Re: absolve me; this is my introduction

> Forgive me, fellow conlangers, I have been rude.  I haven't taken the time
> to properly introduce myself.  Well, my name is Andrey and I'm currently
> working on a conlang.  I became interested in constructed languages after
> learning of them on the net.  After that, I went to a nearby university
> library and started educating myself in linguistics.  My research has
> provided me with quite a bit of information.
Welcome to the list! I never studied linguistics in college (then again, I
never studied ;). I learned what I learned just going to the library and
reading certain books, like _The World's Major Languages_, ed. Bernard
Comrie, which I now own. It's like my bible on modern languages and a few
ancient ones (like Latin and Sanskrit). It's not perfect, since it lacks any
American languages like Quechua and Navajo and half of it is devoted to
Indo-European ones! Bantu, Turkic and Dravidian get only one chapter each.

I own few books, just that one and a textbook on Arabic, which I'm trying to
learn now, along with Farsi, my wife-to-be's native tongue. I also got
Tolkien's LOTR trilogy somewhere, since I'm *trying* to write a
sci-fi/fantasy kinda thing.

There's not much to find in Lufkin, Texas, my current residence; I'm moving
to suburban Washington, DC soon though.

> As of right now, I'm taking things slow and formulating the sounds for my
> conlang.  I want to create a language that sounds beautiful and is
> grammatically inventive, so I have much work to do.  Perhaps I will post
> some information on my conlang.  My first conlang, which is rather
> fragmented, was called crunk.  It was made to give an idea of what sounds
> an alien race would produce.
I literally spent 15 years on phonology for Tech, my current project, and
one of only two I really care to do, the other one being an attempt at a
global IAL/auxlang nicknamed Pig. My intent was to come up with a large
phonology, modeled a lot after Caucasian languages, but based mostly on
Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Ge'ez, Greek, Latin, Avestan and Sanskrit. The
ejectives from Georgian (and Armenian and Ossetian/Iron within IE) are
borrowed for "emphatic" stops/affricates, with Celtic-style consonant
mutation (Hebrew has lenition for non-emphatics) and Turkic-style vowel
harmony (and Germanic umlaut, which has a few similarities). I wanted
originally to invent an extremely complex language, spoken by an advanced
Elven race, or perhaps a secret code or something in the real world.

Right now, I'm at the stage of incorporating Arabic consonants and Hebrew
vowels into a type of "enriched Semitic" (with consonant clusters found in
Aramaic). I used to know the rules for how the ten vowels of Hebrew came
from the six vowels of Common Semitic, which were posted here on the list...
but I lost 'em, so I better ask again (I think Steg told me, or was it
another?). Might be in the Archives too.

I'll post an example of such an "altered Arabic" soon. Probably something
from al-Qur'ân, since it's the only Arabic literature I have.

> As of yet, I am undecided as to whether or not I should create vocabulary
> manually or generate it on the computer.  The former would ensure that my
> language would be more personalised, so i'm leaning toward that.
I'd have to do mine manually, since I can't program worth a squat. I can do
character-for-character replacements in Word, which makes the job of
converting Semitic or IE a little easier.

[For the record, IE loans in Tech come from what I call "artificial
Armenian", since I impose Grimm's Law on the roots, so that, for the dentals
for example: dh > d (plain/voiced stop), d > t' (ejective stop), t > th
(aspirated stop). Palatals become sibilants, so it's a satem language, while
s > sh.]

> I'm rather new at the art of constructed languages and I'm eager to learn
> new things.  I hope this list will be a good place to share and learn
> information about constructed languages.
Actually my main interest is music. Language is my second love. And I'm more
into modern natlangs, and I'd like to do something in the area of
translation/interpretation for legal, business, immigration etc. services.
Or start a company that does just that, along with language teaching
(including ESL).

My fiancée is going to school to be a lawyer (her degrees are in criminal
justice and sociology), so we could team up on this!

~Danny~

Reply