Re: Workin' on some stuff.

On Wed, Aug 23, 2000 at 06:27:38PM -0400, Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
[snip]
> The culture came first, and is motivating the conlang.  :-)  They're
> non-Earth, but on an Earthlike world with "real" though limited magic.
> Actually, having culture first is making all sorts of design decisions
> easier.
Very true. My current conlang is based on a conculture/con-universe I've
been constructing (imagining/dreaming about?) for a long time now, and
I've set down quite a few "philosophical principles", as I call them, in
the culture. This makes it very easy to decide on language issues, 'cos
I'd simply pick the one that matches the philosophy of the culture.

> OTOH I want to someday build a conlang called "meep" based on my habit of
> meeping at people (literally).  Yes, I'm weird, but a little humor puts
> (some) people at ease...and why not?  So far I've gotten 16 people to
> meep back.  I think it'll be tonal, when I get around to it, and entirely
> based on whimsy.
Talking about whimsy... you should definitely check out DiLingo:
        http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/DiLingo
I don't know about you, but this one sent me laughing my head off with
sentences that sound like cowbells... Some examples:
        "Pay!"                  Cha-ching!
        "I am not doing"        ing ing inct dingding
        "It is speakable"       Ring ing lingabing
        ...

[snip]
> Conlanging also motivates culture building...it's a wonderful process
> both ways.
[snip]

Very true... I found that now that I'm working on actually working out the
details of my conlang, I see the need to have descendent languages and
dialects just so I can explore alternative linguistic decisions. And this
causes me to flesh out the history of my conculture even more, to
accomodate for all these lingos.


T