Re: help with starting out

On Sun, 25 Jun 2000 02:11:20 EDT, Jason Scott <Pete544xx@...> wrote:

>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
Not all languages are as inflectional (or more precisely, "fusional") as
French, German, and Latin. In fusional languages, a single affix can
incorporate more than one element of meaning (such as tense, person, number
and mood all in one suffix). But a language like Turkish (often referred to
as an "agglutinative" language) represents each element with a separate
morpheme rather than combining them like Latin does. Since I don't know
Turkish, I'll illustrate with some examples from Kazvarad (one of my rare
agglutinative languages).

Sharvinalikekh.
sharvin- a-     l-      ik-  ekh
know     I(NOM) it(ACC) PAST NEG
"I didn't know it."

Kalazaldekh.
kalaz- a-     l-      d-  ekh
see    I(NOM) it(ACC) can NEG
"I can't see it."

Mishadimat kalazva.
mishad- im- at  kalaz- va
cat     ERG DEF see    me(ACC)
"The cat sees me."

Nendarat nuyash edritchatral zavratya khalayu.
Nendar-     at  nuyash edritch- at- ral zavr- at- ya  khalay- u.
button(ABS) DEF orange middle   DEF LOC wall  DEF GEN press   IMPER
"Press the orange button in the middle of the wall."

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