Re: *junctions of time

On Sun, Mar 19, 2006 at 01:31:08PM -0500, Roger Mills wrote:

> Most interesting. This post, and your previous one on conjunctions, has
> provided some very worthwhile food for thought...:-)
Yes, this ties in with something I've been thinking about lately regarding
my conlangs' vocabularies.

This is worse with Toma Heylm than merechi, but my conlangs have a distressing
habit of only expanding under pressure (contrary to physical law! :) of a
Relay.  And under that time pressure, far too many relex-coinages occur.

merechi is partly immune because of a strong bias for deriving words from
existing forms, but since Toma Heylm was created in part as a backlash to
that bias, it has a bias for lots of separate, unrelated words.  And this
has led to a preposition inventory that is not only expanding to match
English's, but to become (eventually) a proper superset.  Not conlangy at
all!  Or rather very beginner-conlangy.

Prepositions are the worst offenders, but adverbs (being another highly
variable and ill-defined semantic space) also suffer from it.  And adverbs
of time (and prepositions of time) are part of my problem.

I don't know if I want to go back and "fix" these languages.  Toma Heylm
has had the rot from the beginning, as one of the very first things I did
with it in high school was to try to translate a poem we were reading in
English class into it, coining as I went.  (I've long wanted to make a
master Toma Heylm concordance specifically for the purpose of expunging
from the language any word which appears only in this blasted poem!  So
maybe I do want to "fix" it.  But I'm reluctant to retroactively remove
published Relay text words just because they are essentially English
borrowings.)

merechi doesn't bother me as much, because it is my personal language and
can do whatever it damn well pleases :)  And because it has enough personality
to stand on its own.  But my recent Relay experiences have definitely had
me thinking that I want to spec out a new language which will either: a)
not *have* prepositions and adverbs; direction, time and quality of events
would have to be inflected grammatically into the verbs; or b) have a rigidly
defined and CLOSED class of time, space and manner words (I have never
closed a language before, generally because I do not sit down and generate
words until it is really complete).

a) is very attractive, and would work well in a North-American-oid
polysynthetic conlang, but I don't have any of those on a front burner
right now.  b) might be doable for the one new conlang I have under
development, Mli Vjacgu, but I sort of think of that one as intentionally
IE-oid (although not derived from IE bases), so it would need subtler
treatment.

Anyway, Taliesin's thoughts on words-of-time will be very useful if I
ever get around to any of this.  It would be nice to have a similar
breakdown of words-of-space, although I imagine that would be easier to
come up with on one's own.

Has anyone else found themselves coining too many inappropriate words under
Relay time pressure?

Amanda