Re: A different strategy for conlang design

Gary Shannon said:
>
> Begin with a small book, perhaps even a children's
> book or a "young adult" novel like the Hardy Boys or
> Nancy Drew, (Or maybe Harry Potter!) and starting at
> page one, paragraph one, just write a translation into
> some previously non-existant conlang, right off the
> top of your head, inventing words and grammatical
> principles as you go along.  Don't back track, just
> keep forging ahead, straight through the whole book.
That's more or less how I started developing the artlangs for my wife's
project (using oral narratives apparently collected by her from the
natives in question), but I ultimately painted myself into corners and am
now having to revisit their morphosyntaxes to straighten them out
top-down. That was mostly due to the fact that they're supposed to
resemble certain language groups *here*.

But now, seeing this thread, I want to try to get all the way through some
text translations for a new, unencumbered, stream-of-consciousness
artlang. I guess I could stick with the Aesop's Fables I was using to
demonstrate Classical Yiklamu. Or Grimms', perhaps. Genji Monogatari?


-- Mark