Re: Glossopoeia out of (pseudo)glossolalia

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