Re: Conlanging with constraints

2008/2/16 Sai Emrys <sai@...>:

> How have you experienced your conlanging as being influenced (for
> better or for worse) by constraints imposed upon it, of whatever
> source? What constraints do you have, and whence derived? Why have you
> imposed them? What constraints have you considered trying?
My engelang in progress is designed be very phonologically
redundant by having no minimal pairs.  That meant I had to
generate words for it with scripts.  I could have generated wordforms
and then hand-picked what forms to match with what meanings,
but because I am also trying a build-one-to-throw-away iterative
design method, I automatically matched up the shortest word forms
with word meanings I guessed would be most commonly needed,
and the longer word forms with those that would be needed less
often.  Eventually these guesses about relative frequency will be
replaced by results of actual corpus analysis, and meanings will
be reassigned (probably to new word forms generated by
an improved script or the same script working on improved
format files).  But that project has been stalled for a while, with
my conlanging energies going toward gzb and Glossotechnia.
The corpus isn't large or diverse enough to be worth doing
a frequency analysis on yet.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/conlang.htm