Re: Language Lessons

On Tue, 31 Jul 2001 04:31:10 GMT0BST, "Damon M. Lord"
<LordDM@...> wrote:

>To compare, I looked at mine - mine's hardly attractive -
>"Mutations", "Verbs", "Pronouns", etc. So I looked at what was
>attractive, by pulling a few "Teach Yourself" language books off my
>shelf - the chapter titles are much more attractive (no scary
>grammatical words for the non-linguist/non-conlanger!!), laid out
>with such titles as "greetings", "shopping", etc. Perhaps by putting
>conlangs into situations like that into the mouths of imaginary
>speakers would assist making langs more fun?
There ought to be a middle ground. Sometimes I get impatient with all the
touristy stuff in the more recent Teach Yourself books. But some of the
older ones, back when they had the blue covers, were forbidding and dense
with linguistic trivia. (Arthur H. Whitney's Finnish one comes to mind.)

_The Klingon Dictionary_, by Marc Okrand, seems to be a pretty good
compromise. It introduces the interesting linguistic features right away,
but it's also full of nice little examples of Klingon speech (capturing the
essence of Klingon culture two or three words at a time -- a kind of art
form in its own right). The "useful" phrases are relegated to an appendix.

>The great difficulty with creating a course is sustaining its
>creation - I have seen conlangs that peeter out after lesson two or
>three, with no further additions. Is there a template for writing
>courses?
It's not easy to maintain interest in writing lessons for a language that
keeps changing, or one that's unlikely to attract a population of speakers.
But it'd be an interesting exercise. I've done sketches of things like this
from time to time, but nothing substantial. Maybe I should try some
Czirehlat lessons.

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