How did you personally go about choosing your language's syntax and other related attributes?

[Vardelm]

Thank you so much! The sentiment is greatly appreciated. But I did tell you, I don’t like pickles or tea! Maybe I’ll give them to my father; he loves both.

Your enjoyment of the ritual is irrelevant. Eat the pickles. Drink the tea. Be welcome, dammit!

[bradrn]

Did you ever announce you were new? If not, that's why.

That could have been the problem. I first joined the old board a couple of years before it moved, but I only ever made a couple of posts, to promote my SCA. I joined this one a few months after it was set up, but I only gradually started posting more and more.

Thank you so much! The sentiment is greatly appreciated. But I did tell you, I don’t like pickles or tea! Maybe I’ll give them to my father; he loves both.

Your enjoyment of the ritual is irrelevant. Eat the pickles. Drink the tea. Be welcome, dammit!

Oh, OK, fine. <sip tea> <eat a pickle> Happy now?

(Although actually, joking aside, I always have felt amazingly welcome here. I think that’s one of the best things about this community!)

[Vardelm]

Oh, OK, fine. <sip tea> <eat a pickle> Happy now?

Ecstatic.


Back on topic....

I find that, once I have a core idea of a language, a large portion of the grammar feels like it "writes itself".

I've had that a little bit, probably from the same approach of having a few central features for the language and then expanding from there. If a non-core idea doesn't mesh well with the core, then it doesn't belong. But, you sometimes hit on something that just fits really well with the main concept and even strengthens it, but also adds some detail. That's kinda cool. It feels like discovery more than invention.

[Bob]

I make up different languages all the time and have for 15 years now.

Well, I do some reading in some of my books about a particular grammatical phenomena, and then I just go from memory for the rest. That's generally how I do it.

I also am a unique scholar of invented languages from famous or once-famous books, movies, and tv. I sometimes expand these conlangs. For which I follow the same procedure.

What a great question you posed to the group.

...

Yup, Zompist Bboard is the only major conlanging website I ever go to. There's some other one but it has an even more antiquated format, Brown University conlang smailing list or such. But I conlang more than I come on here and do not really conlang all that much anymore these years. Usually once a month for a couple hours. But the last two years, I've actually spent several months doing huge translation projects in Klingon, Atlantean, and Pakuni. So maybe I'd explain that by saying that I like the sense of teamwork and non-linguist outreach presented by my unique work with these famous movie and tv languages.

There's a few small conlanging facebook groups I'm on but they're quite slow and small.

But my conlangs have been very different from all that. Like my method implies, I like conlangs that help me reading things in linguistics and out of linguistics that I otherwise would not and create things that help people get some sense of my research and its glory and benefit to humanity. It also helps me connect with non-linguists and people who might become linguists.

And I get a lot whenever I stop by and visit good old Zompist Bboard. I get plenty, my full really, and sadly it's enough for another few months. Fortunately, I'm a celebrated admin and member over on facebook, so my time between visits is not without some small consolation. People chanting my name and congratulating me on my vast erudition, etc, etc.

But the irony is that people here actually read all that I have to write far more than most people on facebook. They also understand a lot more of what I have to write. But only in some ways. They're just far more gracious about it. You know, it hurts to have one's own peers reject you and not appreciate all the hard work you've put into your research and the rest of your life. And I've put tremendous amounts of energy and resources into my scholarship. I would far far rather be welcome and celebrated than misunderstood, underappreciated, and berated. Especially at this point.

It's hard to explain. Facebook groups are also great because there's tons and tons of people posting about all sorts of different topics, not just conlanging stuff. If I post something, I get more welcome because people might not read or understand it all, but they have some sense of what I'm doing and that I'm reaching out and telling people about my research and discoveries.

[vegfarandi]

I find that, once I have a core idea of a language, a large portion of the grammar feels like it "writes itself".

