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

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

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