Re: New to the list

En réponse à Patrick Jarrett <syberseraph@...>:

> > Do you have any info on your conlang? Curious minds want to know! :-)
> >
> My conlang is called Tierian (tee-air-ean) and is in its early early
> infancy, I have an alphabet down and had endings for nouns, but I am
> deciding whether I want to go isolative or use inflections. I am a large
> Latin fan and the logical construction of Latin has me wanting endings,
> but
> it is such a pain to speak Latin I don't think any natural language
> would
> have as many endings as Latin.
>
Well, then you don't know about Finnish, Hungarian, Turkish, Basque, etc... They
certainly have at least as many endings as Latin :) . Also, Latin is a natural
language. It's dead, but it's a natural language, so if Latin had so many
endings (and that's a matter of taste, personnally I don't think it has that
many endings, but maybe it's because I'm French), why not other languages? I
don't think Ancient Romans had any difficulty speaking Latin (and if you oppose
me that most people didn't speak Classical Latin but Vulgar Latin, I will answer
that the people that could write Classical Latin could certainly speak it
without much trouble). I think it's the same with Sanskrit. And I also think
that Hindi, the official language of India, has also lots of inflections. But my
knowledge of Hindi is next to nothing, so I may be wrong. Correct me if I am.

So you cannot say that natural languages cannot have as many endings as Latin.
In fact, I'm pretty sure you can find languages with a more complicated grammar
than Latin. But if your personal taste goes against that, then it's another
problem. If you like endings but you don't want to have as many as in Latin, why
not create an agglutinative language: you give to each grammatical feature you
want to mark a single ending (or prefix, declinations don't need to appear
always at the end of the word), and this ending can be used as it is by every
word that can take this grammatical feature. For instance, if you want to mark
case, instead of having 11 possibilities for the genitive case like in Latin (5
declinations, the third declination separated in two groups, and singular and
plural having different endings), make it into only one ending. Also, if you
mark number, you can separate it from case, and have one ending only for case,
and one other only for number, instead of conflating them in one ending. This
way, you will reduce the number of endings very quickly.

Anyway, welcome to the list, and if you need any other help, just ask. An let us
know about your conlang when you've worked more on it (I like its name, Tierian
sounds nice).

Christophe.