There are 9 messages in this issue.
Topics in this digest:
1a. Re: Average life of a conlang
From: Logan Kearsley
1b. Re: Average life of a conlang
From: Philip Newton
1c. Re: Average life of a conlang
From: deinx nxtxr
2a. Re: Jaĩbi update and request for comment s
From: Christopher Bates
3. Bay Area Conlangs Meetup & Glossotechnia Playtest next Saturday
From: Sai Emrys
4a. Re: "Futurese" (American English in 3000CE)
From: deinx nxtxr
5a. "Knock it off" or "Leave off"
From: Scotto Hlad
5b. Re: "Knock it off" or "Leave off"
From: Philip Newton
6. FW: "Knock it off" or "Leave off"
From: Scotto Hlad
Messages
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1a. Re: Average life of a conlang
Posted by: "Logan Kearsley" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 31, 2008 10:11 am ((PDT))
On Sun, Aug 31, 2008 at 9:38 AM, Lars Finsen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Logan Kearsley wrote:
>
>> quoting Jörg Rhiemeier:
>>>
>>> I know very well what you are talking about. It is similar with
>>> me and Old Albic. Whenever I find out something about the language,
>>> it feels more like *discovering* something that has always been there
>>> than like *inventing* something that has never before been anywhere.
>>
>> I love it when that happens. Had it happen to me just yesterday, in
>> fact, when I discovered the difference between formal prose and poetic
>> forms of relative clauses in one of my langs.
>
> I love it, too. So much that I actively encourage it to happen, by giving
> authority to existing material and approaching the work rather more as a
> medium than as a creator.
I find it helps occasionally to impose certain limits, like trying to
translate poetry and match the meter & syllable counts, or deciding
that you will find a way to say something in X number of words, etc.
Makes for fun challenges if everything works out, but then if you
discover that there really is just no way to accomplish the task with
the language as-is, it can uncover previously unknown features. Great
for injecting a little naturalistic irregularity, or discovering
archaic remnants of a previous state of the language or evidence of
how the language is starting to change again.
The example of me discovering the difference in formal and poetic
forms of relative clauses- I was trying to (re)translate a song into
Celíminé, and ran out of spaces to put more syllables. There's a
strict S-O word order, and formal speech requires that relative
clauses be introduced with the relative pronoun; so, if the relative
pronoun happens to be the object of the clause, it has to re-cast into
passive voice, which adds several syllables and hence resulted in me
running out of syllables in the song translation. I then made the
happy discovery that, actually, the poetic form allows the relative
pronoun to appear anywhere, which can be slightly more confusing but
it all becomes unambiguous by the time you get to the end of the
sentence (and after all, English gets away with eliding relative
pronouns and so confusing the boundaries of relative clauses all the
time). And thus my syllable count difficulties were solved.
I still haven't discovered whether this is an archaic form that's just
held over in poetry, or if it's a new invention that will be slowly
leaking into casual speech.
-l.
Messages in this topic (18)
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1b. Re: Average life of a conlang
Posted by: "Philip Newton" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 31, 2008 12:58 pm ((PDT))
On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 20:24, R A Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> _tlhIngan Hol might be considered international in that
> users of the language do not all come from the same nation and do not all
> have the same L1 (I think).
True.
While most speakers have L1 = English (it helps that the authoritative
material on the language is all in English; in particular, the German
translation of _The Klingon Dictionary_ is said to be atrocious), off
the top of my head, I can think of four proficient speakers of Klingon
with other L1s: Lieven "Qu'var valer" Litaer (Flemish), Kathrin
"nI'taQ 'IwtlhutlhwI'" Sievert (German), a Swiss German speaker whose
name escapes me just now [*](and who happens to be blind), and
Agnieszka "'ISqu'" Solska (Polish).
Cheers,
Philip
[*] A bit of digging around my photos dug up her _nom de klingon_, at
least: Senara.
--
Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Messages in this topic (18)
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1c. Re: Average life of a conlang
Posted by: "deinx nxtxr" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 31, 2008 7:25 pm ((PDT))
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Jim Henry
> It would be interesting to collect the same information from
members
> of the CONLANG list and get a broader base of data on the
question.
