Conlang progress report

Just an update as to how my language creation is going, since I mentioned it on
list a few days ago...

What I have to this point is what will probably be an agglutinating language
that borrows heavily from English and Japanese, with a bit of French, Spanish,
and Esperanto thrown in, since these are the languages spoken by those who are
in the discussion group that's helping me create it.  There are also a few
programmers among them who place a premium on unambiguity, in hopes that it may
be machine-parsable; I think in context that might be a job for an auxlang
instead.  I'm trying not to do too much with my first effort.

I soon realized with all of the possible decisions and directions to be made
that in order to go forward, I needed to have some kind of context for the
language.  So I decided to create a fictional setting where it would be spoken.
Thankfully, we're all role-players, so things are taking shape quickly.

The language will be spoken on an as-yet-unnamed island in the Pacific.  We're
still half-joking that it has no history and appeared out of nowhere one fine
day, because of the daunting task of writing the history...

Already, the ideas we've come up with for the island are influencing the
language.  The islanders, for example, are accustomed to non-standard (compared
to the rest of the world) family arrangements, often forming in pairs, triples,
or larger groups, without a heavy emphasis on sex or gender.  So, I'll be
changing the language in order to build in more - I'm afraid I don't know the
proper term for this - "relationship"-based markers between the speaker and the
listener.  This is somewhat similar to Japanese, where different particles are
used on pronouns and proper names to denote address to a superior, to a
dependent, and so on.

I'll post more as we develop it, but so far, so good...

--
Steve Kramer   -=oOo=-   scooter at buser dot net
Thought for today:
"I go like this, this, this, this...goal.  Easy!"
Pele, in the movie _Victory_