Re: finally, something besides phonology in Tech...

From: "Philippe Caquant" <herodote92@...>

> The problem with linguistics is that man's life is not
> long enough. Stuck on phonology for 17 years ! Holy
> Sausage ! It will take you at least twice more for
> syntax, the same for vocabulary, and ten times more
> for semantics ! This is a job for your
> grand-grand...grandsons !
Well I didn't exactly do nothing but phonology during that time... I had a
lot to learn about linguistics in general, still do. I also had little
access to materials. I lived in a small town which luckily had a university,
and I didn't use the Internet until the mid-1990s. While I'm here in Austin,
Texas, home of the largest university in the USA (right now) which has a
pretty impressive library of its own, I can do so much more.

I also abandoned the project several times before I took it up again.

The main problem I have is that I'm basing so much on natural languages and
reconstructed proto-languages, so in effect, I actually have to learn some
of these languages. So Tech has been really good for me because it led me to
discover Irish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Arabic, Georgian, Tamil, Korean and
Inuktitut - some of the real-world languages I fell in love with.

> But I won't try to discourage you. Although I wonder
> sometimes: why does every conlanger have to start from
> zero again ? What a huge time saving it would be if he
> could re-use modules other people would have thought,
> written and tested already ? He just would have to
> choose the ones he likes. We do so in computer
> programming. If we had to write again the basic
> routines used to compute "2+2" or "IF X > Y THEN A
> ELSE B", nobody would ever use any computer programs.
I think I "started from zero" so many times. And I'll never really finish
this thing either; I'll just keep working on it until I die or I lose
interest, whichever comes first.

> But I can understand the idea of making a language as
> odd and bizarre and complicated one could imagine
> (although it's not my aim at the moment). This idea I
> already had when I was at school. I also thought of
> making a very eccentric temperature scale, where
> degrees whould have been unequal but related to
> physical measures, like water (and vodka ?) freezing,
> lead melting (at sea level pressure), human body
> standard temperature etc. Zero would have been Kelvin
> 0.
It turned out that I was actually beginning to inventing Heinlein's Gulf
(Speedtalk). I wanted something an advanced race might use to express
intricate, precise meanings in brief utterances, so I looked for languages
with large phonologies that use challenging consonant clusters, then I
looked for the most synthetic (inflected) languages with the most fusional
synthesis, and right now I'm discovering polysynthesis.

I started the project when I didn't even know of the word "conlang" (I knew
"artificial language" from what I read about Esperanto, Klingon and Quenya).
And I wasn't aware of Gulf, and I haven't read it the book yet either -
don't read fiction much, in fact.

The Techians simply use metric like everybody else (except the US), however,
so eccentric temperature scales are not in my future....