Re: updates from me and a question or 2

----- Original Message -----
From: "A. Ingram" <red_grass23@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, December 28, 2002 12:33 AM
Subject: updates from me and a question or 2


> Ok, so i've re-uploaded my conlang info to the files section of the yahoo
> groups conlang site.  I had no problem viewing it with adobe acrobat 5.1
on
> either of my computers, so try to use the latest version of adobe acrobat.
> i wrote the file to be compatible with versions 4 and up.  Any comments
> would be appreciated.  I expect the real fun in discussion of my conlang
> will come when I've got a bit of the grammar formed.  I'm kicking a lot of
> things about in my head, but right now i'm just taking in new knowledge; i
> haven't written any grammar things down.  i do know that there probably
> won't be gender distinctions in nouns, though they may fall into only a
few
> categories of forms.  i would also like the words to form the plurals with
> vowel and/or non-final consonant changes (where applicable).
>
> How many words do you all think I should have before I start to write
> grammar, or should it matter at all?
Sometimes the grammatical structure of the language dictates much of the
form of the words.  And many times I've made them both in tandem so that
they have a nice feel overall.  But you could do this in any order.

For example, let's make up a new language.  We'll call it NL.  Now, I've got
an idea for a neat word: torbel.  I'm imagining that it would be pronounced
/to4bEl/, so we've got a start.  From here it would probably be worthwhile
to make up phonological rules that allow this.  Consider:

V, VC, CV, CVC as all the possible syllables
p, t, k, b, d, g as the stops
f, s as the fricatives
r, l as the approximants
m, n, ng as the nasals
a, e, i, o, u as the vowels

Then let's make up a few more words.

bergon
fasul
lumkurnan
esud
farion

Assigning some meanings to these, we get:

bergon - house
fasul - tree
lumkurnan - child
esud - ocean
farion - rock

Now, I feel like saying that this language has a different form of the word
"bergon" for meaning "houses".  Perhaps "berguor".  That sounds good.  So
now I have to decide what the rule is.

Maybe to make something plural you drop the final consonant (if it has one)
and add u before the final vowel, then r at the end.  Let's try that.  (I'll
use an acute accent to indicate a long vowel.)

bergon - berguor
fasul - fasúr
lumkurnan - lumkurnuar
esud - esúr
farion - fariuor

But I'm not happy with the sound of "fariuor".  I think the plural of
"farion" ought to be "felion".  What's happening here?  Perhaps the rule is
to change the second to last consonant into l and raise the first vowel one
notch, considering a as a front vowel.  Applying this to all the words we
get:

bergon - birlon
fasul - felul
lumkurnan - lulkurnan
esud - ilud
farion - felion

Now, I happen to like the sounds of "ilud" and "felion" better than "esúr"
and "fariuor".  So let's say they're a different class of nouns.  Looking at
the meanings we find:

Class 1: house, tree, child
Class 2: ocean, rock

So maybe there's one class for living things (and things made by living
things) and another for non-living things.  Sometimes this is called
animate/inanimate.  Let's call it that here.

Now we've got some grammar down.  Nouns are divided into two classes that
each form their plurals in different ways.  But now I've got another idea.
Wouldn't it be interesting to have a grammatical way of indicating that one
thing is inside another?  Let's say that adding "-in" to the end of a word
means that thing is in the following thing.  What would that give us?

farionin bergon  "the rock is in the house"
fasulin esud  "the tree is in the ocean"

Anyway, it could go something like that.

The point of this exercise (other than for me to amuse myself by rambling
anet) is to show how one could (and how I often do) make up grammar from
either the sound of the language or from grammatical sorts of ideas.  As you
can see here, both usually play a part.  Hopefully this makes some sense.

On another note, I'm curious what people would think of the sound-values of
the example words versus their meanings.  Leaving aside the blatant use of
"-in" to mean, well, "in", I intentionally picked meanings for the examples
that were quite distant from what seemed right to me.

Every now and then this phenomenon has come home, as I find some old
language project from years and years ago, only to find that one word is the
same in a completely unrelated (and often, very different) language that I'm
working on now.  It could be unconcious memory, but it could also be that
some things just have a sound that goes naturally with them in my mind.  If
only we all heard the same sounds... or maybe I'm just hearing things.

Your* thoughts?

Joe Fatula

---
* That being the plural you.  And the plural thoughts, come to think of it.

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