Re: creating words (was Re: "Language Creation" in your conlang)

Andreas Johansson sikyal:

> > I think you can get away with leaving it incomplete.  Come up with a
> > basic phonoloyg, some gramatical suffixes (or have the protolang be
> > isolating, depending on the present lang), and vocab.  Syntax, et al.
> > can be pretty much ignored, except for some basic issues like
> > adjective-noun order (for determining compound words), since syntax
> > tends to be pretty changeable over time.
>
> I find even that level of completeness hard to achieve when what I really want
> to do is elaborating the "modern" language. Conjuring up an ancestral
> phonology and phonotaxis with some grammatical markers isn't that hard, but
> making a large number of ancestral roots before I start the (already painfully
> slow) process of creating vocabulary for the modern language(s) is.
>
> So what happens is I invent a "modern", usually Tairezazh, word, work out a
> possible ancestral form, and then goes forward again to the sister languages.
What's wrong with that? No one said that you had to *complete* the parent
language before making the daughter languages, you just have to have some
idea of what it is. What you described is, in practice, what I usually do
with Yivrian. So long as the roots you create conform to the ancient
phonotactics, you're fine.


--
Jesse S. Bangs jaspax@u.washington.edu
http://blog.glossopoesis.org

"We're counting on our virtues,
Cause it's too hard to count the dead."
 - Jason Webley

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