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Creative Projects / Re: Conlang 2018: Dwarves Go Shopping for Words
« on: August 03, 2018, 10:11:52 am »
Sorry for taking so long to get back to this (if you're even still working on it!) but I'll try to give some advice.
I guess my overall impression is that it's too systematic. I don't know every language in the world, but I'm guessing none of them assigns meaning on the purely phonetic level (i.e. each "sound" has its own meaning). Morphemes -- units of meaning, including words, affixes, case endings, etc. -- tend to at least be whole syllables, with meaning assigned arbitrarily. For example, take the word "tree" in English. Only the whole syllable -- [tri] in IPA -- has meaning; each individual phoneme -- /t/, /r/, /i/ -- has no meaning in and of itself. [tri] simply means "tree," and that's the end of it.
The problem I think you're going to run into is that such an intensely analytic language will create confusion. Let me give some examples:
-"This" and "that": Ts/od and Sr/od. I get that these are "a thing (I can) see" and "a thing (I can) hear," or something like that; but what happens when you want to say "sight" or "sound?" Wouldn't
those use the same structures?
-a similar problem afflicts me with "woman" and "person": Sr/om, Ts/om. Where do the "hear" and "see" roots come into these meanings?
-"Tree," Ts/o/df/a/ij, gave me a lot of trouble -- I could understand where Df/a/ij "standing thing that gives good" came from, but what was Ts/o doing there? Then I realized that Ts/o/df meant "big";
so the translation should be "big thing that gives good." But you see, that depends on me knowing "big," and being able to distinguish that from any other combination of those phonemes.
And so on. I could probably write a little blurb for each entry. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh -- it's not meant to discourage you, just to give you a heads-up that if you boil your language down too much it might turn into alphabet soup!
THAT SAID: I think you're onto something, in terms of constructing words from concatenating short, basic roots. You might want to check out some Native American languages, which I believe do a lot of that kind of word-formation. I would only caution you to have more morphemes, many more. Right now you have 32. I don't think that's enough to make a viable language. I would say, as a start, go through that whole dictionary and create a unique syllable for each entry; let those be the roots that you build the rest of your words from, not the phonemes themselves. Even those 100 words probably won't be enough, but it's better than 32.
But that's just me. It's your language, you decide how you want it to sound and work. After all, maybe dwarves are more capable of understanding such a language than humans.
PS: In hindsight I shouldn't have sent you straight to the IPA page for your phonology introduction. I ought to have sent you to the phonology of English page, since I myself learned about IPA from learning English phonology. You'll probably find this much easier to make sense of than jumping into the whole thing at once.
I guess my overall impression is that it's too systematic. I don't know every language in the world, but I'm guessing none of them assigns meaning on the purely phonetic level (i.e. each "sound" has its own meaning). Morphemes -- units of meaning, including words, affixes, case endings, etc. -- tend to at least be whole syllables, with meaning assigned arbitrarily. For example, take the word "tree" in English. Only the whole syllable -- [tri] in IPA -- has meaning; each individual phoneme -- /t/, /r/, /i/ -- has no meaning in and of itself. [tri] simply means "tree," and that's the end of it.
The problem I think you're going to run into is that such an intensely analytic language will create confusion. Let me give some examples:
-"This" and "that": Ts/od and Sr/od. I get that these are "a thing (I can) see" and "a thing (I can) hear," or something like that; but what happens when you want to say "sight" or "sound?" Wouldn't
those use the same structures?
-a similar problem afflicts me with "woman" and "person": Sr/om, Ts/om. Where do the "hear" and "see" roots come into these meanings?
-"Tree," Ts/o/df/a/ij, gave me a lot of trouble -- I could understand where Df/a/ij "standing thing that gives good" came from, but what was Ts/o doing there? Then I realized that Ts/o/df meant "big";
so the translation should be "big thing that gives good." But you see, that depends on me knowing "big," and being able to distinguish that from any other combination of those phonemes.
And so on. I could probably write a little blurb for each entry. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh -- it's not meant to discourage you, just to give you a heads-up that if you boil your language down too much it might turn into alphabet soup!
THAT SAID: I think you're onto something, in terms of constructing words from concatenating short, basic roots. You might want to check out some Native American languages, which I believe do a lot of that kind of word-formation. I would only caution you to have more morphemes, many more. Right now you have 32. I don't think that's enough to make a viable language. I would say, as a start, go through that whole dictionary and create a unique syllable for each entry; let those be the roots that you build the rest of your words from, not the phonemes themselves. Even those 100 words probably won't be enough, but it's better than 32.
But that's just me. It's your language, you decide how you want it to sound and work. After all, maybe dwarves are more capable of understanding such a language than humans.
PS: In hindsight I shouldn't have sent you straight to the IPA page for your phonology introduction. I ought to have sent you to the phonology of English page, since I myself learned about IPA from learning English phonology. You'll probably find this much easier to make sense of than jumping into the whole thing at once.
