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Re: First Conlang...? & What Happened?

From:Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...>
Date:Wednesday, January 7, 2004, 18:22
On Tuesday, January 6, 2004, at 11:36  PM, David Peterson wrote:

> <<snip discussion>> > > I didn't mean to say that all first conlangs were that way (indeed, > mine was a rip-off of the Arabic triconsonantal root system); I was > just trying to remember what the stereotype was. A stereotype's not > always true, and it also isn't to say that euroclones or agglutinating > languages are bad.
I didn't understand you to mean those things. However, there is a reason stereotypes exist. When I first joined CONLANG and the artlangers started coming out of the woodwork and joined the list, there seemed to me to be a proliferation of languages which had the following features: * ergative/absolutive alignment * large noun classification systems (i.e., gender) * Celtic-style mutation * an abundance of case forms (à la Finnish) * simple agglutinative morphology There was also a definite trend for Semitic-style root-and-pattern grammatical organization, though it was trend which was separate from the one giving rise to the above-named features. My own project of the time, Tepa, was undertaken as a reaction to these trends. It therefore had: * active alignment (as I understood it then) * no gender * Numic-style consonant alternations (just a hop, skip and a jump from Celtic mutations, really, but it was Numic, dammit! and not Celtic) * no case * prosodically marked morphological categories (reduplication of various sorts, gemination, infixation, non-Semitic templatic stuff) Most of these traits are present in Tepa's descendant, Miapimoquitch. I have since come to understand the lure of the Celto-Finno-Bantu hybrids that once abounded here, though it's still not my aesthetic. Dirk -- Dirk Elzinga Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu If the brain were so simple we could understand it, we would be so simple we couldn't. - Lyall Watson

Replies

Joe <joe@...>
Benct Philip Jonsson <bpj@...>First Conlang...? & What Ha ppened?