Re: irregularities

Tom Tadfor Little sikayal:

> It occurred to me the other day that there is a decent mechanism at hand
> for making conlangs more naturalistic, if that is something one values. The
> first stabs at morphology and syntax as one starts to sketch the language
> tend to be somewhat vague. As we gain more experience with the language, we
> tend to find very specific things we like and make them normative for the
> language.
[snip]

This is exactly what has worked to create a lot of the irregularities in
Yivríndil, though in a different way.  When I first started conlanging it,
I made lots of *regularities* that became unable to sustain as the
language evolved.  So now I have clusters of words which mean similar
things and look alike, but aren't actually related through any
morphological process, past or present.  For example, I have the cluster
of words /per/, /par/, /pel/, meaning "tongue, language, lip"
respectively.  Sounds nice, except that the vowel alternation is random
and I have no idea how the l/r alternation came about.  And the relation
*isn't* naturalistic -- a real lang would have completely unrelated forms
for those words.  Frustrating.

My early langs did have a gender system which I later abandoned, but I now
recognize that the sort-of-regular forms are from the old six-way gender
distinction, which was a feature of Proto-Yivril.  But I would have never
known this about Proto-Yivril if I hadn't messed up in the early stages of
my language.


Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu

"If you look at a thing nine hundred and ninety-nine times, you are
perfectly safe; if you look at it the thousandth time, you are in
frightful danger of seeing it for the first time."
--G.K. Chesterton