Re: A conlang free-for-all

Carsten wrote:
<<
I'm impressed. And when the language should develop inflections and all
that, it's working completely like David's descriptions about
paradigm-based
morphology :-)
 >>

Hee, hee...  It would make sense that some pattern would emerge
(either because some user created it, or because some user saw in
another's creation a possible pattern), and that in order to expand
the language, users would seize on that pattern and apply it where
they felt appropriate--i.e., via linguistic analogy, and not necessarily
via universal grammar.

Actually, though, the more I look at and work with Kalusa, the
more it seems to *be* the language birth experiment I wanted
to create with my class back in Berkeley.  For more info read
the intro here:

http://dedalvs.free.fr/wasabi.html

That is, Kalusa resembles the early stages of a pidgin.  There are
conflicting structures and conflicting vocabularies, and it's up to
the speakers (or users) to determine which ones are going to
become rules.  The next stage (which we may have entered with
some constructions) is where novel grammatical constructions
will simply be ungrammatical by virtue of not being comprehensible,
because they don't fit into the agreed upon patterns.

The main difference, of course, between Kalusa and a spoken
pidgin is that we have no other goal than to create the language.
Those who create a pidgin always have something else more
important to be doing (e.g., working, trade, getting someone
else to do what you want, etc.), so no one's going to consciously
create structure, or brand new words.  Everything will arise
through misunderstanding and analogy.

Wow, as I've typed this up, the corpus is now up to 301 sentences!
Wild...  Anyway, not to bug, Gary, but didn't you say you were
going to link to the files you used to create this?  Seeing how
many sentences I've added to Kalusa, I'd love to be able to do
the same for my own languages to build up a corpus!

-David
*******************************************************************
"A male love inevivi i'ala'i oku i ue pokulu'ume o heki a."
"No eternal reward will forgive us now for wasting the dawn."

-Jim Morrison

http://dedalvs.free.fr/