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Re: Terkunan: rules for deriving nouns, verbs, adjectives

From:Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>
Date:Monday, October 29, 2007, 15:58
Hallo!

On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 07:47:41 +0000, R A Brown wrote:

> Henrik Theiling wrote: > > Hi! > > > > Some things got mixed up here . > > It would seem so to me also.
Yep.
> > The design goals may be clear to me, > > but I seem to present them in a confusing way. Sorry for my fuzzy > > explanations. > > > > Let's see. > > > > Jörg Rhiemeier writes: > > > >>>Henrik Theiling wrote: > [snip] > >>>>Yeah. My goal of a plausibly Romance diachronical fauxlang that I > >>>>like is a bit hard to explain. :-) > >> > >>The problem I see with Terkunan is that it tries to be two things > >>at once: a diachronic Romance language, *and* a fauxlang with an > >>isolating grammar. You cannot have both at once, I think, and end > >>up with something which is neither. > > > > But I am not trying to do two things at once.
> Auxlangs like Volapük, Esperanto, Latino sine Flexione, Novial, Glosa > etc, etc (or even a fauxlang like TAKE) do _not_ have diachronic > development over the centuries. They are the creation of individuals or, > occasionally, a committee or group of individuals. It seems to me a > _diachronic_ fauxlang is a bit of a contradiction.
Precisely that is the problem.
> I presented the design > > goals and said that the historical explanation is secondary at the > > moment. > > My own feeling is that if Terkunan is a fauxlang, then the historical > explanation of diachronic development should be ditched.
Yes - and if Terkunan is a diachronic language, the root selection methods you present in your orange boxes should be ditched and *the Latin words themselves* subjected to the GMP, not the artificially extracted roots - the latter is simply *not the way natural languages change*. Sound changes affect *whole words*, often even larger units (as in the initial mutations of Insular Celtic, which resulted from sound changes operating across word boundaries).
> [snip] > >>>>The diachronical development is retro-fitted and secondary. > >>> > >>>That would seem to me to be making life difficult :) > >> > >>AMEN. What I see what Henrik is trying to do with Terkunan is > >>to make a language which has evolved from Vulgar Latin by > >>naturalistic sound changes, while at the same time appealing > >>to his taste for perfectly regular, simple engelangs. And that's > >>the problem. > > > > I don't see the contradiction, actually. The GMP is a helpful means > > to prevent chaos. It does not contradict the fauxlangish goals of > > simplicity at all. It helps me prevent making sloppy mistakes and it > > constructs the sounds I want. It is very hard (for me) to do this > > without machine aid. If fact, I always hated lexicon construction and > > wasn't very good at it (and slow) and a GMP in an aposteriori conlang > > is a great help. > > I agree that the GMP is a helpful means to prevent chaos in the > diachronic development of a naturalistic conlang. But I do not see why > _simplicity_ per_se has to be fauxlangish. Surely pidgins and creoles > have similar simplicity.
The problem, Henrik, is that you appliy the GMP to *artificially extracted roots* - units that would *never* exist for themselves in the natural evolution of the language.
> > Also, Terkunan is *not* meant to be an engelang and I am *not* using > > engelang design goals at all. The simplicity comes from a fauxlang > > point of view. Engelang would mean that I'd question and reconstruct > > the whole tense/aspect/mood/case/whatevercategory system altogether. > > Instead, I want an isolating language with typical categories from > > Romance and in the best case, with analytical structures typical for > > Romance. > > No European Romancelang has particularly analytic verb structures. > _Spoken_ French does best in this respect, tho the written language > retains quite a bit of synthetic apparatus.
And spoken French arrived there by sound changes which eroded the word endings, not by "selecting" roots that didn't exist as free-standing words *at any point of the language's history*.
> But Romance based creoles do > surely show the simplicity that you are aiming for, and those structures > have derived from Romance itself.
Yes.
> [snip] > > > > The construction of a conlang is different from that of a natlang, > > yes. It always is: for a conlang, there is a person with design > > goals, even in diachronic conlanging. But even if my grammar > > structures seem implausible, it does not mean they are impossible > > Nothing is impossible in a conlang :)
Sure, but: your page states that Terkunan was a language which evolved from Vulgar Latin naturally, i. e. by regular sound changes. That, however, is not really the way the language is constructed - the sound changes are not applied to actual Latin words, but to artificial units. Hence, Terkunan falls short of what it is meant to be.
> [snip] > > > > If this conlang really bothers you (and others?), I could have a poll > > about whether it's so disturbing that I should better remove it from > > the Internet. > > No, that is not, I think, a good idea. I have to admit that I share much > the same misgivings as Jörg does and we are, I hope, trying to be helpful.
Yes. That is what Ray and I are trying to do - help you create a more plausible diachronic conlang.
> > The primary primary meta goal for me is to have fun, of > > course. > > Absolutely. > > > And even if I don't seem to succeed in explaining how the > > design goals fit together, they make perfect sense to me. > > My own personally feeling is that it would be better to drop the > fauxlang idea and to seek the simplicity and isolating structure you > desire by designing Terkunan as a Romance-based creole *there*.
Yes. A creole is one solution; sound changes that erode the inflections are another. But the current way of constructing Terkunan words is utterly unnatural. On Mon, 29 Oct 2007 11:33:30 +0100, Henrik Theiling wrote:
> Hi! > > R A Brown <ray@...> writes: > >... > >> Some things got mixed up here . > > > > It would seem so to me also. > > :-) > > >... > > I agree that the GMP is a helpful means to prevent chaos in the > > diachronic development of a naturalistic conlang. But I do not see why > > _simplicity_ per_se has to be fauxlangish. Surely pidgins and creoles > > have similar simplicity. > > Ok, this seems to be the core of the confusion: that I call it a > fauxlang giving rise to false expectations. I did not notice this > problem before, so thanks for the fine analysis!
Yes. Either it is a fictional natlang - then the GMP has to be applied to full word forms and not artificially extracted roots - or it is a fictional auxlang - then one would not expect diachronic changes. It can't be both.
> >... > >> And even if I don't seem to succeed in explaining how the > >> design goals fit together, they make perfect sense to me. > > > > My own personally feeling is that it would be better to drop the > > fauxlang idea and to seek the simplicity and isolating structure you > > desire by designing Terkunan as a Romance-based creole *there*. > > Ok. I won't call it a fauxlang anymore. > > But 'creole' would also give rise to expectations I currently don't > have, e.g., maybe more loans (if you want to call them loans in a > creole when the words where there from the start). I will call it a > personal language until I find something more specific that suits the > goals.
Yes, you can of course whatever odd rules you want in a personal language. But as it now is, Terkunan is *not a plausible diachronic language*, because the sound changes are applied in an unnatural way. ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf

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Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>