Re: Uber newbie-conlanger conlang

On Tue, 15 Mar 2005 01:54:44 -0800, David J. Peterson <dedalvs@...> wrote:

>
> If you want some concrete examples, I'm working on a page
> for my first conlang, Megdevi.  It's there to describe the
> language, and also to point out what *not* to do.  I wasn't
> ever going to put anything up on the web about it, but it
> showed up in Langmaker's Top 200, so I feel like I owe it to
> those who think it's a good language to set the record straight.
>
> The site is here:
>
> http://dedalvs.free.fr/megdevi.html
>
> The page isn't finished, but I think for your purposes, all the
> information you'd want is already up.
Interesting stuff. The line that struck me was:

"It goes on like this. Whenever I thought of a rule, I added it,
without a thought to how it would change what I'd done before, or what
it predicted for other areas of the grammar."

Which reminded me of my work with Ayhan, and how I had originally
allowed consonants to run into eachother without causing sound
changes, but when I changed the rule to be a bit more like Tagalog
(meaning consonants next to each other cause changes depending), that
it caused the entire system to become full of homonyms, which while
nice caused a lot of confusion when I began to think of it.

So, I had to go back and revise the sound rules, and also how to
prevent such things from happening (I like homonyms, but I don't like
LOTS of them, and i'm not a huge fan of using stress to differentiate
them either). Thankfully, the lexicon was small and after going
through it, I found that the changed words were few in number.

But, what this did was allowed some "irregularities" in the verb forms
and also with nouns created with the various affixes. Instead of being
"take root A and add affix B", it's become "Take root A, consider its
final consonant, add affix b, but change its initial consonant
depending on root A's final consonant".

--
Inu payangyara unamey ati tal amariey ka sey, payangyara kria?
Yanaysatra sonataya atan inu jumoey ati atan matawsara jumoey ati.