Re: Introduction and a few novice questions

Siyo!
Ihekwike Paul Edson :
> >The question, then, is: What factors do you use  to
> allow
> >you to narrow the range of  strategies/features you
> >incorporate into your languages? How does one cope
> with such
> >an embarrassing wealth of possibility?
>
I'm a novice like you.  I'm plowing through my first
language, Kayasanoda.  (If you didn't know, "Siyo" is
the informal greeting and "ihekwike" means "wrote".)
I just picked little bits of things I liked.  My
second language is French, so I thought, since I
hadn't a word generator, to derive vocabulary from
there.  I'm part Cherokee, so I thought it would be
neat to pick up some vocab there, too, as well as some
of the grammatical ideas--I have heavy agglutination
and a small set of infixes.  I also got a little
philosophical, too.  I liked VSO order because it
seemed to give sentences a more active sound.  And
agglutination was very philosophical for me--can you
think of a noun or a verb divorced from any
descriptives?  I used an Anglicized version of
Cherokee phonology, so I didn't have too many worries
about realism.  I based my inflections on the Roman
order of vowels--this seemed very artificical until I
made some observations.  Vowels in pronouns follow
this diagram
-Sing -Pl
1 a    o
2 e    *
3 i    u
*lost due to merging of forms--had I kept the /V~/
from Cherokee, this would be even closer to ideal.

The vowels "narrow" for the plural.  And my suffixes
follow a similar pattern, but a little more
imperfectly: a-->e and o-->u.  In this case, they
"close" for the plural.

So just playing picky-choosy with a few things (two
matters of vocab, one of phonology, one of inflexion,
one of word order, and one or two other things) has
produced quite a capacious language.

If this is your first time, have fun, play around,
learn from your mistakes, and listen to the people
here--they know what they're doing.

Dana! (Take care!)
Clint

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