I've had that a little bit, probably from the same approach of having a few central features for the language and then expanding from there. If a non-core idea doesn't mesh well with the core, then it doesn't belong. But, you sometimes hit on something that just fits really well with the main concept and even strengthens it, but also adds some detail. That's kinda cool. It feels like discovery more than invention.

Totally. I love the feeling when the grammar seems to be writing itself – it feels like it always existed that way.

[Pabappa]

I get that too. As I said earlier in the thread (I think), translating sample texts definitely helps. Poswa has been entirely without pronouns since the very beginning, but it took me years to realize that confining person marking to the verb would be highly inconvenient in a pronounless SOV language, effectively making it into OVS, which I dont care for. So I decided to start person-marking the objects too ... e.g. /rubampepi/ "I ...-ed a boat" instead of just using boat-ACC. no natlang anywhere does something quite like this, so i would never have come up with it if i confined myself to only working within the bounds of natlangs. that said, something *similar* occurs in some Australian languages, and that probably helped me think of this idea, so natlangs do help even with exotic languages like Poswa.

[Eti]

Quick question here: what do you mean by not having much ‘derivation’? Do you mean that there isn’t any derivational morphology (which sounds implausible)? Or do you mean that there isn’t any language evolution? (Which sounds equally implausible.)

I meant it was a thing of little to no language evolution, but not over time, but instead over location. Yes, in time it will change, but it will not change in the context of the region with the exception of things that exist exclusively in certain regions that aren't really known in others. It was something I was contemplating on back and forth because yeah, it's absurdly implausible. I was debating it for some time and I had considered that it might just work given the context of this language.

Given that my design intent is to actually write up a conlang that fits the Ori game universe (it's the game that inspired Eti as a written character to come into existence), and given that the series's creator specifically stated his goal was to allow the story to be interpreted and, for the most part, effectively be defined by its fans, I saw it as a brilliant opportunity to have some sort of pre-built world to expand on. I've done a great deal of work with fan-lore for this game in the past, working on designing extrapolation for how the world works and exists as cohesively as I could possibly muster (and, from what its reception has been so far, my lore interpretation seems to be very accepted by the writers that have invested time into looking into it).

This conlang was my next goal in my roadmap of expansion to this game's lore, as I am very passionate about this game and its associated content. As for the proper in-lore explanation for how this could be true? Both games take place across different regions. The main character has an energy known as "Light", this energy makes up the mechanics of their race and other related objects + entities. Despite being completely disjointed, these two regions shared the same Light, making the main character inherently compatible with stuff from the other region. Since this energy is common across the entire race, and since it seems to be a common interface from which they can communicate any arbitrary form of information to one another, I had assumed this would extend to their language since it is both spoken physically and propagated through the link that this Light energy can create. It wouldn't make sense for it to change across the entire globe if they aren't really separated in the first place, if you see what I'm getting at.

Now that said -- I don't really know if there's one way or another that's definitely better since this becomes subjective about the world. I suppose the best method would be to go up to my peers in the community who do writing for the world and see what they think about this concept. That said, if you have any personal advisories (and moreso, if someone here has played the game and cares enough about its lore), I will gladly hear any objections/concurrences to alter my work if necessary. Under the hood, the functions are more or less identical, it's just how the language applies to the world that changes, so it's not that big a deal either way.

[aporaporimos]

My strategy is to start with an idea of how I want the language to sound. I sketch out some (meaningless) words and phrases and sentences, and then, usually, I write up the phonology. At this point I have an idea of whether the language is more synthetic or isolating, and I have a couple word-forms or phrases I'm attached to and want to keep. So next I sketch up an inflectional paradigm (if it's a synthetic language) or some phrase structures (if it's isolating). And from there I make up more little pieces pretty much at random, revising as I go, until I build up a big picture view of how the language is structured. And then I continue working in a scattershot way, but more deliberately and systematically within the structure I've set up.

