What Makes an Engaging Congrammar?

[Moose-tache]

Let me be more specific. I am asking: “what makes a grammar that people actually want to keep reading?” What piques your interest, and what holds it, beyond the language itself?

For me, it's much easier to identify an uninteresting grammar and what makes it so boring. There are a lot of very specific ideas about how to write a grammar, which tends to make them very repetitive. You know that in every grammar (after a paragraph about how the language is spoken in the western region of Goobal), the first thing you'll see is a chart of consonant phonemes. I'm not convinced that every grammar needs to start with phonology, and I tend to heave a great big sigh when I scroll past “intonation” and “allophony” and discover that I'm now halfway through the whole document. Then we launch into the “grammar” proper, i.e. a chart of noun case morphology. Some congrammars are written in exactly the wrong order: phonology, then morphology, then a brief guide to how actual utterances work followed by a perfunctory pragmatics section. I find myself scrolling straight to the bottom of some grammars to see if there's anything interesting about relative clause formation or avoidance vocabulary long before I read anything about vowel sandhi or subject marking.

Another obstacle for me is the lack of context. Conlangs like Klingon, Verdurian, and Esperanto all take place in a world that the reader is likely to know something about by the time they start reading a grammar. We already like Klingons, and we want to know more about them. So I'm inclined to think that at least some effective congrammars need to lean heavily on worldbuilding. Maps, histories, documents, drawings of likely speakers conversing in a likely habitat. It sounds wrong to say that your book needs pictures if you want people to read it, but when it comes to conlangs, nothing helps me stay engaged more than some (possibly non-linguistic) context. In fact, I would love to read a congrammar that was just a book on how to read a specific epic poem, with full stanzas right on the first page. It sounds opaque but if it's well done it will be a far more interesting introduction than “Part I: Phoneme Inventory.”

If you're into that sort of thing, pretend this is a quiz and vote for your favorite:
1) Depth – I like 'em thorough. If I can't use your grammar as a blunt force weapon, or your subsections don't have sub-subsections, I'm not interested.
2) Aesthetics – Not euphony, just the pleasing quality of the grammar document itself. Someone out there is writing the next Voynich Manuscript.
3) Worldbuilding/Verisimilitude – I want the elves as much as I want Quenya. Give me a sound recording of the author awkwardly singing a fake national anthem and I am smitten.
4) Science – What's the avant-garde in Linguistics these days? I want the latest in tree diagrams and computational analysis. I never met a twelve syllable Greek term I didn't like.
5) Accessibility – Grammars can be overwhelming, so make it easy to follow. Especially for weird artlangs, I appreciate authors who take their time and explain themselves clearly.
6) Diachronics – I'm a sucker for sound changes. Modern Viktish might have topic fronting, but what did speakers of Old Viktish do with their topics?
7) The X Factor – I can't explain it, but some congrammars just grab me. There's nothing that reliably impresses me every time I see it.

[akam chinjir]

I sometimes think I'd be more interested in foused studies of conlangs, rather than general grammars. Like Verdurian Clause Structure or Karazi Focus Constructions or something. Or for that matter your idea of a study of a particular poem.

I really like learning not just about how things work in the language, but what informed the conlanger's decisions. I'm happy if this includes contemporary theory, if it's something I'm familiar with or that gets explained or that I can easily find out about. I like this partly because I'm interested in the conlanger's motivations, and partly because I like learning about language.

Conversely, I usually find attempts to write in-world grammars offputting.

In something that is designed as a full grammar, I think an introductory chapter---with history, culture, and so on, and a typological overview---and a meaty chapter about word classes can be very effective.

[bradrn]

Let me be more specific. I am asking: “what makes a grammar that people actually want to keep reading?” What piques your interest, and what holds it, beyond the language itself?

