Re: help with starting out

Hi, Jason,

First of all, a word of encouragement.    If you are dissatisfied with your
grammar, you are probably doing something right.   You apparently understand
that the decision to have a lot of cases, for example, has a lot of
ramifications.   That's more than I understood when I first took up
conlanging.

Second, if you're aiming for an account of your language that's as complete
as, say, the textbooks you have for Latin, German, and French, a certain
amount of complexity is unavoidable.   Writing a language textbook, even one
for an imaginary language, is bound to keep you occupied for a long time.
You'll need to make decisions about the amount of detail you want to go
into.   You have the option of doing anything from a short grammatical
sketch to a long reference grammar.

Third, a caution.   Although making a conlang seem natural is often a fun
challenge, I wouldn't be too afraid to introduce artificial degrees of
regularity in your first project.   Esperanto is artificially regular, and
it's famous!   :-)

Fourth:   Sometimes it helps to identify a theme or idea that you want to
build your conlang around.  Latin's unknown relative?   A better auxlang
than Esperanto?   A language with only nouns?   A language that uses
something other than word order or case endings to convey who's doing what
to whom?   A language that uses familiar cases in both familiar and
unfamiliar ways?   A language for elves or ants?   Themes like these can
help you focus your efforts, and limit the temptation to throw absolutely
everything including the kitchen sink into your grammar.

Fifth, about inflections.   If your inflections seem "too systematic," study
the Latin declensions, and pay special attention to how "systematic" or
"unsystematic" they seem to you.   Study other natlangs and identify those
aspects of them that seem "systematic."

I put quotes around "systematic" because it's not really a grammatical term.
But I don't mean to imply that it's an illegitimate term.  Unlike
linguistics, conlanging permits you to make judgments about which
grammatical structures are beautiful, ugly, pedestrian, exotic, organic,
mechanical, wild, or systematic.   Yup, you're an artist, or at the very
least, a craftsman.

Here's a couple of suggestions for addressing the "my flexional endings are
too regular" blues:

a)    Write down the Latin declensions using this notation:

C1    =    one consonant
C2    =    another consonant
and so on.

V1    =    one vowel or diphthong
V2    =    another vowel or diphthong
and so on.

Then fill in the blanks with the vowel sounds and consonants appropriate to
your language.   Then change the resulting endings in accordance with your
language's syllable structure, and also to taste.

b)    Another way to avoid the problem of inflections that seem too
systematic is to decline your nouns or conjugate your verbs by changing the
stems.   These changes can be artificially systematic too, but have a more
"natural" or "inflected" feel than a nice, neat table of suffixes in my
opinion.

Hope this was helpful,

Jim






About inflections:




----- Original Message -----
From: "Jason Scott" <Pete544xx@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Saturday, June 24, 2000 11:11 PM
Subject: help with starting out


> Hello list.  I have been struggling with starting a conlang. I have taken
> French, German and Latin in school, studied Esperanto and looked at many
> conlangs and read the faq's on conlanging and yet I fall into the same
trap
> of creating an unwieldy grammar system that's too complicated and
artificial.
> I seem to always create inflections that seem to be more systematic than
> inflective. Can anyone give me some words of advice,  or some words of
> encouragement  =) ?    thanks.
>
> Jason
>