Eti wrote: ↑Tue Jun 02, 2020 11:23 pm
I'm brand new to this scene, so while I am (relatively) clueless when it comes to certain concepts in how this whole construction process works, I will say now that I'm aware that this process differs from person to person. Being fresh out of the gates I'd rather have at least
something as my point of reference. Apologies ahead of time if anything I ask is considered taboo!
Welcome to the board Eti! And if you’re worried, I can’t see anything you’re asking which could possibly be considered taboo.
Now to get to the cut. The LCK has certainly shown me a lot of possibilities for how to handle my language, but more often than not I find myself getting quite overwhelmed with the options. I know the general idea of how to choose them (e.g. what matches the culture, context of the world, etc.) but there's a lot of options that really don't work with this linear thought process as simply as I thought they might.
You can actually get quite far with a language without figuring out its context — for my most well-developed language, I still know absolutely nothing about the world it’s spoken in. The context only really affects the lexicon, semantics and pragmatics of a language — the rest is more or less orthogonal to context.
When you made your conlang(s), how did you decide which models to use for how the grammar works?
Personally, I would say: go with what you like. I
really like agglutinative languages, verging on polysynthetic but not quite there, so most of my languages have been of that type. But more recently I wanted to make a more isolating language, and that’s what I’m doing now. In general, try looking at a bunch of languages, see which aesthetic you like most, and then make a language like that.
EDIT: In case you want a list of languages you can look at for inspiration, here’s some languages and families that have been helpful for me. Arranged very roughly from most agglutinative to most isolating: NW Caucasian, Chukchi, Salishan, Ojibwe, San Miguel Chimalapa Zoque, Quechua, Mayan, Basque, Dyirbal, Bororo, Chalcatongo Mixtec, Shilha Berber, Yapese, Marshallese, Northeast Ambae, Tibetan, Burmese, Yoruba, Mandarin.
Is there any other process aside from answering the question of "What would work in the context of your culture?" that can be applied to try to select some of these options?
I’m not entirely sure why you would ask this… as I said, most of the basics of language is more or less orthogonal to culture. There isn’t really any commonality between the cultures which speak agglutinative languages, for instance.
On top of this, some of these don't really work as exclusive options (e.g. p. 58 goes over fusional, agglutinative, and isolating languages, and from what I gathered, it relays that languages tend to use a certain balance of these with a huge preference to one specifically).
I dunno… I’d say those options are pretty mutually exclusive, even if it is possible to combine them to a small degree. But I do get what you’re saying; there do exist other options which can only be combined and balanced in many ways.
How do I determine what balance makes the most sense, assuming this is even something that can be answered without the abstract experience?
Unfortunately, the answer to this is mostly knowledge: I found myself improving dramatically at figuring out this balance when I actually started to read more about linguistics. But one easy ‘shortcut’ is to ask people here: for instance, elsewhere on the board, I’m currently discussing the best ways to balance pronominal clitics and zero-anaphora.
Part of me says that I'm making this way too hard for myself. I'm really good with logically oriented things, and had assumed that the construction of a language would follow a sort-of-simple model, but it seems there's a lot more holes in the logic that I don't know how to fill up than I was ready for. My aim with this thread here is to try to get some assistance in filling in these blanks, and to get a better understanding what a good workflow might look like. I'll do everything in my power to make the most out of what I'm given, at the very least, since I can only assume that this concept isn't something that can be explained over text very easily. It seems like one of those things that just comes from trying and crashing a few times, like riding a bike.
I can empathise, as someone whose brain works in much the same way. Luckily, not everything in language is quite as subtle as you seem to be imagining, and there are a bunch of basics about a language which it is possible to answer in a simplistic way:
- What is the sound inventory?
- Is it going to be more agglutinative or more isolating?
- What is the basic word order?
- If it’s agglutinative, then which categories get marked on the noun and the verb?
- Does it have noun case? Does it have verbal agreement? (Few languages have both.)
Most of these are fairly independent of each other — the answer to one doesn’t really depend on the answer to any of the others. (One notable exception: verbal agreement is more common in agglutinative languages.) Once you’ve answered those, it should be easier to figure out the rest.