I won’t pretend to have an answer to this — mostly because I haven’t read too many congrammars — but I do have some thoughts on the rest of the post:

You know that in every grammar (after a paragraph about how the language is spoken in the western region of Goobal), the first thing you'll see is a chart of consonant phonemes. I'm not convinced that every grammar needs to start with phonology, and I tend to heave a great big sigh when I scroll past “intonation” and “allophony” and discover that I'm now halfway through the whole document. Then we launch into the “grammar” proper, i.e. a chart of noun case morphology. […] I find myself scrolling straight to the bottom of some grammars to see if there's anything interesting about relative clause formation or avoidance vocabulary long before I read anything about vowel sandhi or subject marking.

Yes, this definitely sounds familiar…

Some congrammars are written in exactly the wrong order: phonology, then morphology, then a brief guide to how actual utterances work followed by a perfunctory pragmatics section.

(I was going to say that most natgrammars are written in this order, so it must have some merit, but then I actually looked at some random grammars and most actually were not ordered like this.)

My own suggestion for solving the above problem is to always start with phonology, and then order the sections in an order which starts with the most interesting sections of the language. So if nouns have a lot of interesting features, do Phonology, Nouns, Adjectives, Verbs, Syntax; if there is lots of morphophonology, do Phonology, Morphology and Morphophonology, Syntax; if verbs have unusual syntax, do Phonology, Verb phrases, Noun phrases, Morphology.

Another obstacle for me is the lack of context. […[/bl] So I'm inclined to think that at least some effective congrammars need to lean heavily on worldbuilding. Maps, histories, documents, drawings of likely speakers conversing in a likely habitat. It sounds wrong to say that your book needs pictures if you want people to read it, but when it comes to conlangs, nothing helps me stay engaged more than some (possibly non-linguistic) context. In fact, I would love to read a congrammar that was just a book on how to read a specific epic poem, with full stanzas right on the first page. It sounds opaque but if it's well done it will be a far more interesting introduction than “Part I: Phoneme Inventory.”]

This is the only thing in your post which I don’t really agree with. By all means, do as much worldbuilding as you can! But a reference grammar should be a reference grammar; outside of an introduction, I see worldbuilding as being superfluous in a reference grammar.

On the other hand, I do think that every conlang reference grammar should come with other documents explaining how a language connects with the world around it. You list a document on epic poems as an example, but for me the standout example would be the Short Stories in Risha Cuhbi thread on the old board, which as the name suggests goes through several short stories and explains in great detail how each sentence connects to the world around it, any interesting grammatical constructions, etc.

If you're into that sort of thing, pretend this is a quiz and vote for your favorite:
1) Depth – I like 'em thorough. If I can't use your grammar as a blunt force weapon, or your subsections don't have sub-subsections, I'm not interested.
2) Aesthetics – Not euphony, just the pleasing quality of the grammar document itself. Someone out there is writing the next Voynich Manuscript.
3) Worldbuilding/Verisimilitude – I want the elves as much as I want Quenya. Give me a sound recording of the author awkwardly singing a fake national anthem and I am smitten.
4) Science – What's the avant-garde in Linguistics these days? I want the latest in tree diagrams and computational analysis. I never met a twelve syllable Greek term I didn't like.
5) Accessibility – Grammars can be overwhelming, so make it easy to follow. Especially for weird artlangs, I appreciate authors who take their time and explain themselves clearly.
6) Diachronics – I'm a sucker for sound changes. Modern Viktish might have topic fronting, but what did speakers of Old Viktish do with their topics?
7) The X Factor – I can't explain it, but some congrammars just grab me. There's nothing that reliably impresses me every time I see it.

I probably like (5) and (6) best, with (1) and (2) also somewhat important for me.

I sometimes think I'd be more interested in foused studies of conlangs, rather than general grammars. Like Verdurian Clause Structure or Karazi Focus Constructions or something. Or for that matter your idea of a study of a particular poem.

I quite like these sort of things as well! But then again, they’re not congrammars, and congrammars are the subject of this thread.

