Re: Linguistic knowledge and conlanging (was Explaining linguistic...)

--- Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:

<snip>

> I think they mean the process by which a natlang
> arises - the changes that
> turned Vulgar Latin into French would amount to the
> "creation" of French.
>
> Alternatively, they might be refering to the entire
> development of natural
> language from whatever was its origin.
>
> (Neither interpretation suggests a process that to
> me seems particularly
> comparable to a conlanger crafting a language
> without knowledge of linguistic
> theory, I might add.)
Here's the process I'm using for my present
experiment.  I choose a piece of text and just write
the translation.  Since this is the first piece of
text nothing is known about the language yet, so the
translation can look like anything; just a string of
made-up words.

That translated sentence gets added to the corpus, and
a concordance is constructed of all the words, and
from that the beginings of a dictionary.

Then I move on to the next sentence and translate it,
refering to whatever exists of the dictionary for
possible vocabulary (although I can make up new words
any time I want to replace old words I don't like any
more).  I am also free to refer to the existing corpus
for examples of sentence structure, or I can create a
whole new kind of sentence just becaues I feel like
it.

But under no conditions have I written down any
syntactical or grammatical rules.  All I know about
the language is whatever is in the corpus, and nothing
more.

The interesting part comes when I can cajole other
people into doing some translations too, adding their
own flavor to the languiage by creating their own new
words and their own new sentence structures.

Nothing is forbidden at this point, except writing a
"rule".  Rules are not allowed, only sample sentences
to be added to the corpus.  If contributors like an
existing word or sentence type they will use it.  If
they don't like the existing word or sentence
structure they'll make up a new one to take its place.
 Nothing is sacred, and there is no "authority"
deciding how the language must be.

Usage in the corpus, is the alpha and the omega; the
only rule. http://fiziwig.com/corpus.html

--gary

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