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Re: Glossopoeia out of (pseudo)glossolalia

From:John Vertical <johnvertical@...>
Date:Monday, June 23, 2008, 7:40
On Thu, 19 Jun 2008 22:07:07 -0400, Jim Henry wrote:
>With my newest, still very sketchy language I've just done something >I'd vaguely thought about doing from time to time but never done before. >I wrote a quatrain pseudo-glossolalically, paying attention just to meter >and rhyme but otherwise making up word-forms by free-association. >Then, having the quatrain in front of me, I gradually figured out what >the poem was about and what the individual words meant simultaneously, >taking clues from the initial phonemes of what might be verbs. (I know >from the couple of dozen sentences I'd already written in the language >(which I'm making up kind of solo-Kalusa-wise as I go along) that it >has subject and object (and transitivity) marking using the initial >consonant of the verb; some of those consonants appear as prefixes >of inalienably possessed nouns too, as in Hixkaryana, which I've been >reading about lately.) In the process of interpreting the poem, I found >out something about how adverbs work in this language, and a little about >the culture of its speakers.
>Have any of y'all ever used a method like this to develop >your conlangs?
Test driving phonology ideas for me generally involves sketching a load of nonsense words (requisite especially for distributional details). I've sometimes taken note of apparent morphology in them; tho these have yet to become any more estabilish'd than "well, there is a '-basr' suffix in there, probably denominal derivational". The thought of extending this process in the way you describe has pass'd my mind, but I think I would, too, need some kind of an idea on main grammar outlines before that. John Vertical