Re: Question about starting

Bookworm Alpha wrote:
> 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.
> This language is being devised for a series of fiction novels I'm in
> the process of writing.

Bit o' advice:

When/if incorporating elements from other language groups, consider not
only features they have, but features they have by not having.  That is,
if a language group lacks something that most languages have, consider
making the lack of that feature what you pull in from that group.  That
will hopefully keep your language from getting too complex.

In fact, that's probably the more realistic way to do it, since, looking
into my crystal ball, I see that your series of novels is about a small
group of survivors from every continent who climbed into a spaceship and
escaped Terra just before the Cataclism.  The language they'd end up all
speaking would be an unbalanced creole (that borrows heavily from a few
and lightly from the rest) and creoles seem to retain only the simplest
parts of the original language's grammar and reinnovate the more complex
parts.


Carl Banks