Idiolect Moment

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Well, lately the most interesting thing in my life has been the weather. Fortunately, it's the kind of interesting that doesn't involve flooded basements or felled power lines; it's the kind of interesting that makes you scream "WHAT THE HELL IT IS MAY 24TH WHY DID TWO INCHES OF SNOW JUST SPLAT ONTO EVERYTHING OH GOD SOMEBODY KIDNAPPED SUMMER."

Today it's bright and sunny and warming up. Now, that's just not fair. Pick a season, Utah. We're at war.

In other news, this here Language Construction Kit is a ton of fun. It inspired me to finally get around to making relative clauses in Rredra, and caused me to have a double revelation when I realized that the structure I had come up with for relative clauses in this conlang mirror my own informal idiolect--and that my own informal idiolect is mutating relative clauses. For example, instead of saying "the doctor who is wearing a coat," I wind up saying "the coat-wearing doctor," or changing "it's a bakery that makes delicious English pastries" into "it's a delicious-English-pastry-making bakery." Not an unusual phenomenon, I suppose, but I think I've been doing it more now than I used to, and with a broader range of possible clauses that can be switched around this way.

It's making me wonder if I've seen it around. I can think of one person online who does this all the time, but I don't know if I just picked it up from him, if I had it before him, or if it's a broader phenomenon.

This book also allows me to feel terribly clever when it gives the basics of semantics and I realize I am quite savvy about how to make words that aren't all just English equivalents. I think Mark gets a little carried away at times with linguistic deconstruction, but then I've always been a bit impatient with some of the sub-fields of pragmatics.

Meanwhile, I'm also getting impatient with sitting around in Dad's office listening to the sounds of inactive phones and shrieking children discovering the joys of vaccination on the other side of the wall. I think I'll see if I can go home yet.

Comments

[beccastareyes]

I think I do that with Darynese, which is a pretty simple conlang. OTOH, having to translate English verb tenses makes me think about what different tenses communicate and whether I should rely on context, use adverbs, or modify the language.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

My very first conlang was horribly English derivative in many ways--and a little too deliberately non-derivative for the sake of being Different in others (hello, OVS sentence structure! why did I think you were a good idea)--but I still rather like the way it ended up mutating some of my colloquial speech. Namely, that I use emotions as verbs instead of adjectives. I like the flexibility in it.

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Basically it sounds like you prefer participial phrases to relative clauses. Classical Latin was like that too (as was, apparently, Greek for much of its history, which is probably where literary Latin picked up the habit because Vulgar Latin showed no such preference and this parenthetical remark is now longer than its host sentence).

I recently realized that the Japanese "no desu"/"-n desu" construction for explanations directly mirrors an equivalent English construction. The "no" is the one for nominalizing attributives, so "such-and-such-happened no desu" is literally "It's that such-and-such-happened", which is a common way of phrasing explanatons and excuses.

And my use of ", so..." is really similar to Japanese use of sentence-final "ga" and "kedo".

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

... Good point. It's not quite the same as the participial phrasing as I normally think of it, though. It's almost adjectival--can be embedded into the middle of the noun phrase, and it includes a reversal of word order. I know there are a few standard uses of such phrasing ("gun-toting assassin," "card-carrying ), but it seems to have a really narrow range. I admit, it's an area of syntax I haven't looked at much.

"-n desu" is one of the few constructions I remember from Japanese, which is weird because I don't use that one as much. (My brother says that Coloradans one-up that with "what it is is that such-and-such happened.")

I'm assuming your ", so ..." ends a sentence and implies information already known to all parties? I can't remember quite what "ga" and "kedo" are for, but I use "so" that way too ...