Re: Conlang Books - ASP & CL101

On 10/10/06, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:
> > I mean issues of how the infinite range of real-world meanings
> > can be mapped to a finite set of words in various possible
> > ways.  Color vocabulary, for instance; kinship terminology;
> > folk taxonomy vs. scientific taxonomy; literal and metaphorical
> Hmm. Part of that should come under the vocab gen chapter - eg folk vs
> scientific taxonomy, color vocab.
>
> However... how much of this is appropriate for an intro-intermediate
> linguistics textbook? I certainly agree that it's fun stuff that
> should be addressed, but perhaps this should be in the form of an
> essay in ASP rather than a chapter in CL101?
Possibly the most common mistake of novice conlangers
is relexing their native language.  At least a brief treatment
of how different natural and constructed languages map
the same set of meanings to words in different ways,
with some additional examples for the example artlang,
auxlang and engelang, seems an important thing to cover
in a constructive linguistics textbook.  For instance,
with respect to family relationships, the artlang would
have a complex and assymetric set of kinship terms
reflecting its conculture and which relationships are
considered more important, which are similar
to each other, etc.  The auxlang would probably
have a fairly minimal set of kinship terms, as
culturally neutral as possible, with a few affixes
and perhaps compounding rules for deriving
more specific or complex kinship terms  The
engelang would be similar to the auxlang but
perhaps with a more complex set of affixes.

Take a look at how the Conlang wikibook treats the subject:

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

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

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

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