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

Quoting Nik Taylor <yonjuuni@...>:

> Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > I've several times attempted to do language families the right way around,
> but
> > it has always failed because it requires making the proto-language
> > vaguely "complete" first, whereas my real interest is always in the
> daughter
> > languages.
>
> 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.

                                                             Andreas

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