Re: CHAT: Hello

Another Canuck! Welcome!

Heather Fleming wrote:

>Anyway, hi, my name is Heather and I'm new to the list. I'm an aspiring
fantasy author who ended up majoring in linguistics, with inevitable
results...

  Similar story here. I started writing fiction and ended up writing
languages for it. There was a bit of fantasy at first but I've since
migrated out of it into sort of an alternate-20th/21st-century Earth
situation.

>I guess my first "conlang" was for a linguistic typology class I took at
the U of A (A for Alberta) two years ago. Our final assignment was to write
up a sketch of the most typologically unlikely language we could come up
with. I had far too much fun with it. I'll dig it up at some point...

  Please do! There was a thread here a little while ago about which
conlangs violated "universals", and how many. Nobody actually had a
language that deliberately set out to violate as many as possible. It'd be
cool to see one.

>Has anyone else done something like that for a lark - coming up with the
most unrealistic (at least for humans) language possible? Not fully formed
of course, but in sketch form anyway?

  Omurax has no verbs. And I may have just done away with adjectives as a
seperate class. No adpositions either. Which leaves tense particles,
conjunctions, and nouns with a whole whack of cases.
  Tolborese probably isn't "unrealistic", but it's very unlikely. Here's a
post from another list that shows some of this monster:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/artificiallanguages2/message/2665
  My phonologies are all pretty bland though.

>Now I'm working on coming up with languages for some fiction I've been
working on ever since I was a kid and finally worked the juvenile plot
holes out of. The really fun part is that there is a gap of about 1300
years between one volume and the next, so I get to come up with Old and
Modern versions. I have some vague ideas about them, but they're still very
much in the air yet.
>
>I'm also helping my friend and co-author develop her conlang for her
conspecies, whose language is completely pitch-based (they have incredible
hearing and their vocal tracts can produce up to I think 6 tones at a time.
Their planet is kind of isolationist because although their civilization
and technology are very advanced, their culture is completely oral so they
have no written form, and no one offworld can learn to understand or
produce it because they lack the physical capacity, and it's bloody hard
for them to get the hang of phonetic languages).

Sounds cool. You should also join the Conculture list on Yahoo groups for
more discussion on fictional cultures.
Do you have a site up for any of those languages or cultures yet?

Mike