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Re: Isolating, Inflected, Word Building, ETC.

From:Henrik Theiling <theiling@...>
Date:Monday, December 5, 2005, 17:11
Hi!

Gary Shannon <fiziwig@...> writes:
> These are some really fascinating topics that make me wish I had > majored in linguistics instead of engineering. ;-)
:-)
> But all this makes me suspect that the best way to arrive at a > really naturalistic conlang is not to build it from scratch to > completion in one step, but to evolve it, step by step, from some > starting point, either an existing natlang, or a very rudimentary ad > hoc proto-language. If one started, for example, with the few dozen > words from the language of the movie "Caveman", and applied, a few > hundred years at a time, ten thousand years worth of mutations, it > would seem that the result would be a very plausible imitation of a > non-existent natlang. Assuming, of course, that the mutations > applied at each step are plausible.
YES! This is a heck of a lot of work to do, but it often results in really great conlangs, yes. :-) I have never managed to do this so far due to the endless work in front of me and my limited knowledge (due to lack of interest, I think) of (linguistic) history and instead sticked to engelangs/artlangs that were constructed according to what my computer science back ground dictated. :-) Even that takes so much time (-> writing the Lisp grammar). E.g., S11 needs more work. I'd finally like some example sentences, I think! **Henrik

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