Re: SURVEY: Idiomatic Expressions In Your ConLang Or ConCulture

Hi!

R A Brown <ray@...> writes:
>...
> > componding again to keep my life interesting.  Will you use regular
> > derivation with only few roots like polysynthetic (enge)langs?
>
> No - for the simple reason it doesn't seem to work. I do not want to
> replicate the things that I have criticized Speedwords for. This means
> that affixes need to be _precisely_ defined. I cannot have vaguely
> defined concepts like "association", "special", "general" which then in
> practice overlap one another in quite unpredictable ways. And if there
> to be antonym & complement affixes, these need to be clearly defined and
> applied strictly & consistently.
Ok.  In West-Greenlandic, my favourite cited example is the school,
the 'learning-place'.  It is a derivation of 'learn' + 'place'.  The
'place' derivation is clearly defined, much more so than 'association'
and the other things you list.  Would you say that the interpretation
of 'learning-place' as 'school' is an idiom?  It is obviously a
specialisation.

I understand that you will not have derivation of this kind, since
words will get too long, but I'm simply interested in whether you'd
call this idiomatic derivation.

> As to compounding of lexical morphemes, I have no problem with that
> per_se, but I do not want to have idiomatic compounding.
Ok, so adhoc/ambiguity is ok, but idiomatic is not?

> A given concept will have its own word. One aim of Piashi is to be a
> briefscript. Having long compounds somewhat mitigates against that.
Indeed. :-)  Kalaallisut is famous for it's word length.

>...
> Something totally different? I don't know what that would be.
I just thought you might have come up with some other concept.
Conlangers often do innovative stuff :-))

> I must confess that the creation of its vocabulary has been the
> greatest stumbling block and still exercises me. This is basically
> what has held up the development of the language. Maybe it's that
> "something totally different" which I need ;)
Tell me about it as soon as you find something. :-)

Lexicon is hard for me, too.  Not so much due to it consisting of
many, many single entries, but more so to find the right design, the
system behind all those lexicon entries.  Satisfaction is hard to
achieve here...

**Henrik

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