[bradrn]

Quick question here: what do you mean by not having much ‘derivation’? Do you mean that there isn’t any derivational morphology (which sounds implausible)? Or do you mean that there isn’t any language evolution? (Which sounds equally implausible.)

I meant it was a thing of little to no language evolution, but not over time, but instead over location. Yes, in time it will change, but it will not change in the context of the region with the exception of things that exist exclusively in certain regions that aren't really known in others. It was something I was contemplating on back and forth because yeah, it's absurdly implausible. I was debating it for some time and I had considered that it might just work given the context of this language.

Interesting idea! So you would basically get a huge dialect continuum. I don’t really understand the rest of your explanation (I’ve never heard of that game you were talking about), but it sounds like you’ve worked this out in enough detail to be able to justify this.

My strategy is to start with an idea of how I want the language to sound. I sketch out some (meaningless) words and phrases and sentences, and then, usually, I write up the phonology. At this point I have an idea of whether the language is more synthetic or isolating, and I have a couple word-forms or phrases I'm attached to and want to keep. So next I sketch up an inflectional paradigm (if it's a synthetic language) or some phrase structures (if it's isolating). And from there I make up more little pieces pretty much at random, revising as I go, until I build up a big picture view of how the language is structured. And then I continue working in a scattershot way, but more deliberately and systematically within the structure I've set up.

That actually sounds pretty much exactly like how I work as well.

[Bob]

When you made your conlang(s), how did you decide which models to use for how the grammar works? I feel like just flipping a coin or rolling some dice to select isn't that good of an idea, even if I constrain the options to what would most likely make sense in the context of the world and culture down to a couple options, but I'm afraid I simply do not know what the alternatives to this really are.

Fortunately, I have a story about that.

Since about 2010, and I've been at this since about 2006, I rely heavily on only two books:

Introduction to Typology, Whaley.
World Lexicon of Grammaticalization, Heine.

Right after college, I went to teach English in far northeast China, in Changchun 长春. This was despite hardly studying Chinese even on my own in college! Which didn't make much difference, I picked up enough quickly to do the job probably better than anyone in the entire country has ever done. ( Because I have a BA Linguistics with something like a 3.0 GPA from Michigan State University. )

Changchun is ironically called "the Detroit of China" which is probably why Professor Edward Shaughnessy sent me there. Because I am from Detroit or the general area. (More like Port Huron, the birthplace of Thomas Jefferson. Fitting because I am such a pioneer of scholarship and great inventor. You know, if I do say so myself, little old me. )

With the help of my students, Scott and Lucky* (a female; English names often are like calques of Chinese names), I bought a bunch of books at the city's major bookstores. (Their real names were Boo-shing* and Ching-wang *1 .) I got those two books at a small bookstore specializing in at least linguistics books and maybe only in linguistics books. I even remember what the store looked like. I think it was in some nice neighborhood near one of the universities, like Northeast Normal University, whereat is the famous The Institute for the History of Ancient Civilizations, which I visited. Where people can get cheap PhD's in things like Assyriology, all while eating lots of great Chinese food (and probably ruining their lungs through all the heavy air pollution for which China is so infamous. cough!).

*1 This part of the story I made up because I could not remember the specifics. It was something like this. I had trouble remembering the Chinese names of my students.

They're really most amazing books and I have rarely found any so amazing. Also, they have Chinese prefaces and bilingual titles and spines, so they altogether remind me of my happy and (for me!) very expensive adventure. Especially considering that my life will probably be shortened due to all the years I spent in China generally being treated like a king, at least in Northern China, and breathing in all the world-unique air pollution and other ubiquitous environmental contaminates. Would I do it over again if I had the chance? Absolutely, but you don't know the whole story. There is a lot of fun to be had around Asia. ( Good, wholesome fun, mind you. )

