Re: Glossopoeia out of (pseudo)glossolalia

Sounds interesting. I think I'll try that. My language, Fraken, is still in
its baby stages.Right now, "Do you speak Fraken?" is translated into the
symbols as [you] [me] [speak] [speak]-[objectification suffix]. So the word
order is...SOV. Subject, object, verb.

So uh, yeah. I think I'll use your idea. Man, this is the first time I've
posted on this mailing
list in a while.
-John

On Thu, Jun 19, 2008 at 11:07 PM, Jim Henry <jimhenry1973@...> 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.
>
> So far the whole documenation of the language consists of sentences
> in the language, with free (not interlinear) glosses in gjâ-zym-byn.  I did
> the same with another sketchlang a year or so ago, but didn't keep working
> on it for mroe than a few days.  If this language lasts longer (I hope so;
> I like the sound of it) I'll see how long I can keep that up without
> feeling
> the need for a lexicon & grammatical tables, etc.
>
> filajhni tukasko namera;
> huzhespa im tera ilang.
> talnipi kiaspo tinera,
> kunemo, vuamjho silang.
>
> quick ad-hoc romanization: ng = /N/, jh = /j\/, zh = /Z/, e = /E/,
> r = /r`/, otherwise IPA values.
>
> "she knits it carefully, my grandmother;
> a festive garment of many colors.
> I watch you work, thoughtfully;
> you are pleased with your work, I will impress the elders [with said
> garment]"
>
> Have any of y'all ever used a method like this to develop
> your conlangs?  I reckon it wouldn't be much use with a
> language better-developed than this one, and I wasn't sure
> I could get it to work consistently even with only 20-30
> sentences written in the language so far, but it worked
> well enough.  I'm busy now writing additional sentences
> using the new words from the poem, inflecting them
> in different ways than they're used there, etc.
>
> --
> Jim Henry
> http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/review/log.htm
>