Re: CHAT: Anglicisms

On Wed, 2 Jun 1999, Chris Peters wrote:

>      Out of curiosity, how aware are any of you of any Anglicisms in your
> conlangs, whether in grammar, phonology, or otherwise?  Or otherwise, if
> your L1 is other than English, how much does your native tongue tend to crop
> up in your project?  I find myself almost unawares favoring certain English
> sounds, or Japanese grammar, in Ricadh when I try to avoid it.  In a sense,
> Ricadh grammar has ended up as a kind of "reverse Japanese" ...
>
Oh, I know there are, in layers, traces of French, Chinese, Classical Chinese,
Sanskrit, Classical Tibetan, Limbu, Kham, Nepali and perhaps a few others in
Denden. But even the influence I trace to Nepali has been Dendenified. See for
instance the southern usage of _tan_:

_tan Hamal kaulon_ 'Hamal's house'

which was caused by the Nepali construction

_Ramko ghar_ which was constantly buzzing around my head.
I didn't conciously take it and alter it a bit - it just
happened.

>      A few years ago, I managed to contact Marc Okrand with a few questions
> about his Klingon language.  For those who don't know, Mr. Okrand had quite
> extensive experience in several natlangs before he was hired to create
> Klingon.  (His field of study was comparative linguistics among and between
> Southeast Asian and Native North American languages.)  So he told me, if he
> created a Klingon rule that, by chance, was the same as a Burmese rule, then
> he consciously went _against_ Burmese for his next addition.  The result was
> one of the best developed "non-human" conlangs out there.  Sure makes me
> wish I had the time and money to get a PhD in the field, like he did!  :)
>
>
Well, I don't worry about making Denden different for differences sake,
since it is spoken by people just like you and me. Neither do I really
worry about consistency, phonological or grammatical. Since Denden is
spoken by people with a wide variety of native tongues, every pronounciation
is probably right, and anyone is at liberty to mangle its grammar according
to his native tongue. What I set out to achieve with Denden is admirably
summarized by Matthias on his page with conlangers links:

         http://members.aol.com/manishtusu/conlangers.html


Boudewijn Rempt  | http://www.xs4all.nl/~bsarempt