Changchun was very interesting, exotic, and picturesque with architectural influence from the Russians and Japanese as well as the Chinese. The city was pretty huge and I remember it as being filled with Siberian sub-zero temperatures, something I knew from Michigan State University, on more than one level, and nice little warm stores, restaurants, and cafes. There was a lot of places to go and explore, big parks, neat giant bookstores, and even lots of neat places within the vicinity of the university where I taught. I would call Changchun cozy whereas I remember Ningbo 宁波 as grandiose and flamboyant, like Cthulu's hometown of R'lyeh, "He had said that the geometry of the dream-place he saw was abnormal, non-Euclidean, and loathsomely redolent of spheres and dimensions apart from ours."
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Weird_Ta ... of_Cthulhu

Changchun was also a bit unsettling because people would regularly steal the manhole covers (for scrap metal). (Which is something outrageous I had never heard of before.) And otherwise leave out unmarked pits and obstacles. So you had to be sure to watch where you were going.

I traveled all around when I wasn't teaching, and also studied a ton of languages and lore on my own, but of course I especially remember the bookstores and libraries. I wish I could go into more details but native Asians, as a rule, are very shy and embarassed, so my poetic descriptions and honesty have probably already pushed the limits a bit of their expectations. I never saw or heard of such libraries as I found.

The bookstores were huge buildings of several stories and were packed, to the very gills, with people reading the books for free. There were no chairs, people would sit or stand.

If you wanted to find some books, you would get your student to approach a saleperson, which are ubiquitous in Asian stores, and say, "Gong ching soo fow pow ring sang bah?" To which the other would respond, "Ling sing wing wang shroo yoo luh." And most conversations proceeded along these lines, Asians being very attentive to haggling and prices, and inattentive to variety and the boringness of repetition. With notable regional variations. For example, in Cambodia some conversations end with one person throwing acid upon the face of the other, proceeded by an immediate change in career to street musician. *2

So almost everything is memorized forms and formats. And the forms must be all filled out in triplicate *3 and must each be stamped 5 or more times by 5 different officials all with very similar-looking seals. The buildings were the same way: Buildings are no sooner built by enormous teams of people, than they begin to be hazardous and plans must be made for their impending re-building. And "some portion" of the building's budget must be set aside for "various bureaucratic necessities", often leaving very little over for actual building supplies.

The public libraries were closed shelves, so you had to ask the librarians to go get the books for you. I hear Europe is also like this. All American libraries (except university special collections) are open shelves, so anybody can just walk up and look around at all the books. Regarding Europe, Italians (?) or other Europeans have told me that it's because otherwise people would just go into the library and start tearing pages out of books. They did this while makin' the gestures alla the time. I never saw Les Mis, but I've read of the plot and performed one of the songs in symphony band in high school, so maybe I have some idea.

...

*2 This is a humorous exaggeration. Though it's quite common, permanently maiming one's enemies with acid to the face is not super super common. I've read this often happens over debts, something unavoidable since everyone is so poor. This is only a continental Southeast Asia (formerly known as Indo-China) thing, at least Cambodia and Thailand. I don't know about Vietnam. I had a way better time in Cambodia than in South China or North China, so I'm hesitant to even mention it.

One of the problems is that Asians have trouble really internalizing that what they way you is a pittance in your home country and that living there is racked with discomforts and permanent health damage. To them, people do difficult things for jobs out of absolute necessity, so the idea that someone would do something for any other reason is generally quite removed from their minds. The Asian sense of adventure is generally lacking, at least the Chinese peoples. Moreso than Westerners, they would really just stay safe in their houses all of their lives if at all possible. And it's been like this since maybe 500 BC or maybe time immemorial, maybe in part due to large population sizes and densities. The really caring community of anyone's life is generally their extended family all living in one house or apartment. Everyone else is out to screw them over which is "good lucky funny". 好福樂 And if it sounds familiar, it's totally different from the West. Though I hear that Europe and South Africa are a bit like this.

*3 No, forms are only filled out once, usually, sometimes in duplicate. This is a humorous exaggeration. The contracts don't matter anyway because the Chinese part is totally different and nobody follows the written rules anyway, they're just window dressing 保面子 like almost everything else.