> Jörg and I have already posted about our conlangs on the ZBB
thread,
> but I'll copy my posts here as ZBB threads disappear into the
bit
> bucket after a few months (or even weeks?) and CONLANG threads
> get archived indefinitely:
My oldest project is Sasxsek (2003) unless you count Deini which
I only recently started, but it's foundation started with ideas
I had 25+ years ago for a language that I never really
documented or finished, except some minimal vocabulary which has
almost no resemblence to Deini in its current state.
I have a lot of other projects for which I'm finally starting to
publish something thanks to the the new website and the
Mediawiki software which makes it much easier for me to produce
content rather than wasting a lot of time on formatting an
presentation.
> ...
> Three of my other conlangs I've worked on for 1-3 years;
another dozen
> or so been sketchy projects that I've worked on for less than
a year,
> in some cases less than a week. One of those I worked on for
a couple
> of years I seriously intend to get back to working on
sometime;
> another is still in progress, and the oldest has been
abandoned pretty
> much since I started seriously working on gzb in early 1998.
I too have a lot of these languages that I don't take much past
the conceptual stage. Mainly because I just want to experiment
with an idea. Once I'm done experimenting, I'm done developing
too.
> ...
> gjâ-zym-byn reached a usable level of stability in about 2000
or 2001,
> after two or three years of development. There have been many
changes
> since then, but relatively little that's not backward
compatible with
> the existing corpus. (Except for archaicizing old words; there
are
> over 50 words in the dictionary marked as archaic, and some
older ones
> that have no dictionary entry.)
I wish I could have said that about Sasxsek. After 5 years, I
think I now have the phonology and morphology stabilized. I'd
say most of the currently vocabulary is stable, but I wouldn't
want to lock in any particular lexicals just yet. As to
backward compatibility, well, there really isn't any except for
the most recent decision to drop <y> /j/ and <w> /w/ and merge
them into /i/ and /u/. Before that were many phonological
additions and loosening of the tight phonotactics, resulting in
many lexical changes. If I could only sit and spend the time to
fill in the lexical gaps, I could have a working language ready
to be used very soon.
> ...
> And yet I don't regret the time I spent working on short-lived
sketchy
> conlangs, either; most of them have a respectable corpus
relative to
> their short lifespan, they explored interesting linguistic
ideas, and
> I think the availability of those shorter-lived projects has
diverted
> my tinkering tendencies away from gzb and made it stable
enough to
> learn.
That's my prespective too. Some of my concepts are just that,
*concepts*. Nihongurishi was thought up in a few minutes, and
ready to go right away. Li?glis will be mainly just applying a
set of phonological and grammatical shifts to English and it too
will be a usable language, but I still have to sit and play with
the ideas to see which work well and which don't. Auxlangs
(most of my projects) though take a lot of time and research so
many may never be fully developed.
Messages in this topic (18)
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2a. Re: Jaĩbi update and request for comment s
Posted by: "Christopher Bates" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 31, 2008 1:15 pm ((PDT))
I've added a small new chapter on predicate nominals and related
constructions:
http://www.chrisdb.me.uk/conlang/jaibi/prednom-chapter.pdf
Features:
1. a distinction between class membership predicates (`I am a man') and
identity statements (`I am the person you saw earlier')
- class membership predicates are constructed along the same lines as
locatives, e.g. `I am in (class of) men'
- identity statements are marked by an invariant morpheme which is used
to mark contrastive focus elsewhere
2. brief descriptions of existential, locative, and possessive predicate
constructions
It's a lot shorter than the chapter on NPs, but I might add more later.
Chris.
Messages in this topic (3)
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3. Bay Area Conlangs Meetup & Glossotechnia Playtest next Saturday
Posted by: "Sai Emrys" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 31, 2008 5:13 pm ((PDT))
Howdy all.
It's been quite a while since we last had a proper meetup, so... let's.
Next Saturday afternoon - ~2pm to whenever - at my&Alex's place, a few
blocks from downtown Berkeley BART. If we have more people than we can
comfortably accommodate, or there are problems with cat allergies (we
have one, who can be sequestered if needed) we'll go to a nearby park.
