Re: ,Language' in language name?

On Sun, 9 Dec 2001 15:46:01 -0500, Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> wrote:

>Irina Rempt wrote:
>> > This viewpoint
>> > is derived from my philosophy of conlanging: that of discovery, not
>> > creation.
>>
>> What came first, the philosophy or the realization that this was the
>> way it worked for you? For me it was the latter.
>
>For me it's a combination.
For me, it used to be a realisation, and has become a philosophy.

For example, I quickly found it boring to invent thousands of root words.
Thus I stopped all attempts at a priori conlanging. Strangely, reforming
a pre-existing system feels more... creative. And this has become my
philosophy.

Like, for example, asking myself what a given paradigm would get
transformed into by this and this phonetic changes, and what all that would
imply for syntax. Or, what a given syntactic construction can be
substituted with, and which parts of paradigms can be thus forgotten, and
which sound changes will be therefore more tolerable, etc...

Even when I start from just one weird feature, I usually try to find out
within what kind of a less weird system it could evolve, and why, and what
it would nicely correlate with... and so it gets kind of refined,
developing in its own way which I wouldn't have been able to foresee.

It doesn't feel like anything *mine* after some point, and that's where it
becomes really fascinating.

[...]
>Then, after the skeleton is in place, I begin to explore it, trying out
>features to see if it works.  Occasionally, I'll discover a feature.  If
>I don't like it, I sometimes try to eliminate it.  Sometimes its
>successful, but most of the times, I just have to accept it, because it
>feels "wrong" to do otherwise.
Yes, this is like the way I feel it, too.


Basilius
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