Re: Question about starting

--- On Wed, 11/19/08, Bookworm Alpha <bwormalpha@...> wrote:

> From: Bookworm Alpha <bwormalpha@...>
>
> Some folks who saw that initial word accused me of using
> Norwegian as
> my language's base, but that is not the case at all. In
> fact, the
> concept is that the language is a so-called
> "superlanguage" that
> encompasses concepts from nearly all the major Terran
> language groups.
The first question you need to ask yourself is are you more interested in MAKING a
language, or are you more interested in HAVING a language.

To make a convincing language you have to take all kinds of factors into
considerations such as phonology, morphology, syntax, grammar, and so on. This
can be a daunting project, and unless it is really the process of language
creation you are interested in, might be overwhelming.

There is an alternative way to HAVE a convincing language without most of the work
of creating a language from scratch, and that is to re-lexify an existing
language (NOT English, please. That's too transparent even to the casual
reader.) To do that,

STEP ONE: pick some interesting, but reasonably obscure language that has a lot of
resources on the net. Take, for example, Pali.

For example:
A Guide to Learning Pali: <http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bullitt/learningpali.html>
<http://orunla.org/tm/pali/>
A practical Grammar of the Pali Language: <http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/paligram.pdf>

And so on.

Then, STEP TWO

At this point you have a whole grammar of a whole real language. Then you can
either devise a scheme for substituting letters in Pali for new letters (vowels
for vowels and consonants for consonants so the words are pronounceable) or you
can simply dream up new words for each word you encounter. Thus, Pali "pasana"
might become "bitako" letter by letter, or it might become "fatarie" by
inventing a whole new word.

In either case, to preserve the grammar, you would need to invent new verb
endings and case ending for nouns, and use those newly invented endings the
same way the original Pali grammar used them:

naro (migo) -> man (deer)
narasa (migasa) -> man's -or- of the man (deer's -or- of the deer)
narena (Migena) -> by, with, or on account of the man (deer)
... etc

might become (with new invented words and endings):

jonni (bambi) -> man (deer)
jonniku (bambiku) -> man's (deer's)
jonnati (bambati) -> by, with, or on account of the man (deer)

Then do the same for verb conjugations.

Just keep it consistent with each one of your new invented endings representing the
same original Pali (or whatever language) endings. That way you have a
complete, sensible, consistent, and naturalistic grammar with little more work
than compiling a new list of words and endings, and a little bit of effort
learning the grammar of your original source language.

You might not want to actually use Pali since it has 8 cases and 25 or 30
different classes of noun case endings, although it would be a simple matter to
ignore all but 2 or 3 of the classes, since you will be making up your own
words anyway. But you'd still either have to deal with all 8 cases, or invent
prepositions to take their place. But then your back into language engineering.

Which ever language you picked, if you decided to try this approach, be sure its not
a widely known one like German, English, Spanish, etc.

--gary

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