Re: Average life of a conlang

On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 9:38 AM, Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...> wrote:
> Logan Kearsley wrote:
>
>> quoting Jörg Rhiemeier:
>>>
>>> I know very well what you are talking about.  It is similar with
>>> me and Old Albic.  Whenever I find out something about the language,
>>> it feels more like *discovering* something that has always been there
>>> than like *inventing* something that has never before been anywhere.
>>
>> I love it when that happens. Had it happen to me just yesterday, in
>> fact, when I discovered the difference between formal prose and poetic
>> forms of relative clauses in one of my langs.
>
> I love it, too. So much that I actively encourage it to happen, by giving
> authority to existing material and approaching the work rather more as a
> medium than as a creator.
I find it helps occasionally to impose certain limits, like trying to
translate poetry and match the meter & syllable counts, or deciding
that you will find a way to say something in X number of words, etc.
Makes for fun challenges if everything works out, but then if you
discover that there really is just no way to accomplish the task with
the language as-is, it can uncover previously unknown features. Great
for injecting a little naturalistic irregularity, or discovering
archaic remnants of a previous state of the language or evidence of
how the language is starting to change again.
The example of me discovering the difference in formal and poetic
forms of relative clauses- I was trying to (re)translate a song into
Celíminé, and ran out of spaces to put more syllables. There's a
strict S-O word order, and formal speech requires that relative
clauses be introduced with the relative pronoun; so, if the relative
pronoun happens to be the object of the clause, it has to re-cast into
passive voice, which adds several syllables and hence resulted in me
running out of syllables in the song translation. I then made the
happy discovery that, actually, the poetic form allows the relative
pronoun to appear anywhere, which can be slightly more confusing but
it all becomes unambiguous by the time you get to the end of the
sentence (and after all, English gets away with eliding relative
pronouns and so confusing the boundaries of relative clauses all the
time). And thus my syllable count difficulties were solved.
I still haven't discovered whether this is an archaic form that's just
held over in poetry, or if it's a new invention that will be slowly
leaking into casual speech.

-l.