Eti wrote: ↑Tue Jun 02, 2020 11:23 pm
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 . )
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.