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Conlang Change and The Definite Article

From:Doug Ball <db001i@...>
Date:Saturday, April 22, 2000, 16:03
Sally Caves wrote:
> not a conscious change I'm making "overnight" (as some people do when they do >a major conlang rehaul)
I believe that I would be one of the people that Sally is referring to. I rarely make gradual changes, but seem to overhaul things quite suddenly and quite drastically. It seems that it tends to happen at least once a year (although this year there's been at least three kind of major changing sessions), and it seems to be a sort of necessary part of my conlanging experience, i.e. there seems to be some uncontrollable aspect to it. Do others of you experience the same sort of thing? How often do you change your conlang(s)? Are you in the slow process-camp or the overnight-camp? Now recently, I enacted some rather drastic changes to Skerre, moving it from SVO to VSO (and this a couple days before my presentation--I wouldn't ever recommend that to anyone, but it is possible if you are well-motivated). Anyway, that has made Skerre a bit unstable, so I look to the list's collective wisdom: In looking at VSO langs, I have yet to see one that doesn't have the definite article. So in moving Skerre to VSO, I figured I should add the definite article. However, with my beloved reduplicative plural prefix, the article becomes a problem, because it becomes confusing between, ta tansko (the race), and tatansko (races). Looking at possible solutions to my problem, I'm pondering adding a suffixing definite article. Does this seem natural, especially for a VSO lang? -Doug