Re: Introduction and a few novice questions

Paul Edson wrote:
>Secondly, I'm in the process of developing languages for a
>number of fictional cultures that I'd like to write about,
>and I'm a bit overwhelmed! Not by the scope of the work
>ahead of me (which I actually, in my innocence, relish), but
>by the embarrassing richness of choices available as I do
>so. I feel a bit like a sculptor staring at a great hunk of
>Carrera marble and wondering, "What's in there?" With so
>many natlang and theoretical models available, so many
>interesting combinations of phonetic, morphological,
>semantic, syntactic, orthographic, and other -ic, strategies
>available, my first instinct is to jam as many 'interesting'
>features into one language as I can hold in my head.
>Obviously, this has tended to lead to false  starts and the
>waste of many otherwise inoffensive sheets of paper (not to
>mention the electrons!).
>
>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?
Poor you - you should started out a total ignorant like I did.

Seriously, I'd try to reverse the process. Instead of trying to use every
interesting feature you come across of, try to decide on a "theme" for the
language. Tell yourself, for instance, "I want a 'classical' language with
massive inflections, and with lots of fricatives everywhere", and then
starting from that, see what suggests itself. It's the path I take, at any
rate, and I usually find that once I've decided on a few basic points, lots
of things just insinuates itself into the language - indeed sometimes the
languages seem to be inventing themselves.

The only trouble is you may find that one of the solutions that seemed
logical from your theme means you can't use the latest nifty feature you
fell in love with. When I find myself in that situation, I usually save said
feature for some later project.

                                                    Andreas



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