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

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)