Re: Structure of documents about your conlangs

Quoting Jan van Steenbergen <ijzeren_jan@...>:

>  --- Roberto Suarez Soto skrzypszy:
>
> >         Do you have a "standard" structure for documents explaining your
> > conlangs? I.e.: first pronunciation and phonology, then grammar; inside
> > of grammar, first the verbs and then the rules relative to nouns, etc.
>
> Yes, I do, although it's different from the example you give (as a
> matter of fact, I've never seen the verbs coming before the nouns).
>
> - INTRODUCTION
>   (History, conculture, classification of the language, dialects etc.)
> - PHONOLOGY
>   (Alphabet, orthography, pronunciation, phonology)
> - MORPHOLOGY
>   * Articles
>   * Nouns
>   * Adjectives
>   * Pronouns (pers., refl., rec., poss., dem., rel., interr., indef.)
>   * Numerals
>   * Verbs
>   * Prepositions
>   * Conjunctions
> - SYNTAX (Questions, word order, etc.)
> - VOCABULARY
> - SAMPLE TEXTS
>
> Furthermore, it it always useful to have a section about word building:
> how can adjectives be derived from nouns, nouns from verbs, etc. Usually,
> I don't make a seperate chapter for that, but divide it over the other
> sections instead. That's largely a mater of taste, though.
I might point out that exactly what sections you have really depends
on the structure of the language you're working with.  All languages
are going to have pronouns of some kind , most likely, but a great many
languages don't have reflexive, possessive, relative or indefinite
pronouns (Phaleran has only the last of these), nor do many languages
have distinct classes of adjectives (Phaleran doesn't). So, there is
no real "standard" in the sense that you *need* to have such and such
sections except in the sense that all human languages have such and
such components in their grammars.

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637