Re: Conlanging skills? (was Re: Myers-Briggs Types and stuff.)

On Tue, 29 Sep 1998, Tim Smith wrote in response to Laurie:

> At 10:59 AM 9/27/98 -0500, Laurie Gerholz wrote:
> >For the rest of you, which parts of conlanging are easy and which are
> >difficult? How does that influence the conlangs you create, or how you
> >document them?
>
> For me, thinking up interesting grammars is easy -- too easy, in a way,
> because I think up so many of them that I find it hard to concentrate on any
> one of them for long enough to flesh it out into a real conlang.  (By
> "grammar" I mean the syntax and what I think of as the "abstract morphology"
> -- the set of inflectional morphemes that are needed and the rules for how
> they fit together, NOT the actual surface-level morphemes.)
Well, and this is Sally logged on here; I just posted a long note about
how the vocabulary was the main thing in inventing Teonaht, but to be
honest about it, I got the bulk of the grammar up in paper form in just
a few months this year.  Of course it will need endless revising, but the
hard and the tedious part is cataloguing the grammar, as Tim says here.
Now this I have, in a precious old beat-up notebook that goes back to, oh,
1970?  with some real inroads made to it in 1979?  But how do I transfer
that mess to the computer?  I've got about a fourth of it inputted.  But
I can't seem to go about it methodically.  I've deliberately started
inputting all the newest words, the one's I'd committed to the grammar
first, roughly by alphabet: first in the Teonaht-English section and more
slowly in the English-Teonaht section.  But then it got into a huge snarl:
I tried to proceed methodically from the old notebook and found I had
contradictions, or found that I'd covered that section already, yadda
yadda yadda... an unbelievable mess, and migrainous as well.  So how to
finish it?  The stuff I have on the webpage... that's just a flyspeck.
The enormous bulk of the lexicon is still in pencil.

But what this also says is that I like making up the words; it's the
tedium of writing it down in the computer that has me all up in knots...
whereas recording the grammar is something I find easier to do.  Verbs
will be going up next.

Sally


 >
> The hard part is generating the lexicon (both lexical roots and grammatical
> and derivational morphemes).  I keep thinking that I'll write a computer
> program to do this for me, something that I can feed a set of phonemes and
> phonotactic rules to and have it crank out random words.  But so far I
> haven't gotten around to it.
>
I wouldn't even know how to START something so technically sophisticated,
although I've queried the list... and gotten answers that are way over my
head.

> Developing a phonology is in between, harder than the grammar but easier
> than the lexicon.  (Actually, what's really hard about the phonology is
> coming up with something that can be represented with an orthography that
> uses only ASCII characters and isn't hopelessly counterintuitive.)
>
I don't mind counterintuitive.  The phonology part is nihil for me; I made
that up years ago, and have just stuck with it.  "U" is /j/ and that's
just all there is to it!

> Basically, it's the grammar of a conlang that really excites me.  The
> phonology and lexicon are secondary; I just need them to be the physical
> manifestation of the grammar.  I suspect that I'm not typical of conlangers
> in this.
No, the more I listen on this list, the more actually typical this sounds.
I've heard quite a number MEN (not surprising) tell me just this: that
making up grammars is what excites them.  Do you mind if I use this for
the survey?  I'd like to hear from Laurie on this one.  And some of the
other women.  But I imagine it's like fixing up old houses: some men, and
some women, love the recreation of a building, and they go from house to
house to house fixing it up and refurbishing it, and then losing interest
in it when it's too familiar.  Time to sell and get a new project!  Other
men, and other women, like to work endlessly on the same house.  That's
me.  About my house, and about my conlang.

Okay, now wait a minute!!!  Hee hee... this is Tim, isn't it?  I'm getting
down to his signature... It was actually Tim himself who told me this
about his predilection for new grammars.  HAR... so my sense that I'm
hearing this twice or thrice is probably an illusion...  hi Tim... see you
at Albacon...  Sally

 I know that many of you feel that the words themselves, what the
> language actually sounds like and/or how the semantic space is mapped, are
> the most important thing.  (Not that I don't find these interesting, too;
> they just aren't as important to me as the more abstract, underlying structure.)
> -------------------------------------------------
> Tim Smith
> timsmith@global2000.net
>
> "Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain."
> -- The Wizard of Oz (MGM, 1939)
>
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Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
http://www.frontiernet.net/~scaves/teonaht.html

                        Mr. Book: "Shut it down!"
                        _Dark City_

                         Christof: "Cue the sun!"
                        _The Truman Show_

I need a generalization about autumn to make in T.
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