Re: How to evaluate a conlang

On Wed, 28 Sep 2005, 05:15 CEST, João Ricardo de Mendonça
wrote:

 > How do you evaluate a conlang? How do you define a "good"
 > or a "bad"
 > conlang? I understand this is a personal criteria, so I'm
 > not looking
 > for a definitive answer. I just wanted to know other
 > people's opinions
 > on this.

Clones of your L1 or any tolkienean language are usually
disregarded. And there are some other typical newbie errors
to avoid, like assigning unsensibly complex meanings like "a
gummy bear that accidentally fell under the sofa pillow and
was found by the dog of good friends of our family ten years
later when it was hard like stone" to a word like "at".
That's simply hilarious. I think there's once been a thread
where we discussed about the features of an "übernoob"
parody jokelang. Just keep your stuff consistent and try to
avoid to re-invent the wheel called "your native language".
FWIW, I must admit my first conlang was heavily based on my
L1 German, too, and wasn't consistent at all as for its
sound for example. Oh, and it also helps to first collect
general ideas about the sound of your language and some
interesting grammatical featuers (e.g. I wanted Ayeri sound
at least a bit like Austronesian langs like Indonesian
originally, though it didn't completely work out as I
wanted). Actually, conlanging is much like model building.
First, you have the idea. Then you see how you could realize
things. Then you go to a hardware shop or something and buy
the materials you need. Then you sit down and build the
model, and if you don't like something, you need to refine
it.

Carsten

--
"Miranayam cepauarà naranoaris."
(Calvin nay Hobbes)

Current projects:
www.beckerscarsten.de/?conlang=ayeri
www.beckerscarsten.de/?conlang=tarsyanian