Re: THEORY: Conlanging as reverse Sapir-Whorf?

nicole perrin wrote:
>
> This makes me curious, do people on the list (who work on more than one
> conlang) find that most of their conlangs are similar to each other?  I
> don't mean in obvious ways, but maybe you really like /p/ and all of you
> languages have it (or you really dislike it and none of them have it),
> or maybe they all have similar word orders, or are all
> isolating/agglutinating/analytic/polysynthetic etc?  I know that my
> three favorite conlangs that I work on are all SOV and two of those are
> agglutinating, which I admittedly prefer, but I do try to mix in other
> elements to other conlangs.  Also, my conlangs have totally different
> phonologies.  But maybe that's just because otherwise I would feel
> guilty that my conlangs were only relexes of conlangs...<whimper>.
> Anyone else?
>
        Even without trying to consciously create different conlangs, mine are
always pretty different one from the others. It must be a subconscious
effort not to do the same each time :) . The phonologies are generally
not very much different (because I don't master the "exotic" sounds
(when I speak of "exotic", a simple lax /I/ is already difficult to
master for me, though I'm improving, whereas six months ago I still
didn't recognize the difference with a /i/ or a /e/), but the
morphological constraints are generally different, which gives a
different feeling for each language. For instance, Moten and Notya have
similar phonologies, but Moten has a relatively free morphology whereas
Notya allows only C(y)V (y being /j/) syllables as well as syllabic n
and m at the end of words, so the feeling given by the two languages is
very different. Finally, I try with each of my new languages to explore
different features that I didn't try before. That must be why finally my
conlangs look so different from each other. Some examples:

- Azak: VSO, ergative, highly agglutinative and compounding, only
suffixes, lots of cases

- Moten: SOV, nominative, only slightly compounding and analytic, few
inflections, infixes

- Notya: No preferred order (maybe SOV), "active", compounding, four
inflections for all words, no distinction at all between nouns and verbs

- Chasma"o"cho: VSO or VOS, not compounding at all, very synthetic with
lots of prefixes and suffixes mainly on verbs, auxiliaries, designed to
feel "strange"

        So you see...

> Nicole
--
        Christophe Grandsire

        Philips Research Laboratories --  Building WB 145
        Prof. Holstlaan 4
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        The Netherlands

        Phone:  +31-40-27-45006
        E-mail: grandsir@natlab.research.philips.com