Re: Unilang: the Grammar

Hi Henrik!

--- Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> SuomenkieliMaa <suomenkieli@...> writes:
> > If I may butt in, to the person writing on
> Tyl-Sjok,
> > why is it that you decided on making simple
> concepts
> > like "come/go" into long phrases as you said
> > ("move-use-foot").  Is it to resemble Mandarin or
> > something?  Just curious...
>
> For various reasons:
>   - the language should be isolating, and I thought
>     that a concept of `go' and `come' is merely the
> same
>     with some variation, so it should be composed.
>     The problem is, of course, to decide where to
> stop
>     decomposing concepts...
Again I suppose it is 'to each his own', but just to
comment, I agree with your idea that the conlang
should be unique and not just a spin-off of a living
language.  Several emails back, I mentioned to you my
conlang Vya:a:h - which I erroneously described as a
"spin-off of Finnish".  I ought to correct myself now,
my intention is to base about 40% of the vocab off
Finnish/Estonian with the remaining 60% purely of
itself - brand new.  (Of course, as I relish the rough
but sweet-to-the-ear melody of the Finno-Ugric
languages, incl. Hungarian, I should most like to have
Vya:a:h's melody and basic sound components, I believe
they call this in linguistic "phonemes", similar to
those aforementioned tongues, whilst attempt to
incorporate other elements from around the globe as
well as my own personal concepts into it).  So the
above point you make is understandable.

>   - the language is supposed to be some kind of
>     proto-language for unbelievably complicated
>     languages yet to come.  These will use a lot
>     of contraction to derive words from their
>     constructed ancestor, Tyl-Sjok.
>     By using composition now, I'll be able to
>     `compute' new stems in offspring languages.
Here, however, I may comment this.  If you intend of
having Tyl-Sjok act as the "mother" tongue from which
to base offspring languages, will it not be terribly
confusing/difficult to proceed if the mother tongue
already holds such hard-to-remember combinations as
"move-use-foot" to describe "come/go"?  The offspring
tongues' concept of these verbs must become
mind-boggling I guess.

>   - the language is meant to be (almost overly)
>     ambiguous.  So usually, you simply don't use
>     the long phrase for `to come', but mere use
>     `to move'.
Ambiguous, indeed!  By the way, what sort of writing
system will Tyl-Sjok have?  Any incorporated at all,
or is this just for a book, or...?  If you're aiming
at ambiguity, definitely a non-Latin alphabet /
writing system is a must!  I think I saw one earlier
on Draseleq, when searching the net on conlang.
Amazingly beautiful character system, although I do
not care so much for "horizontal" (ie, characters
which, in writing may actually be written veritically
like Jpn, are consisted per se from a left-to-right or
right-to-left motion) script as I would call it.
Vya:a:h script, for instance, resembles to a degree a
cross-between Hangul - Khmer - Kana although it is not
a hybrid of any of these.

M

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