My conlang effort

Well, since I haven't written a single word about my conlang yet, let me
introduce the things I've been working on.

I am a huge fan of Sumeriology and decided I wanted to make a conlang that
used a similar system of writing - mayhap not in the same,
hard-to-write-with-a-pencil-form, but with glyphs-plus-syllabary. This much
should be obvious to those who read my last post about the movie Blade ...

I also decided that I was always so unhappy with my own, self-generated
languages that I was going to give myself a little jump - I've been using
Vovin's "A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu" to get me moving on the language
basics (phonology and syllabic structure) and I'm starting in on a more
Sumerian-style grammar. These two languages are startling similar in some
points, ie. posited vocalic harmony, posited archaic syllabic structure,
and the like, so it's been fun to use one with the other.

I have no webspace, nor time to make a webpage, so I'm going to try and get
something written up on the basics of this language, which I have not named
as I have not worked out the situational issues yet. That is, there are
going to be local, living descendants of this Ursprache (I've used that
word twice today, and in unrelated posts! Bad BB!) which are going to have
diverged in grammar and phonology - maybe even they'll be a tonal reflex
... wee hoo! But I'm not quite *there* yet, and hence haven't gotten all
the finicky details down, so more later.

I'm presuming a technology level roughly equivalent to that of the early
Old Babylonian empire, ie. late Bronze age (?), but since the setting is
going to be wet and forested and involve an idea I discussed long ago on
the Worldbuilding list, namely nonhuman sentient primates (ie. an alternate
Earth where the africanus survivor wasn't our ancestor, but another), it
will be not very much like Sumeria/Babylonia in form ...

BB


*********
I'm a kinky, queer, bisexual genderfucker. And they say, "write what you
know." -Cecilia Tan, 'Writing  Sex,' OutWrite 1999
You need to have a magpie mind. I think you need to like shiny things.
-Samuel R. Delaney on what it takes to be a scifi writer, OutWrite 1999
Only 298  shopping days left before the end of the world.