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Re: OT: What makes a good conlang? (was Re: Super OT: Re: CHAT: JRRT)

From:H. S. Teoh <hsteoh@...>
Date:Monday, March 8, 2004, 22:10
On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 10:53:31PM +0100, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo! > > On Sat, 6 Mar 2004 18:38:58 -0000, > And Rosta <a.rosta@...> wrote:
[...]
> > I think verisimilitude is a major ingredient of what I most value > > in an artlang, too. How do you judge 'realism'? To me, it's mainly > > a matter of complexity, of scale, and of completeness. The more > > complex, the more large-scale, and the more complete it is, the > > more realistic it is. > > Not necessarily. A brief sketch can also capture a small part of > an imagined reality quite well. It may not look like a complete > natlang, but like a brief sketch of a natlang. One should not confuse > quantity and quality, neither in conlanging nor in any other art, as > masterful haikus on one hand and Nazi monumental buildings on the > other hand demonstrate. I'd always prefer a brief sketch which shows > masterful treatment of certain details over a complete conlang which > consists of a humdrum, obviously unreflected SAE grammar and a > randomly generated vocabulary.
I fully agree. This is one of the main reasons I stayed away from automatically generating Ebisédian vocabulary in any way, even though that meant that I have to be content with its incomplete lexicon for many more years. [snip]
> > On the other hand, languages that seem > > to go beyond what is plausible for a human language, such as > > Ebisedian and Ithkuil, I don't find realistic (though they > > have other attractions). > > Ebisedian represents a language from a *very* alien universe, > thus one should not expect it to look like a plausible human > language.
[...] On the other hand, it *was* designed with human speakers in mind. Though much of the vocabulary is very alien out of necessity, since universe in which the Ebisédi live simply is that alien, the innards of the language itself was intended to be "realistic" in the sense of being plausibly "intuitive" to a human speaker. Now whether I succeeded in my intentions is another topic altogether. One of the reasons I started to develop Tamahí, the descendent of Ebisédian, was because I realized that, due to my inexperience when I first designed Ebisédian, I had gone too far in letting the Ferochromon universe invade the perceptions of the Ebisédi, and in my indulgence in exotic linguistic features. I don't know how obvious it is from the scant Tamahí sketches that I posted so far, but I'm basically using the excuse of language change to revise the less savory features of Ebisédian (such as its less-than-likely phonology) and drop features which I realize in retrospect were too overboard. I'm still working on some core parts of Tamahí to make it less bizarre. (But I should say up front that I have no intentions of dropping the case system, since it is actually quite intuitive to me. It is the one thing that I would keep even if I dropped everything else and started from scratch. I still consider that the reason people find it odd is simply because we are too used to accusative typology. I did, however, drop the instrumental case in Tamahí and introduce proper adjectives in place of the non-verbal sentences, which I intend to completely discard. Whether people realize it or not, the non-verbal sentences play a much larger role in Ebisédian's exotic feel than the case system itself, second only to the exotic vocabulary.) Be that as it may, I do not believe that human language is as easily systematized as some linguists would have us believe, so I am not apologetic in the least in saying that Ebisédian's case system is actually quite intuitive, even if my first attempt at it may have gone a little too far. T -- This is not a sentence.