Well-Rounded

[bloodyrosemccoy]

I just realized that every conlang I've made so far is pretty much inflectional.

Don't get me wrong--they're COOL inflectional languages. But, y'know, I could stand branching out.

Now I just have to decide if my next one will be isolating or ridiculously polysynthetic. I'm leaning toward polysynthetic. I want to see just how long I can stretch a single word. It's good to have pointless goals.

Comments

[baroncognito.livejournal.com]

I'm a bit apprehensive about writing stories using constructed languages. I think in English, I don't know that I can write for a person who doesn't think in English. Same reason that I'd say all of my characters are human. Perhaps I'm othering too much. I write female characters despite not being female, and people are people... I don't know.

This is actually something I've been fighting in a story I've been working on. I'm setting a story in a place that isn't Earth, but it's similar enough. The continents and history are drastically different, but it has similar life forms. It has beings that are essentially humans, because I'm feeling lazy enough not to want to imagine the world through the eyes of someone with three arms and two heads but only one identity (for example). If I have a creature that fills the same biological niche as a deer and similar narrative and metaphorical purposes as a deer would, i.e. she was startled, like a creature that fills the same biological niche as a deer (for short, we'll call it ctftsbnaad), should I give it a name, like ctftsbnaad, or just call it a deer? I'm already writing all the other dialog in English. And what about the animals that aren't exactly like anything we've got now? I mean, I'm calling a creature that's a mix of a monitor lizard and a coyote a Hundewaren, but if there's a dinosaur that's similar enough to what I have in mind, would it be better just to call it that?

Do you come up with the culture first and then develop the language, or do you develop the language and then construct a culture that would express itself that way?

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

*grin* The strangeness of fantasy and science fiction is that I always figure I'm essentially "translating" from whatever language they're speaking.

That's actually one of the reasons I switched my narrator to a human in my sci-fi story--so she could give audiences a frame of reference (saying "it looked like a beetle"; "its head looked like that of a deer"; etc.) But it really depends on what you want to convey--it depends on how much you want to highlight that it's not the same as a deer. A good compromise is to add a modifier ("she was startled, like a meadow deer"), so you know that it's in the category of deer-type things, but it's not QUITE the same thing. I do that a lot.

I think authors can develop an instinctive sense of how to use words for unfamiliar to the reader. They might compound familiar words into a neolgism, or make up a new word entirely, or ... well, it really seems to depend on what the rhythm of the story calls for.

For your last question, it's both--I develop the culture and language in tandem. They do tend to influence each other in sometimes surprising ways.