Re: Overly Ambitious Conlang Project (Was Re: Lurkers)

Howdles,

Gressett, David spake, saying:

I think your use of leverage will propel you to success.

Thanks; I hope so.

Then I wrote a program that fed this through the wordnet database, and
collected every noun, verb, and adverb sense of each word. Each word was put
into a "morpheme candidates" table, to which I added a bunch of check box
fields to represent derivations I wanted to perform, or exclusions from the
final lexicon. It took a few months to go through this list and click all
the boxes I wanted, but hey, I could cover on average about 60 morphemes per
minute.

Finally I wrote the program to hash through the candidates, create words for
them, and create derivations. Now I have just what I wanted. A huge list of
terms that have very specific senses of the most common concepts.

That's great -- rather like what I'm doing without the automation (I'm not a
programmer, so it's a matter of convincing my wife to let me sequester
myself for a couple of hours each day and trudge through the vocab lists).

Now I have been able to concentrate on the really fun part, the grammar.

When I started this, I was going in thinking, "Naming languages. I won't
have to concentrate on grammar much." Whatever. The more I read on the
subject, the more I realize how little I know.

John, what is your fantasy world for? A book? An RPG? Lucid dreaming ;-)

Yes. While I've been an RPGer, I'm finding less time for it, but the world
was initiated with an eye towards literary expression first and that's where
I'm leaning. I rather look at it as my mental train set, and the conlangs
for it just shaping the landscape -- or maybe the history is the landscape
and the conlangs are the detailing of it. Either way, it's okay (you wake up
with yourself)...

Combustible yeti,

John