Re: Nineteen-year-old language sketch unearthed!

Hallo!

On Sun, 29 Apr 2007 16:38:44 +0200, Carsten Becker wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Matahaniya ang Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>:
>
> > On Thu, 26 Apr 2007 23:59:05 -0400, Amanda Babcock Furrow
> > wrote:
> >
> >> In 1988, a 14-year-old highschool sophomore, I ran
> >> across the idea of polysynthetic, verb-based languages
> >> in the encyclopedia, if I recall correctly. [...]
> >>
> > This is much more than what I could manage at that age
> > (even more than what many other conlangers achieve in
> > adulthood).  When I was that young, my conlangs were
> > euroclones - all I knew back then was German, English and
> > Latin, and my conlangs looked like that, too.
>
> Frankly I wasn't even interested in conlanging back then. I
> only started conlanging when I was 16, and of course, my
> first conlang was essentially a clone of German with some
> odds and ends and a horribly inconsistent sound.
Well, I made my first real conlang a bit later than at 14, too;
I was perhaps 15 or 16 when I made up Serindian and its ilk.
(I had a small family of related languages; however, the sound
changes weren't regular - I didn't undersrand that back then.)
As I said before, they were much like German or Latin: 4 cases
(nominative, genitive, dative, accusative), 3 simple tenses
(present, past, futures) and 3 corresponding perfect tenses,
etc.

> Ayeri still lacks linguistic background and a couple of
> complicated twists (such as several conjugations and stuff),
> but I don't feel like recreating it from scratch.
Keep it the way it is.  It is beautiful, and simplicity is not
a flaw.  I sometimes feel that Old Albic was too complicated
(but at other times, I feel that it was not complex enough,
which probably means that it is just right the way it is).

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