Re: Lexicons and Langauge Borrowing

Michael Mouatt <arcangel@...> wrote:
>
> I would like to form geopolitical, cultural, and religious labels from a
> lexicon by using etymology; ie. followers of, village of, etc. Do I
> require grammar structures for this purpose?
The structures you need may or may not be grammatical. You could
certainly have a set of grammatical inflections for nouns that
transform them into the things you mentioned. But these need not
be included in the standard grammar of the language. You can create
a set of affixes to attach them to words. These affixes might be
very productive (like English -er, -or for agents, -ian, -ese for
nationalities).

I recommend affixes (or other devices) to modify words. You can
have several affixes for a single function like this, and you can
also produce irregularities as your language changes, thus obscuring
the primitive derivation, and avoiding sets of words that look very
much alike.

>
> Also, is it considered bad form to borrow too much from real languages?
Bad according to who? There are no dogmas here :-)

> I'm creating some conlangs based on the Scandanavian and Germanic
> branches. So far I've borrowed heavily from Icelandic phonology.
>
Borrowing phonology can't be bad -- Tolkien did this all the time.
Sindarin is ostensibly modelled after Welsh, and Quenya has a strong
influence from Finnish. In a way, almost all conlangs borrow phonology
from natlangs. No one has created a language with sounds that aren't
present in some natlang, unless it's intended for aliens. Borrowing a
lot of phonemes from one natlang only makes it look similar to it at
first sight, and often more realistic.

Borrowing words (lexicon) from natlangs is another thing. I wouldn't
judge anybody who does that (anybody in the list?). You might borrow
words if you are deriving a futuristic language based on an actual
language. I don't do that, and don't borrow words from any natlang,
at least at a conscious level. But I don't see that could be bad
from any point of view (unless you really borrow *a lot*). If you're
deriving a new language that could have evolved from Germanic or
Scandinavian, then you sure have to take those as a base for lexicon.


--Pablo Flores

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