On Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:48:59 -0700, Garth Wallace wrote:
>> On Oct 22, 2009, at 4:45 PM, Tim Smith wrote:
>>> That sounds like the way I usually do conlanging!  I almost always start
>>> with the grammar rather than the lexicon or the phonology.  My problem is
>>> that the process usually stops there.  I have lots of abstract "skeleton
>>> grammars" in my head that have never been "fleshed out" with actual sounds,
>>> words, inflectional morphemes, etc.  In other words, the great majority of
>>> my conlang projects look more like interlinears than anything else.
>>
>> I second that. I only have one or two languages with more than a handful of
>> words. The rest are grammars, at varying levels of completeness, waiting for
>> words.
>> Maybe the "NaNoCreMo" could start with something like that, where you
>> already have the basic grammar, but you figure out the actual realizations
>> as you go along.
>
>Same here, though there's usually some phonology and a name to go with
>it. Building a lexicon and morphology tends to trip me up.

Most of my projects that are more than sketches are biased towards the
phonology-morphology component, but I have a few skeletal grammars in the
closet too, where I'm even charting out *semantics* without any lexicon to
speak of. That really feels somehow wrong.

My problem probably is that I appreciate a naturalistic sound (ie. with a
diachronical justification for everything) but an engelangish grammar, and
yet I don't really feel like uniting the two in a single project… I've
thought up one solution, and that involves wrapping any engelangs as being a
posteriori within a conworld, but there really should be an easier way out.

John Vertical