Re: help with starting out

Herman Miller wrote:
>
> 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."
Yup, a lot of my langs are similar to this -- they're almost all
agglutinating.  This may seem systematic, but probably only because
you're used to inflecting langs.  Hungarian is also an agglutinating
lang, but I don't know any of it, so I'll give a few similar examples
from my Ini:

Pan pamum
P-   -a-       -n       pa   mum
past imperfect negative have masc3pl
"They didn't have"

Kan pamum
K-     -a-       -n       pa   mum
future imperfect negative have masc3pl
"They will not have"

See, the first word in each sentence seems pretty systematic, but only
because it's made of some of the same morphemes -- I think this is kinda
nice in conlanging actually, because you have to make up and/or memorize
way fewer morphemes (for example, in Ini there are only 13 morphemes to
remember for these little tense/aspect/mood particles, but an inflecting
lang might have as many as 120 completely different words expressing the
same info).  Just my $.02

Nicole
--
nicole.eap@snet.net
http://www.geocities.com/nicole_eap
AIM sn:  iiiieeeee