Re: Book on constructive linguistics

On 9/25/06, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:
> Inspired by http://www.spinnoff.com/zbb/viewtopic.php?p=424493 and my
> previous musing on the subject...
>
> Who here would be willing to contribute to a book on this subject?
>
> The basic idea:
>
> Teach language - all aspects of it - from a constructive POV, rather
> than descriptive or prescriptive. Every chapter should read like a
> pallette, a huge number of seed ideas that try to give the reader an
> idea of what language is or may be capable of, and give them the tools
> with which to create their own.
Something similar is already under way:

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Conlang

It teaches basic linguistics from a conlang perspective, assuming
no prior knowledge, with both natlang and conlang
examples.  Parts of it are pretty good, parts of it need a lot
of revision, and several important parts aren't written yet.

I like your idea of developing three different example
conlangs throughout the course of the text.
Maybe one isolating, one agglutinating, and one fusional (or even
polysynthetic); one naturalistic artlang, one engelang/loglang,
and one IAL; one with a fairly minimal phonology,
one roughly on the scale of German, and one
phonologically baroque language like Ithkuil.  Two would
have different basic word orders and another would
have a fair number of cases with very free word order...

I've been only intermittently involved in the Conlang wikibook
lately, but if you get involved with it seriously, I'll probably
get involved again too.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry

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