( But I think the coronavirus plague is overall a natural disaster. The Black Death is thought to have originated in China. China is a huge country and probably has the world's highest populations stretching back for hundreds of thousands of years. Whether they are others mismanaged it beyond that, well, I'll leave that unaddressed. Then again, they just might have done it. I suspect that China makes a lot of key decisions based on divination like casting down milfoil stalks or "reading" cracks made in heated turtle shells. So that's an alternative sort of logic and approach to the world. And this sort of thing is big in some parts of the world, maybe even in places near to you. The idea is that the gods lead onward and control the milfoil stalks. For "good lucky funny". 好福樂

But I study Classical Chinese and other ancient Chinese languages all the time, so I focus on the positive. Westerners only want to hear negative things about modern China, and seldom, which is quite a contrast to how I approach China. But the above also gives some vague sense of Ancient China as well. But I think the two are very different. The China I've actually visited is Modern China. The Ancient China of my readings often ends up as a lengthy denunciation of injustices and negligences of all sorts. The Analects of Confucius present a clear description and denunciation of a certain sort of rascalhood. And this is all in spite of a general modern misrepresentation: The actual texts of Ancient China are seldom understood properly, as advanced and comparative and critical skills with Classical Chinese are a very rare thing today, anywhere in the world. Which is all a shame. But it's all part of the window dressing 保面子 . )

[alynnidalar]

Because I am from Detroit or the general area.

...I’ve lived in Michigan my entire life, have been to or through Port Huron dozens (if not hundreds) of times, and there is no possible way to describe being from Port Huron as being “from Detroit or the general area”. And I say that as someone who routinely trolls people from Ann Arbor by insisting they’re from Detroit.

[KathTheDragon]

Imagine posting an essay not about conlanging and also with absolutely no modesty anywhere.

Anyway, to make this post productive, my current conlang takes very heavy inspiration from Ancient Egyptian because I think the language is really cool. Also clitics, I really like clitics.

[Bob]

Because I am from Detroit or the general area.

...I’ve lived in Michigan my entire life, have been to or through Port Huron dozens (if not hundreds) of times, and there is no possible way to describe being from Port Huron as being “from Detroit or the general area”. And I say that as someone who routinely trolls people from Ann Arbor by insisting they’re from Detroit.

I've lived all over the world. Compared to someplace in China or the Philippines, or even Michigan Technological University, Port Huron is "Detroit or the general area".

Why do you feel the need to correct me to my face regarding this? Do you lack the imagination regarding the places that I've lived that you declare that what I have said is incorrect?

And you troll people from Ann Arbor who say they're from Detroit? In the grand scheme of things, at least the whole rest of the state is an extension of Detroit, and it's the most famous city of the entire state. It would not be without *global and vast historical* precedent for one to be from almost anywhere in the Lower Peninsula of Michigan and say that they're from Detroit or the general area.

I've seen you a few times on this group.

People can live almost nowhere near Rome, Milan, Beijing, or Shanghai and still be obliged to make reference to those cities when addressing an international audience who is not *from that area* and couldn't possibly be expected to know about it.

And probably almost no one knows the hometown of Thomas Edison, not even people who live in Port Huron. He's becoming a more obscure historical figure.

...

Maybe I'm just being contentious. Does it really matter what one person says and then another person says? Most people on this group probably have their eyes glaze over when they read the obscure USA place name "Michigan", like the Mid-West really is that boring, backwards, and benighted compared to "our superiors" on the East Coast and West Coast.

[Bob]

Imagine posting an essay not about conlanging and also with absolutely no modesty anywhere.

Anyway, to make this post productive, my current conlang takes very heavy inspiration from Ancient Egyptian because I think the language is really cool. Also clitics, I really like clitics.

Imagine applying the standards of one's own region to people from totally different parts of the world as if one was inherently superior in every way. And doing so without any reference to various international styles of presentation or identity.

