Analysis Swap

[foxcatdog]

From the CBB if anyone is interested. I already have a thread on the CBB.

Hey friends! Here's a fun activity I've been thinking about for a while—I actually tried something like it years and years ago and it was a ton of fun, thought I'd see if anyone wanted to give it a shot.

The object of the game is to develop an analysis of the other person's conlang, by eliciting examples from them the way you would from a lay (i.e., non-linguist) speaker of that language.

For example, an untrained speaker is not likely to tell you "Ah yes, my language has a case system marked with suffixes on nouns, it has a nominative case and an accusative case and..."

But, they could tell you how to say things in the language, so if you asked for the right translations and paid attention to patterns in the endings of words, you could figure out "Hm, these look like suffixes, and based on when they change, I think they're noun cases. It seems like there's at least a nominative case and an accusative case..."

We do it as a swap, so, we have two threads going, with you analyzing my language in Thread A and me analyzing your language in Thread B.

Part of the benefit from playing is that you get some confirmation whether your own analysis of your language is a good fit. If someone else, looking at your language, draws very different conclusions about how it works, then theirs might actually be the better analysis!

Would anyone be interested in playing?

[äreo]

This definitely sounds like a cool idea.