Bring food/drink for potlucky eating, and your conlangy brain. We'll
be doing a playtest of some of some new Glossotechnia rules (&
possibly Make-A-Lang), as well as the usual social / language geekery.
Please email me for directions.
- Sai
Messages in this topic (1)
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4a. Re: "Futurese" (American English in 3000CE)
Posted by: "deinx nxtxr" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 31, 2008 6:26 pm ((PDT))
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of John Vertical
> >> http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/futurese.html
> >>
> I've dug it ever since discovering it about three years ago
> (JBR's was one of the first conlang-related sites I came
across).
I've really only looked at his RANTO site and some of his
spelling reforms, but never saw this one until now. I haven't
had time to really take a look yet, but certainly will because
it's conceptually similar to something I'm doing now with
Li?glis.
Messages in this topic (5)
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5a. "Knock it off" or "Leave off"
Posted by: "Scotto Hlad" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 31, 2008 9:29 pm ((PDT))
OK here we go with my question. Before I give the question I’ll give the
background so that you can see what has spawned it.
One of my cats, Daria, (the only one not spayed because I’ve run out of money)
is in oestrus. If you never been around a cat in this condition consider
yourself lucky. She’s not loud like some cats can be but the noise is just
constant. One of my other cats, Pebbles, must have had enough because I have
caught her with her mouth clamped on to Daria’s throat, all the while holding
her with the front paws and then kicking the stuffing out of her with her rear
paws. Daria meanwhile is oblivious to the whole affair, just continuing on with
her gutteral sounds. At the moment, Daria is curled up on my desk beside the
monitor sleeping…
Anyway, I have found myslef just looking at her and saying, “Give it a rest…”
or “Knock it off…” or “Leave off.” It has me wondering what a Pilovese person
would say to the whole affair. Even in French, I’m not sure what one would say
beyond, “Arrêt” or “Assez” as neither of them can convey the tone of being
wearied or annoyed with the situation.
I’d like to know how to convey this message to my cant in your conlangs and
your L1, including regional type things.
Thanks,
Scotto
Messages in this topic (2)
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5b. Re: "Knock it off" or "Leave off"
Posted by: "Philip Newton" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon Sep 1, 2008 6:46 am ((PDT))
On Mon, Sep 1, 2008 at 06:29, Scotto Hlad <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I'd like to know how to convey this message to my cant in your conlangs and
> your L1, including regional type things.
In colloquial German: "Ej, lass' mal stecken" or "Ej, lass' mal gut
sein". ("leave it sticking [where it was; don't pull it out]" or "let
it be good; leave it be [the way it was because that was already]
good"). Or "Jetzt reicht's!" / "Jetzt reicht's aber langsam!" ("Now it
is enough!" / "Now it's slowly be(com)ing enough!")
Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Messages in this topic (2)
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6. FW: "Knock it off" or "Leave off"
Posted by: "Scotto Hlad" [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Aug 31, 2008 9:33 pm ((PDT))
Sorry, the last sentence should read “cat” not “cant.”
S
-----Original Message-----
From: Scotto Hlad [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2008 10:30 PM
To: Constructed Languages List
Subject: "Knock it off" or "Leave off"
OK here we go with my question. Before I give the question I’ll give the
background so that you can see what has spawned it.
One of my cats, Daria, (the only one not spayed because I’ve run out of money)
is in oestrus. If you never been around a cat in this condition consider
yourself lucky. She’s not loud like some cats can be but the noise is just
constant. One of my other cats, Pebbles, must have had enough because I have
caught her with her mouth clamped on to Daria’s throat, all the while holding
her with the front paws and then kicking the stuffing out of her with her rear
paws. Daria meanwhile is oblivious to the whole affair, just continuing on with
her gutteral sounds. At the moment, Daria is curled up on my desk beside the
monitor sleeping…
Anyway, I have found myslef just looking at her and saying, “Give it a rest…”
or “Knock it off…” or “Leave off.” It has me wondering what a Pilovese person
would say to the whole affair. Even in French, I’m not sure what one would say
beyond, “Arrêt” or “Assez” as neither of them can convey the tone of being
wearied or annoyed with the situation.
I’d like to know how to convey this message to my cant in your conlangs and
your L1, including regional type things.
Thanks,
Scotto
Messages in this topic (1)
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