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Re: Aesthetics

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Wednesday, October 17, 2007, 15:19
Hi!

Edgard Bikelis wrote:
>... Did anyone here ever wrote an 'aesthetic credo' before starting >a conlang? ...
Starting with my second conlang, S2, I've usually written down the design goals before starting. The major goals were always very short and general and so far never changed afterwards without destroying the whole conlang... Or better, my ideas that started a new conlang were usually design goals, which I then wrote down before I started. These design goals are of course based on my aesthetical goals: the primary design goal is always that I *like* the resulting conlang. :-) The exact focus may be very different, of course. S11 and some related sketches are an example where the design goals changed: it's a mess. It started with an interesting system of vowel harmory which also had a pleasing romanisation. But I did not write down goals for the whole conlang then. I added consonants and consonant sandhi and then a font (yet incomplete, but I think it will eventually be a nice one), then I changed the sound system, because the sandhi rules were awful. The font had to be adjusted now, because it was designed closely to account for the phoneme/phone mapping and sandhi rules. Meanwhile, I had an idea about a special kind of syntax that is parsable with a context-free parser, which I eventually added to S11, and which also influenced the design of the font, because some morpho-phonological processes were marked. And then I started a project (S22) without a phonology and without syntax for an oligosynthetic or oligoisolating conlang. I've got vocab there now and about 10 different phonology 'modules' for experiments. Eventually, I wanted to use this for making words in S11, use the grammar there and its current sound system, but I don't know whether it will fit well. Furthermore, one of the sound systems I came up with as an example is extremely beautiful; it is inspired by Náhuatl. It is suited for the syntax system, too, but it would mean to discard what started S11 altogether (including that nice unfinished font). I even thought about removing S11 from my website, but that would be work, too, and it does have a fancy romanisation and sound system. ;-) So, that's what I call a mess. Three projects aiming at different parts of an engelang, and none functional. The subsequent conlangs S17 (Þrjótrunn) and S25 (Terkunan), my first aposteriori langs, worked out very well so far, and I did write down design goals (or better: they started as design goals). They worked so well that I am currently not in the mood to go back to the above-mentioned mess. I still consider everything between S11 and S25 'active' (those are three to six projects, depending on how you count the mess), maybe I'll even get back to S9 (Da Mätz se Base) or S7 (Qþyn|gài) one day -- who knows, both have their weaknesses I might want to try to fix. **Henrik

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Edgard Bikelis <bikelis@...>