Re: Introducing myself, and several questions
| From: | Damian Yerrick <tepples@...> |
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| Date: | Thursday, February 17, 2005, 9:43 |
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"B. Garcia" wrote:
>Why worry about what offends people? As long as your conlang isn't
>created with offensive words (such as using natlang offensive words as
>words in your conlang... like for instance ni**er for "love").
ANADEW. See various pidgins, argots, and cants that borrow swearwords
as ordinary words. Some English speakers find "pickaninny" nearly as
offensive as the N word, but Tok Pisin has borrowed it as the
ordinary word for "child":
http://listserv.brown.edu/archives/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0006B&L=conlang&P=R13857&D=0&m=16554
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tok_Pisin
Worse yet, the Russian argot called Mat:
http://www.kenai-peninsula.org/archives/000023.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mat_%28language%29
Heck some would argue that if Dutch were a conlang, its word
|natie| for "nation" would offend anyone who remembers the
Holocaust because it's pronounced roughly ["na.t_si].
(Forgive me if I mistranscribed it into X-SAMPA; some details
of the notation are still new to me.)
http://www.ataris.com/board/Forum10/HTML/009650-2.html
And while looking these up, I found a "category tree" that might
prove useful for philosophical conlangs:
http://www.wordreference.com/definition/pickaninny
Sally Caves wrote:
>>>>My name is Damian, and I'm a conlanger.
>>>
>>>This does sound like a twelve step program, doesn't it! :)
>>
>> If only it took only 12 steps to make a conlang :)
>
>:)
For the record, the allusion to Alcoholics Anonymous was intentional.
I was half expecting someone else to pipe up and give some sort of
humorous list of 12 steps from zero to conlanger or vice versa.
>> Wouldn't I have to worry about offending native speakers of
>> the existing natlang(s) or creators of the existing conlang(s)
>> if I include too many identifiable words?
>
>Take a look at Ill Bethisad, Damian. Here's the Wiki:
>
>
http://ib.frath.net/w/Main_Page>However, a terrific book is Bernard Comrie's Language Universals and
>Linguistic Typology which gives examples from various non IE languages.
Thanks. I'll add it to my wishlist.
>And
>even a plain grammar can give you enough information about a language's
>phonology and structure that you can go on from there.
This is sort of what I meant by saying that I'd read about
other languages.
>>what are the forces
>>that help a language become consonant-rich?
>
>Your own decision to make it so. You might be trying to rebuild New York
>City in minute detail. No invented language will ever have the history of a
>real language. One can give it the look of one, though, to some extent.
Understanding language change will help once I go beyond isolates
and try to create a language _family_.
Ph. D. wrote:
>if you have access to a large university library, try to
>find _Languages and their Status_ and _Languages and their
>Speakers_ both edited by Timothy Skopen.
I'll add them to my wishlist.
Henrik Theiling wrote:
>What is the link between 'isolating' and 'vague'?
Isolating languages tend to rely more on context to express things
that agglutinative or fusional languages tack on as affixes to a
noun or verb. For instance, all verbs in most Germanic and Romance
languages carry obligate tense and aspect inflection, but Chinese
verbs use optional adverbs. But it's only a correlation; if I
remember correctly, the auxlang Novial allows to leave off
endings to express a numberless, genderless noun.
Further corroboration of my 3-SAT vs. 2-SAT hypothesis is
Bigbabytalk, a language based on serial 3-word clauses,
which I discovered whilst searching the list archive:
http://web.archive.org/web/19990507163044/http://web.singnet.com.sg/~webbooks/paper101.htm
Muke Tever wrote:
>> Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> writes:
>>> ...
>>> Pirahã is the name.
>>> ...
>>> I am pretty sure that it is a hoax.
>>
>> Well, yes, the stories I read are so unbelievable that it is hard to
>> believe it's real. However, there are many different sources. If a
>> hoax, it must be a huge-scale one. If not, it's truely strange. How
>> to check?
>
>An overview, in PDF form, "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in
Piraha":
I have just finished reading that analysis, and the Pirahã culture
seems to reflect disturbingly much of the nature exemplified by the
conlang Toki Pona.
--
Damian
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