I really like learning not just about how things work in the language, but what informed the conlanger's decisions. I'm happy if this includes contemporary theory, if it's something I'm familiar with or that gets explained or that I can easily find out about. I like this partly because I'm interested in the conlanger's motivations, and partly because I like learning about language.

I can’t say I would be too interested in this.

Conversely, I usually find attempts to write in-world grammars offputting.

I quite like these actually — it gives a good opportunity to show off worldbuilding, especially in older grammars. The standout example for me is zompist’s grammar of Caďinor.

In something that is designed as a full grammar, I think an introductory chapter---with history, culture, and so on, and a typological overview---and a meaty chapter about word classes can be very effective.

I can agree with you about the introduction, but as I said above, the rest depends on what parts of the languages are interesting. For instance, in a grammar of English, I can’t imagine a chapter on word classes to be very interesting. (Their syntax, yes, but not the word classes themselves.)

[akam chinjir]

...I wanted to check something else, and discovered that the 1800-page Cambridge Grammar of the English Language doesn't have a chapter on phonology. (The closest they come is a brief section explaining how they'll do phonological transcriptions.)

[Xwtek]

For me, it's depth. Worldbuilding is important, too. Also, isn't science and diachronics part of depth? Accessibility and Aesthetic is the least important, although I agree this is not as easy as it looks.

As analogy, the depth is like the characters, woldbuilding is the plot. Aesthetic is then just the artstyle, and Accessibility is just tropes. A relex of English would be very accessible.

[Pabappa]

Maybe sprinkle in a few jokes and puns? Depends on your writing style, of course. The sample sentences in my grammar and in the Pabappa dictionary are sometimes intended to be funny, ... e.g. the sample sentence for porrap "belt" is "Men enjoy wearing belts", because right next to it you see that the word for belt and the word for masturbation are the same. Or flesh them out with cultural references like the others are saying ... e.g. if watermelons are a major crop, maybe lots of sentences about watermelons.

[Vardelm]

Accessibility and Aesthetic is the least important, although I agree this is not as easy as it looks.

Accessibility (of the document) and aesthetic (of the conlang) are the most important in my mind. Aesthetic of the document is nice, especially if it aids in the accessibility. Having the depth of development, where you see how words relate to the world, is great, but if your conlang doesn't have some kind of aesthetic that appeals to me, I'm not going to bother getting to the point where I see the depth. "Aesthetic" here is pretty broad, though, in that it could be your orthography & the flavor it gives the language, or the combination of morphosyntactic features it has. Maybe I think there is some really cool way ergativity or evidentials is handled. There has to be some hook that catches my attention and pulls me in.

[HourouMusuko]

I agree as well that aesthetic and accessibility are the most important. That said, I'm not particularly picky. I just dislike when a person seems to spend 95% of their effort on phonology and little else is displayed. That's more of a rookie problem than anything else, but I come across it so often that I tend to look for anything other than phonology when reading a person's conlang grammar these days. Obviously I understand the importance of phonology, it's just that it's often a person's first step and sometimes they don't get too far beyond it.

But most importantly I just want to get the sense that the creator has a put a lot of thought into their grammar and enjoys what they're doing.

[KathTheDragon]

I personally put phonology at the beginning so I don't have to constantly explain how things are pronounced.

[evmdbm]

f you're into that sort of thing, pretend this is a quiz and vote for your favorite:
1) Depth – I like 'em thorough. If I can't use your grammar as a blunt force weapon, or your subsections don't have sub-subsections, I'm not interested.
2) Aesthetics – Not euphony, just the pleasing quality of the grammar document itself. Someone out there is writing the next Voynich Manuscript.
3) Worldbuilding/Verisimilitude – I want the elves as much as I want Quenya. Give me a sound recording of the author awkwardly singing a fake national anthem and I am smitten.
4) Science – What's the avant-garde in Linguistics these days? I want the latest in tree diagrams and computational analysis. I never met a twelve syllable Greek term I didn't like.
5) Accessibility – Grammars can be overwhelming, so make it easy to follow. Especially for weird artlangs, I appreciate authors who take their time and explain themselves clearly.
6) Diachronics – I'm a sucker for sound changes. Modern Viktish might have topic fronting, but what did speakers of Old Viktish do with their topics?
7) The X Factor – I can't explain it, but some congrammars just grab me. There's nothing that reliably impresses me every time I see it.

