Re: Survey (a new one!)

At 09:19 PM 9/30/98 -0700, Matt Pearson wrote:
>Actually, this is just an extreme case of a more
>general habit I have of carrying over vocabulary
>from one conlang project to the next - whether it's
>recycling actual words, or doing different variations
>on a particular sound-meaning correspondence.
>
....[snip]....
>Do other people find the same sort of thing happening
>in their conlangs?
I do have a tendency to recycle both lexical and grammatical morphemes, but
I think that in my case it's basically caused by laziness.  As I've said
before, inventing a lexicon is the hardest part of conlanging for me.  In
two of my conlangs, Meitzanathein and Naya Vandi, I tried to justify this by
saying that they were related.  But that turned out to be perhaps a solution
worse than the problem, because it meant that, to be really plausible, I had
to come up with a protolanguage and with reasonable ways for each of them to
evolve from it (both sound changes and grammatical changes), a much harder
task than just developing two entirely separate lexicons!  (In fact, I've
never gotten very far with this task.)
-------------------------------------------------
Tim Smith
timsmith@global2000.net

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
-- The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939)