CONLANG Digest - 12 Oct 2001 to 13 Oct 2001 (#2001-287)

All right, I seriously have lots of email, so I’m going to put all my replies in
one email, ok? Kay.

>It means disposing of a language's vocabulary and putting in your own
>in its place. That's what most people do in their first naive attempts
>at a conlang. There's nothing wrong with that though, everybody does it
>at least once.
Ah, I see. It all makes sense now! :)
>My first conlang, ternAru, started out as a relexification of English
>and stayed like that for a while until I started to do some real
>messing with it. The biggest stages of change were (a) When it got a
>(rather complicated) case system, became Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) and
>the names of the pronouns got shuffled, and (b) when I decided to play
>with the case system to give a way of indicating the focus of a
>sentence - I ended up creating a trigger system without knowing or
>having heard of one before. When I found out what one was, I was quite
>chuffed with myself.
Neat!
>ternAru is quite different now from what it used to be. Now, if only I
>could organise my notes...
>
>K.
LOL. That’s part of my problem, too...
>Actually, any fool can die. There isn't to many other activities that
>don't require any competence of any kind. :-)
>
>                                                 Andreas
LOL. That’s very true. Though, some fools die in very strange, very stupid ways...

>Not this guy!  ;)>To put it in a real world context, relexification occurs in prolonged
>contact situations where a Pidgin forms, in which the substrate group
>keeps their own syntax relatively in tact while replacing their own
>lexicon with that of the superstrate language.  A quick example:
>
>Ewe:       avu          ma      le  tsa      yi           xo        te
>English:   the dog   that    is   walk  go   at   house  under
>Sranan:    a dagu    dati     e   waka  go  na   oso      ondro
>
>    "That dog is walking under the house."
>
>Sranan is a creole spoken in Suranam, and those who formed it
>originally spoke Ewe (a west African language), which was then
>relexified by English (eventually).  So, despite the absence of the
>locative marker in Ewe, the morphemes correspond exactly, whereas the
>words themselves are drawn from English (except for "na", and I forget
>where my prof. said that came from...)
>
>-Dave
Oh. Nifty. :)

>Sniff, sniff...
>
>Sorry about that, I just got it mixed up with creating a cypher.
>
>Ah well, at least I can take a Subtle Correction(TM) with grace...
>
>K.
LOL... doesn't everyone get mixed up? ;) Of course...

>Actually, in the context of Conlanging, "relexifying" is used to mean
>using invented words, but your native language's syntax, and with >words having a
>one-to-one correspondance with your native language's words.
Sooo many definitions!! Aaah. ;) J/k... I understand now. ;)

One more thing... Just want to say that I’m really jealous of all of you people
that can speak Hungarian (as well as any other language!). That’s one of the
languages I desperately want to learn...

Noelle-- The eternal babbler


The Aquamarine Demon
"When I hear somebody sigh, 'Life is hard,' I'm always tempted to ask, 'Compared to what?' "


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