1 and 3. Not being a real linguist I don't get 6 and I certainly don't really get 4; I suspect I do the bare minimum of phonology so that you can say it and then move on to the morphology and syntax

[Kuchigakatai]

Let me be more specific. I am asking: “what makes a grammar that people actually want to keep reading?” What piques your interest, and what holds it, beyond the language itself?

I think 15 years of communal experience on the ZBB has shown that conlangers who actually succeed in writing a meaty reference grammar get admired for it but also don't get read. Conlangers sometimes say they like in-depth grammars, but then Mecislau comes and posts yet another grammar over 500 pages long, and he barely gets some "wow!" and "nice!" comments.

(Well, perhaps people do read his grammars, but if he never receives further probing or discussions, does it make any difference?)

To get conlangers to read, discuss and mention grammars, I think the best approach would be a short exposition that focuses more on the quirks than on the things that go in a typological survey. Do include an inventory of the consonant phonemes, and a sample of a noun fully declined for case/etc., but otherwise do less of "my conlang has a fluid-S active-stative alignment!" and more of "my conlang doesn't distinguish any of who/whoever/everybody/somebody/anybody/nobody except through syntax!".

You're quite right that having a detailed conworld is often a good idea, especially for a-priori conlangs. This is probably harder to get right in an alt-history of Earth (especially if you don't change much about the timeline), but on the other hand, when it comes to a-posteriori conlangs you do receive interest from people who are keen about that area of Earth anyway (somebody doing a Germanic conlang often receives some feedback from people who like Germanic natlangs as it is).

[Salmoneus]

To be honest, the one thing that I find makes a congrammar engaging is whether I wrote it.

Which I originally planned to say as a joke, but actually it's a pretty valid point, I think. People are only really interested in their own grammars - and that's OK. A reference grammar is what it says on the tin: something to refer to. And nobody's going to need to refer to a grammar of a language they're not already personally invested in.

Who does need to refer to it? The creator!

So yes, do annotated texts. Yes, do focused exposition on some topic of interest. Yes, do engagement in conlang fluency threads and translation challenges.

But to do all of that well, it really, really helps to have a grammar to refer to. The reference grammar should not be conceived of as the entrypoint into a language - it's the foundations, not the front door.

So write a reference that you yourself find interesting. Use it to create other, flashier displays of the language. And then, maybe, perhaps, someone else might actually find your congrammar interesting.

[Vardelm]

<snip>

This post makes me wish there was a "like" or "upvote" feature on the forum. Very true, actually. I do think people are interested in specific aspects of other conlang grammars, but probably not reading the full thing even if they browse through & see that it's well done. Personally, I'm very interested in ergativity, so I will look at grammars of ergative conlangs and go straight to the relevant section to see how they implemented it. That's probably why I value accessibility; it makes it easier to find the parts I'm interested in. I can still appreciate whether the grammar is good quality as I'm searching around, though.

[bradrn]

<snip>

This post makes me wish there was a "like" or "upvote" feature on the forum. Very true, actually. I do think people are interested in specific aspects of other conlang grammars, but probably not reading the full thing even if they browse through & see that it's well done. Personally, I'm very interested in ergativity, so I will look at grammars of ergative conlangs and go straight to the relevant section to see how they implemented it. That's probably why I value accessibility; it makes it easier to find the parts I'm interested in. I can still appreciate whether the grammar is good quality as I'm searching around, though.

Seconded!

