Re: Ideas for a cant-derived conlang

Greg Bear in two early novels, The Infinity Concerto and The Serpent Mage,
combined as Songs of Earth and Power, has a conlang based on several (mostly
Irish) cants.

It might be worth checking it out.

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 02:43, you wrote:
> I've had an idea for a conlang which ultimately derived from a cant. This
> is the language of a culture of itinerant river traders, who used cant to
> discuss matters of trade with each other without being understood by
> outsiders. In time the cant developed into a fully featured language.
> Processes involved included
> Semantic inversions, eg "house" swaps meaning with "boat", "land" swaps
> meaning with "water", genitive becomes a construct case.
> Using idiomatic expressions to replace their literal meaning entirely, eg
> "mature" becomes "leafblossom", from the expression "with leaf and
> blossom". Mixing of metaphors - deliberately confusing two idiomatic
> expressions for the same thing taken from different dialects to produce an
> expression comprehensible in neither of the original dialects.
> New phonotactic and morphological rules, with words altered to fit them.
>
> Pete
--
Wesley Parish
* * *
Clinersterton beademung - in all of love.
* * *
Mau e ki, "He aha te mea nui?"
You ask, "What is the most important thing?"
Maku e ki, "He tangata, he tangata, he tangata."
I reply, "It is people, it is people, it is people."