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The Alurhsa Word for Constructed: Creativity in both scripts and languages
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dusepo
Joined: 12 Feb 2008
Posts: 129
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 Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 5:50 pm Post subject: The evolution of Conlangs... |
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Retfon has been under construction now for about 4 months now. In that time, it has taken basic shape. However, there are some things I am still not happy with, and it is still quite basic and needs work. I am thinking of creating a 'New Retfon' which would evolve from a dialect or by mixing with an invading culture.
I know some of you have created many dialects of your conlangs, and some have created many conlangs. And so, as I am new here and relatively new to conlanging, I come here to ask your help! Any ideas?
I would also love to mix my conlang with anyone elses, if that's ok with them? In effect, I'd love for someone to invade my conworld, lol.
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langover94
Joined: 21 Aug 2007
Posts: 509
Location: USA
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| Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 8:12 pm Post subject: |
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Since my conlang was not origianally going to be used for a conworld, I do not have any dialects.
If you are still not happy with your conlang you could do one of two things:
-Let your language evolve naturally, through frequent speaking
-Reform your language, like you want to do.
I would personally go with the first one, because languages do not evolve over night. But the second option is also feasible.
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eldin raigmore
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Joined: 03 May 2007
Posts: 1621
Location: SouthEast Michigan
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| Posted: Sun Feb 17, 2008 9:44 pm Post subject: |
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| langover94 wrote: | | -Let your language evolve naturally, through frequent speaking |
Conlangers like to simulate language-evolution through regular sound changes. There are several software tools available -- many of them by conlangers for conlangers, but all useful to conlangers -- to allow you to simulate such sound-changes. There are also at least one sound-change-reverser.
IMO Langover's idea of speaking your own conlang yourself, is a good way to guess which sound-changes are likely to occur. But if that seems to take too long for you, you can just guess at a bunch. A different bunch would lead to a different dialect. (Speaking it yourself, you will probably run into some times where two different sound-changes suggest themselves, and you don't see how both can happen at once; so you could get different dialects that way, too. But, again, maybe you don't have the patience, or for some other reason you need to come up with the dialects before you can speak a lot of your conlang.)
Don't forget: Sound changes will drive changes in the rest of the language; changes in vocabulary/lexicon, changes in morphology, and changes in syntax. It happened to English and to French, for example.
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Evolution driven solely by regular sound-changes, is an internal-only process. Evolution can also be driven by language-contact.
Indeed: almost every language has some technique for borrowing something -- usually vocabulary -- from other languages.
Piraha (pardon the mis-spelling) may not have any such means to borrow.
Tariana-speakers are all at least bilingual; they have a linguistic-exogamy rule. Also, they have a "rule" against "language-mixing". What that really means is, if you're speaking one language and you use a word from a different language, everyone will laugh at you. Thus, Tariana tends to borrow features that are less obvious to the "linguistically-naive"* speaker, such as grammar and accidents (rather as if an English speaker decided to put evidentials and directionals into English because he'd learned some Native American languages, or to make it topic-prominent because he'd learned some Asian ones, or to distinguish between alienable and inalienable possession because he'd learned some Polynesian languages.)
*"Linguistically-naive", in this case, doesn't mean they don't know four or more languages; it means they have not been formally instructed in the science of linguistics, and have not learnt those languages from reference-grammars, and have not had the opportunity to compare a lot of reference-grammars, and have not had occasion to try to write a textbook to teach one of those languages.
But most languages borrow vocabulary.
French tries not to. Or rather, their academy tries to stop it. But the average French-speaker just goes ahead and borrows.
Nouns are the most frequently borrowed; especially, of course, proper-nouns; but common-nouns as well. Verbs and adjectives are also borrowed rather easily. I don't know about other parts-of-speech.
If you look at the Swadesh list you'll see a set of words that probably should not be borrowed, if you want to be realistic. These words were chosen for robustness against borrowing and robustness against "semantic drift" (changes in meaning). But, conlangers like to make conlangs that screw with hypotheses; maybe you want a dialect that borrows all of these words, but does not borrow "Internet" or "PC" or "spreadheet" or "CRT" or "CPU" or "monitor" or "floppy disk" or "astronaut" or "jet" or "airplane" or ...
When one people conquers another, the standard wisdom is that the new linguistic situation adopts the conquerors' grammar and the conqured people's vocabulary. Certainly any plants, animals, artifacts, or proper-named features of the landscape, that are in the conquered area but not in the ancestral home of the conquerors, will probably have their names borrowed into the conquerors' language.
OTOH in pidgins and creoles, especially English-based ones, the opposite seems to have happened; they tend to have an English vocabulary, but have subject-peoples' morphology, such as dual and trial numbers, and a distinction between inclusive and exclusive first-person non-singular.
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