Then imagine that said people are offended that you would not have sensitivity for their worldview because it's not the same as your own.

Also, imagine someone who uses the language name "Ancient Egyptian" as if it was a single language instead of a whole family of related languages (and writing systems) from a span of 3,000 years. Which is also often colloquially used for any historical language associated with Egypt, especially Arabic ones.

[Bob]

Imagine posting an essay not about conlanging and also with absolutely no modesty anywhere.

Anyway, to make this post productive, my current conlang takes very heavy inspiration from Ancient Egyptian because I think the language is really cool. Also clitics, I really like clitics.

Imagine people on the internet who criticize others because they have different approaches to things or are trying to make points. "Why can't we all just be the same?"

Imagine interacting with an accomplished scholar and conlanger and giving them hassle over nothing instead of letting them write what they want and trying to muse over it and what it's all about.

Also imagine addressing one of the world's experts in Ancient Egyptian languages and refering to an "Ancient Egyptian" language as if it existed. I'm used to "this sort of thing" with respect to Egyptian (and African) languages. But it's still grating. I wouldn't expect you to have seen any of my other posts but if it should be that you're 1) bothering me for having a different culture from yourself and 2) also mocking Egypt and Africa ... well, I at least can try charm to encourage you to do otherwise in the future.

Ahem. But are you aware of how few serious language scientists study the Ancient Egyptian languages or writing systems? And it's a great injustice considering their time scale and importance to indentities and perspective worldwide. And doing it lip service is a far cry from either becoming a language scientist of these languages and writing systems, or showing encouragement and sympathy for the same.

How can I win you with charms to do some research into other cultures' senses of modesty? Or into a respectful way to address Ancient Egyptian languages or their few, living, and jaded scholars and language scientists? Yet if you detect any note of frustrating, consider that there might be years behind the same and some justification in one's mind.

Then again, most language scientists are not anthropologists, so maybe I'm asking too much. But no, I don't think I am on Zompist Bboard. I think there's enough interest here in anthropology.

[Vardelm]

Wow! There is a way to block people on the new Zompist Bboard!

[KathTheDragon]

I don't know how to react to this with anything other than laughter of incredulity.

[dewrad]

Also imagine addressing one of the world's experts in Ancient Egyptian languages and refering to an "Ancient Egyptian" language as if it existed.

But you're not one of the world's experts in Ancient Egyptian languages. You're an enthusiastic amateur with (considerable) delusions of grandeur at best.

But are you aware of how few serious language scientists study the Ancient Egyptian languages or writing systems?

The University of Arizona lists 302 individuals in North America alone. These are tenured professionals, mark you, not dilettante autodidacts. Admittedly, the list is current as of 2013, so I assume that there may well be more at the present time. Professional associations concerned with Egyptology worldwide number in the hundreds. It's hardly a niche interest.

[elemtilas]

Because I am from Detroit or the general area.

...I’ve lived in Michigan my entire life, have been to or through Port Huron dozens (if not hundreds) of times, and there is no possible way to describe being from Port Huron as being “from Detroit or the general area”. And I say that as someone who routinely trolls people from Ann Arbor by insisting they’re from Detroit.

There's also no possible way to say that Thomas Jefferson was born in Port Huron, unless there is a spatio-temporal portal between Port Huron and Shadwell VA.

[alynnidalar]

Because I am from Detroit or the general area.

...I’ve lived in Michigan my entire life, have been to or through Port Huron dozens (if not hundreds) of times, and there is no possible way to describe being from Port Huron as being “from Detroit or the general area”. And I say that as someone who routinely trolls people from Ann Arbor by insisting they’re from Detroit.

There's also no possible way to say that Thomas Jefferson was born in Port Huron, unless there is a spatio-temporal portal between Port Huron and Shadwell VA.

I can explain this one, actually! He means Thomas Edison. Edison wasn’t born in Port Huron either (he was born in Ohio), but did live part of his early life there.