(I have to say, it’s a bit sad that as conlangers, we’re not interested in others’ grammars. But that’s the truth, so we might as well work around that by posting less grammars and more interesting tidbits.)

[Vardelm]

(I have to say, it’s a bit sad that as conlangers, we’re not interested in others’ grammars. But that’s the truth, so we might as well work around that by posting less grammars and more interesting tidbits.)

I think it's worth still posting them. After all, what YOU might think is interesting about your grammar isn't necessarily why I find interesting about it!

[bradrn]

(I have to say, it’s a bit sad that as conlangers, we’re not interested in others’ grammars. But that’s the truth, so we might as well work around that by posting less grammars and more interesting tidbits.)

I think it's worth still posting them. After all, what YOU might think is interesting about your grammar isn't necessarily why I find interesting about it!

Good point Vardelm!

[zompist]

I sometimes think I'd be more interested in foused studies of conlangs, rather than general grammars. Like Verdurian Clause Structure or Karazi Focus Constructions or something. Or for that matter your idea of a study of a particular poem.

I really like these ideas. It's also, of course, how a lot of linguistics is done. I should try to create an issue of an Almean linguistics journal...

For me, though, I couldn't really do these without having the reference grammars first, though perhaps not in complete form. It's tempting to do some hidden grammars just so I could throw Karazi Focus Constructions at you.

Also FWIW, I like having a high-level introduction to the grammar-- I did this in rewriting the Verdurian grammar. As I said there, "many of you are going to keep reading till you get bored. That’s fine, but I think we’d both prefer that you get a good overall sketch of the language rather than some fraction of the inflectional morphology." But again, I couldn't really write the overview until I had the reference grammar for myself.

[bradrn]

I sometimes think I'd be more interested in foused studies of conlangs, rather than general grammars. Like Verdurian Clause Structure or Karazi Focus Constructions or something. Or for that matter your idea of a study of a particular poem.

I really like these ideas. It's also, of course, how a lot of linguistics is done. I should try to create an issue of an Almean linguistics journal...

For me, though, I couldn't really do these without having the reference grammars first, though perhaps not in complete form. It's tempting to do some hidden grammars just so I could throw Karazi Focus Constructions at you.

Also FWIW, I like having a high-level introduction to the grammar-- I did this in rewriting the Verdurian grammar. As I said there, "many of you are going to keep reading till you get bored. That’s fine, but I think we’d both prefer that you get a good overall sketch of the language rather than some fraction of the inflectional morphology." But again, I couldn't really write the overview until I had the reference grammar for myself.

I don’t think anyone here is seriously saying that we shouldn’t write reference grammars — if you’re going to write articles on a language, there still needs to be some sort of description so you know what to write about! (On the other hand, if anyone here is seriously saying this, then please be clearer about it!)

[xxx]

I am not a conlang learner, but a conlang builder. I therefore prefer to discuss grammar points in relation to the motivations of the conlanger rather than digging alone difficult to read documents...

I see the forum as a club of explorers where anecdotes of travel in unknown countries are discussed rather than a specialized library where complete works are presented in large books that are difficult to manipulate...

[Moose-tache]

Wow, what a wealth of intelligent, inspiring, helpful answers. Thanks everyone!

I will definitely implement some of these ideas, especially the notion that I shouldn't be kicking down the door with the reference grammar. I've seen that grammar-last approach work well for other people (Did Mecislau create the Novogradian website before or after the reference grammar?). So the question then might not be how do you make a conlang reference grammar interesting to strangers, but how do you make it engaging to people who already have a passing curiosity about the language? How do you take that spark and keep it burning? There have been plenty of times when I was already exposed to examples of a language (say on Game of Thrones or Star Trek), only to be bored almost instantly when I tried to dive deeper into the available material.

A quick prompt to get examples flowing: after reading the Almean historical atlas, or Lord of the Rings, or Native Tongue or your favorite Star Wars fanfic, was there a language you sought out only to skim the grammar and give up early? What went wrong?