'standard'.


-Stephen (Steg)
 "Beornings talk with a Lithuanian accent?!"

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