Re: Conlang Books - Reviews & Recommendations

On 1/23/08, Sai Emrys <sai@...> wrote:

> Feel free to include books that are not *about* conlangs as such, but
> have significantly affecting your conlanging (e.g. WF&DT above). And
> feel free to include reviews of books that have already been
> mentioned.
I'll second your recommendations of Eco's _Search for the Perfect
Language_ and Payne's _Describing Morphosyntax_.  Another book
that was influential on some of my early diachronic conlangs
was Owen Barfield's _Poetic Diction_.   I haven't read it in more
than a decade so I can't describe it in detail, but part of it talks
about the histories of certain words, and how one word with
a broad sense mutated into multiple words with more specific
senses; I had a lot of that going on in my first real conlang,
Pliv, and in Toaliralolo/Thauliralau.

After the discussions of Natural Semantic Metalanguage
here a few months ago, I found and read Anna Wierzbicka's
_Semantics: Primes and Universals_.  It hasn't influenced
my conlanging yet because I've hardly done any in recent
months, but it probably will in the future - I want to try using
NSM (preferably a gzb version of NSM) to define new
[and existing] words in gzb.

--
Jim Henry
http://www.pobox.com/~jimhenry/review/log.htm