Re: Lexical Relatedness Morphology (wa Re: [Conlangs-Conf] Conference Overview)

staving David J. Peterson:

><<
>(One question, though: What does "the language is indestructible"
>mean, and why is it a problem?)
> >>
>
>As an example of this I gave my first language, Megdevi.  Whenever
>I encountered a problem (usually when translating something,
>e.g. Shakespeare's The Tempest, which I started to translate), I
>created a new morpheme--whether it be a root or an affix.  Rather
>than working with what I had, I just created a new form for
>whatever meaning was desired.  And whenever I heard of some
>new morphological process on Conlang or from a linguistics
>class, I'd just coin a new affix to add it in, without thinking about
>whether it fit in with the nature of my language or not.  The result
>is my language really didn't have a nature.  It was like a word-for-
>word uber-language relex, where every sense and every notion
>had a morpheme associated with it.
Over the weekend, I was thinking about this with relation to Khangaþyagon,
which has a very Item-and-Arrangement morphology - pure aggultination, to
the extent that language guesser software has been known to identify it as
Turkish. Did I avoid that trap, and if so, how? I think I did, because I
closed most of my bound morpheme categories fairly early on - that is, I
don't allow myself to just create new morphemes to solve problems, but have
to find creative ways of using the morphemes I've got, or make the syntax
do the work.

Another thing was that a lot of the work in developing Khangaþyagon,
especially the noun paradigm, was not in creating the items but in working
out the arangement - the point where I worked out the system of ranks for
the segunakar was a major breakthrough, and was the start of the transition
from sketchlang to usable.

I must get round to downloading some of the other talks - I hope they're as
thought-provoking as yours.

Pete

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