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

From:Tim Smith <timsmith@...>
Date:Wednesday, September 30, 1998, 2:01
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.) 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. 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.) 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. 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)