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Aeetlrcreejl
Joined: 08 Jun 2007
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 Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 7:20 pm Post subject: Torture |
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I'm running a class in which people get to make their own conlangs. Any advice (besides phoneme inventories)?
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Tolkien_Freak
Joined: 26 Jul 2007
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| Posted: Thu Jan 17, 2008 8:00 pm Post subject: |
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| Can you be more specific? What do you mean? (And why is the thread titled 'torture?) |
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Aeetlrcreejl
Joined: 08 Jun 2007
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| Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:00 am Post subject: |
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What I'm asking is: any advice for a newcomer to conlanging who knows absolutely nothing about linguistics? Some helpful advice would be about syllable structure and scripts.
It's called torture because make-learning them about morphology will be torture.
I've shown them samples o' my conlang, and they all think it's mind-bogglingly weird. 
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Iwocwá ĵọṭãsák.
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[iocwa_H d`Z`Ot`_h~a_Hk] |
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Tolkien_Freak
Joined: 26 Jul 2007
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| Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:03 am Post subject: |
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Ah.
I don't know - maybe start with easy stuff, like different types of languages and definitions of words like phonology and morpheme. |
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eldin raigmore
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Joined: 03 May 2007
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Location: SouthEast Michigan
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| Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 12:19 am Post subject: Re: Torture |
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| Aeetlrcreejl wrote: | | I'm running a class in which people get to make their own conlangs. Any advice (besides phoneme inventories)? |
David Peterson did that, twice, as part of an experiment he proposed that was supervised by his graduate advisor.
Also I've seen a headline where a linguistics professor had his class do that.
Maybe you should have them do an "isolating" language first. Maybe even a creole-like or pidgin-like language.
Try that old trick where someone can see only the last two words and must add the next word. Or go the other way; the can only see the "next" two words and must add the word before it.
Or you can do a "ladder" where each person can change one world in the sentence, but can only see the previous version of the sentence before changing it.
Those are fairly good ways to make them concentrate on syntax and ignore morphology at first; and also to strip the syntax down to as small as it can be, given that it bears the complete burden that morphology might bear in another language.
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After that, have them try to say all the same things in a new, polysynthetic, agglutinating language. Make a rule such as "no more than four (or three, or two) words per sentence", and/or give bonuses for putting the whole sentence into at most one (or two, or three) words.
Show them the Cartoon Theories of Linguistics cartoons. If you can, get permission from SpecGram to print off a copy of each for you to post in your classroom. |
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yssida
Joined: 16 Sep 2007
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Location: sa jaan lang
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| Posted: Fri Jan 18, 2008 4:16 am Post subject: |
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They should at least show some interest. Passion +10
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